Session with Gerhard Richter, Former Bauhaus Student, Spring 1985 - School of Design

Abstract

Our guest today is Gerhard Richter. I'd like to give you a little bit of background not what he did at the Bauhaus which is what he is going to tell you about but what he has done since then. To begin with, he was nine years old when World War I started and when the Bauhaus started in 1918 in the German city of Weimar. He attended the Bauhaus in 1928 after its move to Dessau. He started in the spring that year and stayed for two semesters. He was a commuter from the city of Leipzig which is about an hour away by train. Not all of the students lived at the school. After he left the Bauhaus he studied music in Leipzig and in 1933 he had to leave Germany because he had a Jewish wife. He went to Basel, Switzerland and played the cello there, which he had been studying along with woodworking. He played in the Kunsthalle. In 1934, he immigrated to Israel and there he joined some of his friends from the Bauhaus in a small furniture manufacturing company and after that went out on his own and manufactured furniture. He was quite successful with some new designs which were light weight, reasonable in price, and used plywood. He also played cello in the Palestine orchestra and for the opera. In 1945 at the end of World War II, he again tried to come to the United States he had been trying all along but he still was not able to come in because of the immigration quotas. Then he tried again in 1951 and was successful. He came to the New York area and worked in cabinet and furniture work for several years with a variety of firms. He also tried chicken farming in New Jersey which was not successful. During the Korean War he applied to the United States Army to teach woodworking, he took a test, and was accepted as a teacher and taught for 15-1/2 years. It was part of a kind of therapy program for army personnel to study woodworking. He retired in 1980 and that is when he came to Durham. Since that time he has taught woodworking at Duke University and also plays the cello in community orchestras. I thought we might start by asking Mr. Richter if he would talk about his early training and how he ended up at the Bauhaus.