Gertrud Louise Goldschmidt is one of the few Jewish students in Germany in 1938, the Technical University in Stuttgart was still accepting “non-Aryans”. Goldschmidt, 26, had already passed all the certificates in her subject architecture, her final project was finished. She was not allowed to attend the obligatory series of lectures on National Socialist ideology, such as “Tasks and Goals of Defense Policy.” She took English lessons in her lecturer’s house. Two weeks after the Reich pogrom night she passed her exam. She was one of the last Jews to receive a certificate. The document saved her life.
Gertrud Goldschmidt’s requests for residency permits in England and Australia were denied, but Venezuela granted her a visa as an architect. And although she desperately cabled her parents in England “French poor, Spanish and Italian non-existent”, she traveled to Caracas via England on June 2, 1939. For Gertrud Goldschmied it is the end of her German biography. Under the stage name Gego, she will become one of the most important artists in South America of the 20th century.
An exhibition in Stuttgart Art Museum entitled “Gego. The architecture of an artist” deals once again with the time when Gego was still Gertrud Goldschmidt. It is rare for a museum to research the early work of an exile whose work is not even part of its own collection. However, Stuttgart – which was voted Museum of the Year this year – has raised funds and hired an art historian for three years to process a bundle of more than 100 works from the estate. The permanent loan remained at the house after the epochal exhibition “Gego. Line as an Object”, which was shown in Hamburg and Stuttgart and – finally – made the work of the artist, who died in 1994, known again in her home country, including in economically impoverished Caracas can hardly be presented and certainly not scientifically processed.
For people from Stuttgart of all places there is a lot to discover in the show
But because the studies in the early 1930s were also subjected to close scrutiny with the drawings, graphics and objects, there are a few surprises for the Stuttgart public. For example, the curriculum of the university at which the student, who was born in Hamburg in 1912, enrolled, was analyzed for the first time, probably because this university was one of the most progressive in Germany after the Bauhaus was closed. On the index card, however, a red bar and the yellow color identify the student as a woman and as a Jew.
Nonetheless, Gertrud Goldschmidt allowed herself to be photographed confidently in a suit and tie for the “Belegbuch”. Her studies were supported by dedicated professors – among them Paul Bonnatz, who is notorious for being a traditionalist today. The teachers know that this is the only way their student will get one last chance at legal emigration. And in the city, in the one with the model settlement Weissenhof one of the most important residential projects of the Weimar Republic was created, the student also finds inspiring mentors: she takes courses with the painter and graphic artist Karl Schmoll von Eisenwerth, worked as an intern with Bodo Rasch, an autodidact, designer and visionary who not only researches cantilever chair design, but also takes part in performances of Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate” and is in lively exchange with Buckminster Fuller. Even after she emigrated, she stayed in close contact with Rasch by letter until the 1970s.
The art comes from the line: Gego’s “Bicho 89/8” (1989).
(Photo: Photo: Frank Kleinbach/Collección Fundación Gego. Permanent loan to the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart © Archivo Fundación Gego)
Above all, however, Gertrud Goldschmidt learned spatial thinking, how to deal with technical materials and the medium of drawing, and how to use the line when it came to putting ideas and thoughts on paper. Later she will write in Spanish about the value of the line, which she then calls “Sabiduras”. The curator and art historian Stephanie Reisinger also emphatically traces the artist’s later work back to this part of her training: “Long before Gego decided to become an artist in Venezuela in the mid-1950s, she built a creative framework in Germany for her later artistic work Create.”
She designed “art in construction” before there was a name for it
In fact, Goldschmidt is excellently trained when she arrives in Caracas, where the promised position has already been filled. But the city in which she ended up more or less by accident is a stroke of luck. Caracas is to become a bourgeois metropolis in a massive reform. The money is there: Venezuela has just become the second largest oil supplier in the world. And the wave of modernization is mainly bringing immigrants from Europe into the country. Gego is just about to witness how colonial buildings and haciendas disappear and in their place breathtaking projects like the Ciudad Universitaria de Caracas are created. Carlos Villaneuva, the leading architect, also includes art in “a new synthesis of the various forms of expression” – for him the crystalline is a symbol.
Gego will initially accompany the construction boom as an interior designer with designs for restaurants, bars and nightclubs. At the end of the 1940s she also designed a villa for her own family, she married the German businessman Ernst Gunz, and together they opened a workshop for lamps and furniture. But in the 1950s, the qualified engineer took a different path and became an artist. Gego works on parallel architectures, designing works as early as the 1960s that would today be defined as art in architecture, such as her “aluminum staircase”, which seems to merge with the surrounding building.
These major projects have made her famous throughout South America, and she is also influential as a teacher – including with her basic course “Taller Gego”. Above all, her sculptures in urban space draw on the fact that she not only studied scale and construction, but also construction techniques and materials. As early as 1974, the Latin American art critic Marta Traba recognized: “Without this technical and professional basis it would not have been possible for her to realize her work.”
Gego. The architecture of an artist. Until July 10th at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. The catalog costs 35 euros.