Margaretha Reichardt

Margaretha Reichardt (6 March 1907 – 25 May 1984), also known as Grete Reichardt, was a textile artist, weaver, and graphic designer from Erfurt, Germany. She was a student at the Bauhaus design school in Dessau, Germany from 1926 until 1931. She was one of the most important designers to emerge from the Bauhaus weaving workshop.

Reichardt was taught by, and worked with, many famous Bauhaus names, notably Gunta Stölzl. She developed textile coverings for the tubular steel chairs of Marcel Breuer.

She spent most of her adult life running her own independent weaving workshop in Erfurt, which was under Nazi rule and then later part of communist East Germany.

Margaretha Reichardt was born in Erfurt on the 6th March 1907. Her father was a master tailor and the sexton of the Catholic Severikirche (St Severus' Church). The family lived in apartments in Severihof, a prominent building belonging to the church, overlooking Erfurt's catheral square. She was an only-child.

From 1913 to 1921 she attended the Katholischen Bürgerschule (a catholic school) and the Mädchenlyzeums der Ursulinen (a school for girls run by Ursuline nuns) in Erfurt.

In 1921 Margaretha Reichardt was given special permission to begin training, at the young age of 14, at the Erfurt Kunstgewerbeschule, a school for applied arts. She left the school in 1925 as a qualified craftswoman.

In 1923, while at the Kunstgewerbeschule, she went on a class excursion to nearby Weimar to visit the very first Bauhaus exhibition, held at the Haus am Horn. She was very enthusiastic about the exhibition and it later inspired her to apply, in 1925, to the study at the school. She was matriculant number 83.

In 1926 she began her studies at the Bauhaus, which had just reopened in Dessau. The first semmester consisted of a preliminary course run by Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy. Following that she was educated in the Bauhaus weaving workshop. She also attend classes by Paul Klee, Joost Schmidt and Wassily Kandinsky. She passed the Bauhaus journeyman's exam in 1929, and in 1931 was awarded her Bauhaus Diploma, receiving Bauhaus Diploma number 54.

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