Women's History Month: Else Regensteiner

In the history of art, fiber arts began to earn respect as a fine art medium in the Western world starting in the mid-1800s. Going back to ancient times, many countries around the world have perceived textiles as more valuable than commodities like gold. The rise in the status of fiber arts continued in the 1900s after the important Bauhaus school (1919–1933) in Germany featured a prominent textiles workshop, producing lots of important fiber artists. One of those fiber artists was Else Regensteiner, whom I was privileged to meet while living in Chicago.

Else Regensteiner (1906–2003, born Germany, United States), Dazzling Journey, 1970. Wool, silk, and novelty yarns, 53" x 35 13⁄16" (137 x 91 cm). Image courtesy of the Artist. © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist. (8S-19468)

Regensteiner wove most of her wall hangings on a tapestry loom. For small works such as Dazzling Journey, the tapestry loom Regensteiner used was a vertical one set at an angle. Her weavings explored all of the experiments pioneered in loom weaving at the Bauhaus, and she advanced the aesthetic of giving the warp sequences (the vertical threads) prominence. This piece also shows her exploration of incorporating the weft (horizontal threads) in sections rather than all the way across, and the incorporation of different size threads into a single piece, much like Anni Albers’s (1899–1994) work of the 1960s. The warp threads terminate at the top and bottom, ten or so twirled together to make tasseled fringe.

Else Regensteiner, Rectangles, 1973. Wool, cotton, silk and mohair, Leno weave or plain weave, height: 64 3⁄16" (163 cm). Image courtesy of the Artist. © 2025 Artist or Estate of Artist. (8S-19473)

In Rectangles, Regensteiner employed a Leno weave. In a typical weave, the warp threads (the vertical “backbone” of the weaving) are interlaced with the weft threads. The Leno weave, sometimes called a “gauze weave,” is a technique in which warp yarns are twisted or cross around each other to form a figure-eight pattern, sometimes with a mesh appearance like this piece.

Between 1952 and 1980, Regensteiner collaborated with weaver Julia McVicker (1906–1990) to create new and more colorful woven fabrics. The two women dyed their own fabric samples and had those dyes replicated by commercial dye houses. Many of Regensteiner’s colors, such as the fuchsia in Rectangle, were inspired by colors she had seen in various rocks. She also incorporated stones into some of her weavings, as well as shells, feathers, and driftwood.

Out of the civil wars, ruined economy, and social strife that ensued in Germany after World War I (1914–1918), a revolution in art was born with the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. The Bauhaus curriculum encouraged the interdisciplinary combination of fine art and industrial design, a search for universals of form, and a promotion of aesthetics in industrial production. The first Christmas after the school was founded, the students made decorations out of textile scraps and sold them at a “Dada” fair in Weimar. This venture was so successful that textiles became the first workshop of the Bauhaus. 

Although the textiles classes were composed almost entirely of female students, they aimed to produce work that would elevate weaving to the level of fine art, rather than craft considered “women’s work.” From the very beginning, weaving of the Bauhaus reflected the abstract aesthetic present in Bauhaus painting. Students were encouraged to experiment with all of the concurrent abstract styles, most of which involved some sort of cubistic, geometric abstraction.

The weavings from the Bauhaus gained a market in several German firms that produced materials for furniture, automobiles, and household furnishings such as rugs, curtains, and wall hangings. In this way, abstraction was introduced to a broad section of the public. Bauhaus textile teachers migrated to the United States before World War II (1939–1945), spreading the Bauhaus aesthetic and elevating recognition of textiles as fine art.

Born in Munich, Germany, Regensteiner’s early childhood education was at the German Women's School. She ultimately acquired a teaching degree for kindergarten. She married Berthold Regensteiner, the owner of a clothespin factory, in 1926. After Regensteiner's husband's business was confiscated by the Nazis in 1935, she and her husband moved to Chicago to be with her mother and stepfather, who had also fled Nazi persecution.

Although she lived in Germany when the Bauhaus textile workshop was operating (1919–1933), Regensteiner was unaware of it. She became interested in weaving in 1939 when she met Bauhaus weaver Marli Ehrman (1904–1982), who had become the head of the textile department at the School of Design in Chicago (now Illinois Institute of Technology). Regensteiner became Ehrman's assistant and took weaving courses at the school.

In 1942, Regensteiner went to Black Mountain College in North Carolina. The school was run by Anni Albers, a textile artist who had once run the Bauhaus textile studio, and her husband, Josef Albers (1888–1976), a former Bauhaus teacher. Returning to Chicago, Regensteiner began teaching weaving at Hull House and ultimately at the School of the Art Institute in 1945, where she founded the weaving department.

Regensteiner's teaching methods were grounded in the Bauhaus backgrounds of both Ehrman and Albers. The establishment of a strong textile department at the School of the Art Institute marked the beginning of the ascension of textile arts to the status of fine arts, the cherished goal of the original Bauhaus teachers. Even after retiring from teaching, Regensteiner remained an influential figure in fiber arts with her books Art of Weaving (1970) and Weavers Study Course: Sourcebook for Ideas and Techniques (1997). 

Correlations to Davis Programs: Explorations in Art 2E, Grade 3: Unit 6.31; Explorations in Art 2E, Grade 4: Unit 5.4; The Visual Experience 3E: Chapter 10 3-D Media, 10.8; Davis Collections: Art Terms R–Z; Davis Collections: Fiber as Art; Davis Collections: Groundbreaking Women Artists