Relearning History

The work of Galina Andreevna Balashova displayed on the right (photo: VG Bild- Kunst).

One of the most fascinating objects in the Vitra Design Museum’s exhibition Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today isn’t a table or a chair or any single piece of design, but rather a book. It’s a book, however, that contains a guide to building flat-pack furniture from affordable and readily available materials for migrant families. 

It’s not a contemporary piece of activist design plucked from the hottest graduate show – in fact, it was published in 1909. And it’s not a first edition of an IKEA catalog, either. The Swedish furniture company wasn’t even founded until 1943, while Gerrit Rietveld’s DIY crate chair was only created until the 1930s. It was Louise Brigham who got there first, creating the guide so that mothers on low incomes could furnish a home from recycled materials for the cost of just half a week’s wages. 

“She invented Ikea before Ikea,” says Nora Fehlbaum, CEO of Vitra. As the third generation of her family to helm the company, but its first female leader, Fehlbaum says she regularly finds herself the only woman in the room on business. “I couldn’t believe we didn’t know about her,” adds Fehlbaum. It’s a feeling that you repeatedly experience as you explore the exhibition, which is arranged chronologically. Who are all these women? Why didn’t I know all their names before? It’s an exhibition with a mission, and everything has been designed so that it can be packed up and shipped off to another museum at the end of its run with plans for it to travel for the next five years.

The exuberant punctuation point of Here We Are! belies the sheer amount of effort that the trio of curators – Viviane Stappmanns, Nina Steinmüller, and Susanne Grane – had to go through to re-find women designers who spent their lives struggling to get out from the margins of an industry that threw up endless barriers to entry and success. “You find more women who made contributions to design than you think if you look beyond the classic places,” says Stappmanns. The curators became gender-based detectives, tracking down women hidden in the back row of group photographs or from faded signatures of catalogue drawings. 

Some of the evidence the curators found was brutal. The contracts signed by women designers obliging them to be paid less than their male counterparts and promising not to go and get married on the job. Designers would have patents for their work filed under their husbands’ names, or their bodies of work would become scattered after their death. “Sometimes the story gets lost,” says Stappmanns. “If there’s nobody who cares for someone’s legacy then nothing happens.” Heavy hitters such as Eileen Grey and Charlotte Perriand – powerhouses of midcentury design and architecture in their own right – have family and supporters who have dedicated themselves to keeping their names in the history books (and, even then, it has been a long, difficult process). Others have not been so fortunate. There are ceramics by Trude Petri and Eva Zeisel who were recognised in their lifetimes, helped in part by their emigration from Europe to the US, but as for Gertrud Kleinhempel, who together with Margarete Junge created whole houseful’s of interior goods and furnishings, little survives bar the odd piece – and the Phoenix sewing machine she designed.

Opposite Brigham’s book there are pieces and ephemera from the women of the Bauhaus, who were miffed to find themselves shunted into the textiles and home goods departments regardless of their interests. There are textiles by Gertrud Arndt, who was more interested in architecture but joined the weaving workshop (although today she is remembered for her photography) alongside works by Gunta Stölzl. Their rugs on display – some never before seen – are beautiful in their own right, but it’s the objects in the display cases that prove that the first women in the Bauhaus got the last laugh. All those toys and design pieces for everyday home use, designed by women such as Alma Siedhoff-Buscher? The school’s best-selling products. 

There are exciting pieces of furniture in the exhibition too, of course. Vitra has an impressive archive and is strict about only preserving pieces rather than restoring them to a factory-fresh state, so everything feels real rather than fake. The final room, containing contemporary designs by names such as Patricia Urqola and Hella Jongerius is a riot of colour and fun. But Here We Are! Is an exhibition that rewards close reading – literally. There’s a blood-red wall illustrating feminist design movements from the 70s and 80s, such as the UK architecture collective Matrix. My personal favourite was the original drawings of Galina Andreevna Balashova, who designed spacecraft interiors for the Soviets during the space race. Her work, of course, was a state secret until 1991.

Only artefacts that survived have been put on display. Nothing of Brigham’s DIY furniture has been preserved, so it’s just her book that sits there, quietly. The curators had a go at recreating the designs but ultimately felt that the basic aesthetic detracted from the message. It’s a shame because, while the book is powerful to see in person, it would be good to be clear that social design doesn’t have to be beautiful by contemporary tastes to be meaningful. But then again, the amount of reading is a fitting testament to the process the curators went through to bring these bodies of work into the light. “You could do 10 PhDs and not be finished,” marvels Stappmanns. It is not an attempt to overturn the story of the past century of design, but to rebalance it ex post facto. “We don’t have to rewrite design history,” says Fehlbaum. “We just have to relearn it.” Here We Are! sets out to provide a curriculum for this relearning.

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Words India Block

Photography VG Bild- Kunst

Here We Are! Women in Design 1900 – Today is on at the Vitra Design Museum until 6 March 2022.