Portrait of Lis Beyer-Volger

From 1926 to 1928 Lotte Stam–Beese studied textile design and architecture at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, a school founded in 1919 where painting and sculpture were taught alongside more practical art forms such as weaving, design, and architecture. Rather surprisingly, courses in photography were, not offered at the Bauhaus until 1929, but many students and faculty nevertheless spent time experimenting with the camera. Stam–Beese’s hazy portrait of fellow textile student Elizabeth (Lis) Beyer— who later married Hans Volger, another Bauhaus student—transforms a casual snapshot into a bold artistic composition. By dramatically cropping Beyer within a diagonal and abstracting most of her body behind a frosted windowpane, Stam–Beese lent an emphatic sense of lift and movement to the picture. Many at the Bauhaus adopted such an approach, which spread from the school and others to become broadly popular in central Europe and beyond during the 1930s.