Ise Frank: The Forgotten Woman of the Bauhaus

Ise Frank (1897–1983), wife of Walter Gropius, was a key but overlooked figure at the Bauhaus. Born in Wiesbaden to a Jewish bourgeois family, she met Gropius in 1923 during a lecture and married him the same year, abandoning her writing career to support his work. She edited all his texts and contributed to furniture design, notably the kitchen in the Bauhaus director's residence in 1925, two years before Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky's Frankfurt Kitchen. From 1923 to 1928, Ise shaped the school's didactic philosophy and, foreseeing Nazi dangers, exported the Bauhaus method through exhibitions in Turkey, France, and the US, documented by photographer Irene Hecht. The Nazis declared organizers 'enemies of the Reich' and closed the school in 1933. The couple fled Germany in 1934, moving via London to the US, where Walter taught at Harvard. Ise faced rejection for her article 'Grandma Was a Career Girl' from Atlantic Monthly, which opposed working women. She continued editing Walter's books, which he dedicated to her. After his death in 1969, she wrote under her own name, championing Bauhaus ideals, and turned their home, Gropius House, into a museum, later donating it to Historic New England. The house still attracts thousands of visitors annually. Ise Frank's legacy is a crucial but underrecognized part of design history.