CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/15/2024

A gorgeous new book on Bauhaus textile innovator Otti Berger

In 1937, Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius wrote of radical textile artist Otti Berger, “her work realizes more perfectly than anybody else’s of my followers the peculiar idea of the Bauhaus to work out ready made models for industrial multiplication instead of mere designs on paper.” Featured photograph, of Berger, ca. 1931, is from staff favorite Otti Berger: Weaving for Modernist Architecture—the first comprehensive study of her work. A peer of Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, Berger designed upholstery, wall fabrics, curtains and floor coverings with unique weaves and patterns that look as gorgeous and yet as bold and experimental now as they did running up to the Second World War, during which she perished at Auschwitz. The book itself is beautifully produced and illustrated with 500 reproductions from a goldmine of archival materials, alongside important new scholarship by Judith Raum.