Margarete Willers

Margarete Willers, known as Grete, was born on 30 July 1883 in Oldenburg. When she enrolled at the Staatliches Bauhaus Weimar for the summer semester of 1921, she was thirty-seven years old and already an accomplished painter: From 1905, she had studied painting and drawing, specialising in still life and life drawing, in Dusseldorf and Munich; from 1912 to 1914 she studied in Paris at the Académie Ranson, the Académie Colarossi and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière founded by Claudio Castellucho. From 1919, she was a member of the association of artists Das Junge Rheinland. At the Bauhaus Weimar, she attended Georg Muche’s preliminary course and, like most women at the Bauhaus, was subsequently assigned to the weaving workshop – although Willers did not object to this because she was a keen weaver. Her well-known Schiltzgobelin (slit tapestry), a wall hanging now found in the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, dates from this period. Willers did not complete her studies but established her own workshop in Essen in 1923. In 1927, she returned to the Bauhaus, which had in the meantime relocated to Dessau. For six months, she worked as a freelance collaborator in the temporary exhibition space of the hand-weaving workshop and, with Gropius’s help, opened her own atelier. The following year, her work was exhibited at the Folkwangschule in Essen. Here, she held a position as head of the department of hand-weaving and embroidery until 1943, creating wall hangings and decorative and dress fabrics. By now qualified to train apprentices and a registered qualified craftswoman, she progressed to directing the hand-weaving workshop Bückeburg in Lower Saxony, where she remained in charge of the design department and preparing apprentices for their final examination until 1963. In addition, she worked as a drawing teacher at the Gymnasium Adolfinum from 1944. In the 1950s, she produced work made on the vertical loom, wall hangings and smaller works. In 1963, Willers retired from teaching for health reasons and returned to Essen, where she died on 12 June 1977.
Today, Willers’s textile works, drawings and paintings are found not only in the museums of the cities in which she lived and worked, such as the Landesmuseum Oldenburg or the Museum Folkwang, but also in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. [IS 2021]