Gunta Stölzl

Gunta Stölzl was born in 1897 in Munich

Stölzl was born in Munich in 1897. Her father, Franz Seraph Stölzl, was a teacher and school principal, and she had one brother, Erwin. She finished high school in 1913 and began studying glass painting, decorative arts and ceramics at the Munich School of Applied Arts in 1914.

From 1917 to 1918 she worked as a Red Cross nurse behind the front lines in World War I. In 1919 she joined the Bauhaus in Weimar, and by 1920 she was fully accepted with a scholarship. She passed her journeyman's exam as a weaver and reopened the school's dye studios in 1921.

After the school moved to Dessau, she returned in 1925 as technical director of weaving and became a junior master in 1927. She moved the workshop toward industrial design, tested materials such as cellophane, and added courses in mathematics and geometry. She was dismissed in 1931, in part for political reasons.

In 1929 she married the architect Arieh Sharon, and their daughter Yael was born that year. She later moved to Switzerland, where she founded her own weaving company in Zurich in 1938. In 1942 she married the journalist Willy Stadler, and she worked in her private studio until her death in 1983.