2 Alma Siedhoff-Buscher

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher (1899–1944) belongs to the first generation of Bauhaus-educated product designers. Judging from her work of the 1920s, she should have been among its most successful students: she was one of the first to design interiors exclusively for children, and her progressive, minimalist aesthetics received great public acclaim.

But the year Siedhoff-Buscher arrived at the Bauhaus, the Dutch founder of De Stijl, Theo van Doesburg, moved to Weimar and brought his influence to bear on the school. These spiritual ideas proved too far removed from De Stijl’s Rationalism and the Bauhaus’s growing affinity with industry. Itten left the school in March 1923. Siedhoff-Buscher appropriated De Stijl’s basic forms and primary colours, but despite her aesthetic language, she did not receive much support at the Bauhaus, and seems to have always been a reluctant Modernist.

When founder Walter Gropius called for a ‘new unity’ between art and technology that year, Siedhoff-Buscher felt hopeful that her ideals aligned with the school’s direction. This feeling was confirmed when her designs were displayed prominently in the newly built Haus am Horn that summer. While the exhibition was organised by the school to justify the public funds it received, a wide public attended and her multifunctional nursery, designed in 1923, was particularly praised. It remains her most well-known furniture, consisting of a wardrobe, a changing table, a chest, a cot, a linen cupboard, play cupboards with play blocks, a chair on castors and a bench.

The exhibition as a whole was heavily criticised: shapes, colours and products proved too unusual for contemporary taste. ‘Three days in Weimar and one can never look at a square again for the rest of one’s life’, wrote critic Paul Westheim. To the surprise of many, the weaving class (where women were relegated to and considered the school’s lowest status workshop) was spared from the attacks. People were used to abstract motifs in fabrics and the exhibition’s woven pieces received excellent reviews. These same patterns were much less understood or appreciated in paintings by Bauhaus masters Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky or Oskar Schlemmer.

Siedhoff-Buscher’s work stood out because it was a new idea to create furniture for children, and her pieces were modern, multifunctional and aesthetically innovative. Her nappy-changing table, for example, can turn into a writing desk, and with its cut-out window, the dresser’s cabinet becomes a puppet theatre. ‘Children should, if at all possible, have a space where they can be what they want. Everything in it belongs to them – their imagination shapes it’, she wrote of her children’s room at Haus am Horn, ‘they are not bothered by external inhibition … everything suits them, the shape corresponds to their size, practical purpose does not hinder the play possibilities.’

Before deciding to leave the Bauhaus, she made one last attempt to improve her situation and bluntly asked Gropius if he thought her work was useless. Her worries were confirmed. The director spoke of the ‘fate of her activity’ and explained that he saw her at the margins of the school, even though others saw her work as embodying the school’s spirit. László Moholy-Nagy, for instance, himself a great mentor to Marianne Brandt in the metal workshop, pointed out that her ‘toys and play cabinet express the educational principles of the Bauhaus very clearly’. She was deeply affected by Gropius’s judgement of her work and, in the autumn of 1927, withdrew from the Bauhaus and from the Modern Movement as a whole, her nationwide reputation unfortunately not enough to sustain her inside the school. Ironically, she contributed to building Gropius’s reputation. After he emigrated to the US (with the National Socialist party’s blessing), he did not hesitate to make use of her designs and included her nursery in his Bauhaus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938.

Alma Siedhoff-Buscher’s career and life were cut short. After leaving the Bauhaus, she suffered from depression and was only 44 when she died in a bomb attack during the Second World War. Her work drifted into obscurity and there was nothing to suggest that, 80 years later, we would still be buying her products. A 1995 exhibition on children’s furniture, in Velbert, Germany, curated by Cornelia Will, contributed to her ‘rediscovery’. Today, her toys and pieces of furniture are re-edited and popular; they help convey a progressive image of the Bauhaus. With the growing interest for Montessori principles of education, her designs resonate strongly with the public all over the world. SiedhoffBuscher understood better than anybody else at the Bauhaus how children’s needs should be thought about and designed for. Her work may not have changed the world but she did change the world of children.