Gertrud Arndt

Gertrud Arndt, née Hantschk, was born in Racibórz (Silesia, Poland) on 20 September 1903. Seeking to become an architect, she began working at the architectural office of Karl Meinhardt in Erfurt in 1919. She simultaneously attended the school of applied arts there. Arndt taught herself photography so that she could document buildings for the architectural office. In 1923 she began studying at the Bauhaus and trained in the weaving workshop. After her final exam in 1927, she stopped weaving and focused on photography again. That same year, she married fellow Bauhaus member and architect Alfred Arndt and moved to Probstzella in Thuringia. There she photographed his construction projects. At the same time, she also created private photographs and photocollages. In 1929 Alfred Arndt was offered a teaching position at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Gertrud Arndt set up a darkroom for herself in the masters’ house and began photographing the activities and life at the school. She created documentary and portrait photos as well as numerous self-portraits. Although Arndt was not a student in Walter Peterhans’s photo class, several of her images were shown together with works from his students in the 1930 travelling exhibition on the Bauhaus. Arndt had her first child in 1931. One year later, the couple returned to Probstzella and, from then on, Arndt devoted her time to her family. In 1948 they fled from the Soviet-occupied zone to western Germany. In 1979 an exhibition at the Folkwang Museum in Essen led to Arndt’s discovery as a photographer. Since that time, her works have been presented in a number of exhibitions and publications. Gertrud Arndt died in Darmstadt on 10 July 2000.