ELLA BERGMANN-MICHEL (1896-1971) Biography

Literature

Herta Wescher, Die Collage, Koeln, 1968

Exhibition History

London, Annely Juda Fine Art, The First Russian Show - A Commemoration, August - December 1983, catalogue number 88, illustrated page 155
London, Annely Juda Fine Art, Ella Bergmann-Michel Collages and Drawings 1917-1931, catalogue number 12, May - July 1984

Description / Expertise

Ella Bergmann-Michel was born in Paderborn, Westphalia on the North of the River Rhine. Between 1915 and 1918 she studied in Weimar where she made a relief Sonntag für Jedermann which prefigures Kurt Schwitters’s collages, using old wood which she had found in the flea-market. In several collages of 1919 she combined her work with poetry, and in others, dadaist writing. This same year she married Robert Michel and worked with him independently in Weimar.

The Michels met Walter Gropius who borrowed their works to decorate the empty halls of the Bauhaus school and they became friends with the Bauhaus teachers, including the architect Adolf Meyer. This untitled composition belongs to this period.
Ella Bergmann-Michel’s work became increasingly factual and scientific and she began incorporating stern horizontal and vertical compositions into her work. In 1927 she travelled around Holland with Kurt Schwitters. Exhibitions of her work have been held throughout the United States and in Zurich, London, Belfast, Poland, Milan and Paris.