Masked Self-Portrait, 39A, Dessau (Maskenselbstportrait, 39A, Dessau)

Gertrud ArndtWW-1930-105333

1930·Gelatin silver print·Image: 21.8 × 13.7 cm (8 5/8 × 5 7/16 in.)

<p>The German Bauhaus (1919–33) revolutionized the study of art and design through a rigorous combination of theoretical and practical training across disciplines. Gertrud Arndt came to the Bauhaus in 1923 to study architecture, but like the majority of women who enrolled, she was pushed into the textile department, from which she graduated in 1927. She experimented with photography in her spare time and in 1929 received training from Bauhaus photography instructor Walter Peterhans. Cobbling together accessories and fabric into makeshift costumes, she produced a series of 43 staged self-portraits called <em>Maskenporträts (Masked Portraits)</em>. Arndt later claimed she was "simply interested in the face" and its ability to transform the self through costume and expression. Her photographs sketch out a range of female roles and moods: an Asian woman, a grieving widow, a naive young girl, a proper lady, and, in this case, a bewildered vamp.</p>

Catalogue

Year: 1930
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image: 21.8 × 13.7 cm (8 5/8 × 5 7/16 in.)
Collection: Art Institute of Chicago
Artist: Gertrud Arndt

Artist

Gertrud Arndt

Photography

Gertrud Arndt was a German photographer and weaver whose practice bridged the Bauhaus curriculum of the 1920s and postwar experimental abstraction. Working primarily in black-and-white photography and textile design, she created geometric compositions that dissolved figuration into pattern and light. Her self-portraits, often masked or fragmented, treated the human face as a formal problem rather than a vehicle for expression. Arndt's work remained largely undocumented until late in her life, when her archive revealed a rigorous, decades-long engagement with modernist abstraction across two distinct media.

Darmstadt

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