Lilly Reich

Lilly Reich (16 June 1885 – 14 December 1947) was a German designer of textiles, furniture, interiors, and exhibition spaces. She was a close collaborator with Ludwig Mies van der Rohe for more than ten years during the Weimar period in the 1920s and early 1930s. Reich was an important figure in the early Modern Movement in architecture and design. Her fame was posthumous, as the significance of her contribution to the work of Mies van der Rohe and others with whom she collaborated only became clear through the research of later historians of the field.
Biography
Reich was born in Berlin on 16 June 1885. In 1908, she put her embroidery training to use when she went to Vienna to work for the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) of Josef Hoffmann, a visual arts production company of designers, artists, and architects. She returned to Berlin by 1911. There she began to design furniture and clothing. She also worked as a shop window decorator at this time. The following year she joined the Deutscher Werkbund, or German Work Federation, a group similar to the Vienna Workshop whose purpose was to help improve competitiveness of German companies in the global market. That year she designed a sample working-class flat in the Berlin Gewerkschaftshaus, or Trade Union House. It received much praise for the clarity and functionalism of the furnishings. She contributed work to the Werkbund exhibition in Cologne in 1914. In 1920, Lilly became the first woman elected to the governing board of the Deutscher Werkbund.
From 1924 to 1926, she worked at the Messeamt, or Trade Fair Office, in Frankfurt am Main. There, she was in charge of organizing and designing trade fairs. It was there that she met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, vice president of the Deutscher Werkbund. This sparked a period of involvement of furniture for van der Rohe as the two collaborated on many projects together. In 1927, the two worked on "Die Wohnung" in Stuttgart for the Werkbund. She designed many interiors for this exhibition including "Wohnraum in Spiegelglas" ("living space in mirror glass"). During her career she designed store windows, exhibition displays, and fashion. In 1929 she became the artistic director for the German contribution to the Barcelona World Exposition, where van der Rohe designed his world-famous pavilion. This is where the famous Barcelona chair made its first appearance. This pavilion was considered the highlight of their design efforts.
In 1932, Reich was asked by van der Rohe to teach at the Bauhaus and direct the interior design workshop. Her tenure was short-lived as the Bauhaus was closed in 1933 by the Nazis, who referred to it an “oriental palace” and “synagogue” filled with “Bolshevists” and “cultural Marxists” dedicated to degenerate art.
After the Second World War, she briefly taught at the Universität der Künste in Berlin but was forced to resign due to ill health. She died two years later in 1947 in Berlin.
There are streets named after Lilly Reich in the German cities of Munich, Hildesheim, and Ingolstadt.
Career
Reich started her career as a designer of textiles and women's clothes. This experience was to be formative for her – giving her a particular interest in contrasting textures and materials, as well as specific skills with regard to the use of textiles in furniture.
She worked in the studio of Josef Hoffmann in Vienna from 1908. Hoffmann was a celebrated modernist designer, responsible for designs such as the Kubus chair (1918), Cabinet (circa 1915), Koller (1911), and Broncia (1912) chairs.
In 1914, Reich converted her studio to a dressmaker's shop and maintained it through the duration of World War I. In 1912, two seminal events helped establish her reputation as an influential designer and exhibition organizer. First, she designed well-received interiors for a worker's apartment and two stores for the Lyzeum-Klub exhibition Die Frau in Haus und Beruf (Woman at Home and at Work). That same year, she was elected to membership in the German Werkbund, an organization founded in 1907 that aimed to ally art and industry as a means to improve German-made products and designs. The Werkbund sponsored lectures for shopkeepers and consumers as well as sought the assistance of museums to influence public taste through exhibitions. On 25 October 1920, Reich was formally recognized by her peers when she was named to the Board of Directors of Deutsche Werkbund. She was the first woman to be appointed to the Werkbund's governing board. It was her responsibility to plan and curate design exhibits hosted by the Werkbund and intended to promote German designers both in Germany and abroad.
In 1921–22, Reich organized and prepared two large exhibitions to be shown at the Newark Museum in Newark, New Jersey. The first exhibition, entitled "The Applied Arts," consisted entirely of women's clothing and accessories, seeking to promote the revival of German fashion and increase cooperation between artists and manufacturers. The second exhibition was an enormous undertaking with the display of more than 1,600 objects, many chosen by Reich, to showcase the quality and breadth of German industrial design. Over 4,000 people visited the exhibition between 18 April and 31 May 1922 and the Newark Museum acquired over sixty-five objects from the exhibition, including a children's clothing design by Reich. The show did not travel in the United States as hoped, given a strong anti-German sentiment subsequent to the First World War. Nonetheless, the show had a profound effect on American design and its influences may be seen in the work of U.S. designers after this date.
Lilly Reich and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
Through her involvement with the Werkbund, Reich also met Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and moved from Frankfurt to Berlin to work with him in 1926. She was Mies' personal and professional partner for 13 years from 1925 until his emigration to the U.S. in 1938. It is said that they were constant companions, working together on curating and implementing exhibitions for the Werkbund, as well as designing modern furniture as part of larger architectural commissions, such as the Barcelona Pavilion in 1929 and the Tugendhat House in Brno. Two of their best known modern furniture designs from this period are the Barcelona Chair and Brno Chair.
Albert Pfeiffer, Vice President of Design and Management at Knoll, has been researching and lecturing on Reich for some time. He points out that:
Mies became the director of the Bauhaus School of design and architecture in 1930, and Reich joined him there in January 1932. She was one of a small number of female teachers on staff, and only the second to hold the title of "Master". She taught interior design and furniture design, heading the interior finishings department, which included, weaving, wall painting, metalwork, and cabinetry workshops. Writing about Reich's tenure at the Bauhaus, art historian Adrian Sudhalter states that Reich "also manage[d] much of the daily administration of the Bauhaus for Mies."
In 1996, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented an exhibition on her work "Lilly Reich: Designer and Architect" which for the first time brought attention to this influential but almost forgotten designer. Reich began her career in textile design which was the acceptable professional path for women designers during the early part of the twentieth century. She played an integral part during the Bauhaus movement in Dessau and Berlin in Germany and served on professional boards, such as the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation). Lilly Reich managed her own interior design firm and was a faculty member at the Berlin University of Arts.
Lilly Reich collaborated and co-designed the Brno Chair, the famous Barcelona Chair, and the Barcelona Pavilion along with Mies on behalf of the German government for the 1929 World Exhibition in Barcelona, Spain. The Barcelona Pavilion is considered to be a masterpiece of modern design, however, Lilly Reich is rarely mentioned in textbooks, nor given proper credit for her contributions. She also worked with Josef Hoffmann on the design of the Kubus armchair and sofa.
Lilly Reich traveled to the United States, England, and Austria to study and work with the designers of her time. She also curated exhibitions on behalf of her government.
In 2018, the in Spain presented the first edition of the Lilly Reich Grant for equality in architecture. The grant was specifically addressed to the study of the work by Lilly Reich herself, and to delving into the knowledge and dissemination of an essential figure in the history of modern architecture.
Exhibitions and shows
In 1911, after working for many of Berlin's most fashionable department stores, Reich designed clothing installations for Wertheim. She also was a member of the Deutscher Werkbund since 1912, which worked in collaboration with German retailers to make modern window displays. Their 1913 yearbook carried a series of photographs which included one by Reich.
One of her larger expositions was during the International Exposition of 1929 in Barcelona. During this, she stressed the need for connection to the industry and serial production. With this she created mass-produced objects, neatly stacked side by side by the hundreds in elegant, tailored contexts, Reich in fact dissolved the individual unit in an abstract and global image.
Later on, in 1937, Reich displayed and installation at the 1937 Paris World's Fair. Her installation would become a part of Albert Speer's Nazi Pavilion, during an extremely tense World's Fair.
Other works include:
German People – German Work, 1934
The Dwelling in Our Time Berlin, 1931. "Material Show": Wood exhibit.
Lilly Reich, Elephant Pharmacy, Berlin 1913. Jahr Buch des Deutschen Werkbundes
The war years
In 1938, just before the Second World War, Mies emigrated to the U.S. Reich continued to manage her affairs in Germany, until her death. She visited him in the U.S. in September 1939, but did not stay, returning instead to Berlin.
Her studio was bombed in 1943 and she was sent to a forced labour camp where she remained until 1945. After her release at the end of the war, she was instrumental in the revival of the Deutsche Werkbund, but died in Berlin before its formal re-establishment in 1950.
References
Publications
Conti, Giulia (2022). Lilly Reich. La rivoluzione della spazialità tessile tra emancipazione e avanguardia. Roma: TabEdizioni. ISBN 978-88-9295-208-9
External links
Lilly Reich by Albert Pfeiffer, Vice President of Design Management at Knoll (company)
Biography from the Werkbundarchiv
Webpage of Lilly Reich organization.
Biography at Kettererkunst.com
Designing Modern Women 1890–1990 Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York
1885 births
1947 deaths
German furniture designers
German women architects
20th-century German architects
20th-century German women
Academic staff of the Bauhaus
Architects from Berlin
German industrial designers
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe