Muche, Georg

Muche, Georg (1895–1987). German painter, designer, and architect, born at Querfurt. He trained in Berlin and Munich, 1912–15, and taught at the Sturm Art School in Berlin, 1916–20. In 1920 he became the youngest teacher at the Bauhaus, assisting Itten in the preliminary course and running the weaving workshop. Like Itten, Muche had mystical leanings, but he also became interested in a technological appproach to art and designed two experimental houses intended as prototypes for cheap, mass-produced buildings using modern materials. He left the Bauhaus in 1927 and joined Itten in the school he had opened in Berlin. From 1931 to 1933 he taught at the Breslau Academy and from 1939 to 1958 at the Krefeld School of Textile Engineering. Although he devoted much of his career to textiles, Muche was primarily a painter. He was somewhat unusual in that he began as an abstractionist (in a manner reminiscent of Kandinsky), then turned to a more figurative style in the 1920s, with a penchant for portraying decorative plant forms.