Gertrud Arndt

Gertrud Arndt was a German photographer and designer who was associated with the Bauhaus movement. She is remembered for her pioneering series of self-portraits from around 1930. She studied under László Moholy-Nagy, Wassily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1927, where she enrolled in the weaving workshop. She married fellow student and architect Alfred Arndt in 1927 and moved to Probstzella in Thuringia, where she photographed buildings for her husband's architectural office. In 1929, she returned to the Bauhaus in Dessau and took a photography course with Walter Peterhans. She produced a series of 43 self-portraits as well as images of her friend Otti Berger and the masters' houses in Dessau. She experimented with different styles, costumes, and settings in her photographs, creating expressive and playful images that challenged the conventional roles of women at the time. She also designed carpets, fabrics, and wallpapers for the Bauhaus. After the Bauhaus closed in 1932, she moved back to Probstzella and later to Darmstadt in 1948. She almost completely stopped making photographs after World War II and focused on her family life. She received international acclaim for her photography in 1979 when her photographs were exhibited at Museum Folkwang. She died in July 2000 at the age of 96.