Söre Popitz, advertisment for Thügina, 1925/1933
Söre Popitz was a female student of graphic design at the Bauhaus, one of very few. She studied type with Jan Tschichold and design with László Moholy-Nagy + Herbert Bayer.
As Madeleine Morley wrote for AIGA Eye on Design, in her article:
Celebrating Söre Popitz, the Bauhaus’ Only Known Woman Graphic Designer
"It’s especially clear how formative Popitz’s brief time at the Bauhaus had been when looking at the stripped-back, linear ads she produced for a household appliance company named Thüngia. Popitz’s series depicts different figures standing beside Thüngia’s sinks or stoves—a stick-figure doctor, a husband and wife, a group of girls. Further ads feature a range of different types of women, from young girls in patterned dresses, to housewives in aprons, and lean figures dressed in stylish frocks, feathered hats, and glamorous earrings.
These playful, geometric stick-figures recall the costumes in Bauhaus professor Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. The household appliances on each poster are drawn in elegant, thin black lines and lack detailing, which, along with the unfussy typography, communicates cleanliness and efficiency. Everything about these designs would have conveyed modernity, functionality, and simplicity: ideal for the modern consumer with their newly electronic, gas-heated, fully-functioning apartment. And Popitz’s stylish stick-women, rendered abstractly but with detailed clothes, ranged from the traditional to the modern, appealing to housewives and working women alike."
Image details:
Söre Popitz, advertisment for Thügina, 1925/1933. Proof on paper, 14.9 x 12.5 cm. Bauhaus Dessau Foundation.
