ART BASEL PARIS
Ella Bergmann-Michel
Embracing Progress
The artist Ella Bergmann was born in Paderborn, Germany, in 1896. She developed an early interest in photography, which her pharmacist father practiced as an amateur. In 1915, she enrolled at the Weimar School of Art, one of only two in Germany open to women at the time, and which lead to the creation of the Bauhaus in 1919. There, she met Robert Michel, an engineering student and test pilot who, in turn, became an artist after his plane crashed in 1916! From this romance emerged one of the most romantic, avant-garde, and least studied artist couples of the first half of the 20th century.
From 1918 onwards, Ella Bergmann developed a highly committed Futurist-Dadaist work on paper. This political commitment brought her into contact with Friedrich Ebert, the first Social Democratic president of the Weimar Republic. In 1919, she was the only woman among the four artists invited by Walter Gropius to exhibit as an announcement of the upcoming opening of the Bauhaus.
During the 1920s, her abstract drawings analyzed and extrapolated the decomposition of light through a prism and its circulation through the lenses of cinematographic projectors. The family settled in the Frankfurt area. There, Ella received many artists and intellectuals and invested herself heart and soul in the social, artistic, and architectural project of the “Neue Frankfurt,” for which she developed her talents as an advertising and filmmaker. With Robert Michel and Kurt Schwitters, she traveled across the Netherlands by car to meet Piet Mondrian and Hannah Höch. In 1925, Ella exhibited with Robert Michel, El Lissitzky, and Kurt Schwitters at the Nassauischer Kunstverein in Wiesbaden. Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp crowned this early career by purchasing some of her works for the “Société Anonyme, Inc.” collection. Between 1931 and 1933, Ella Bergmann made five films of highly avant-garde design and political significance. She reveals the social state of interwar Germany, filming soup kitchens and repressed street vendors, and also documenting the contributions of Mart Stam’s modern architecture to the comfort of life for the elderly.During the shooting of a film capturing popular demonstrations during the 1933 elections, Ella Bergmann was arrested by the political police, and later, the Nazi regime designated the couple as degenerate artists. Ella Bergmann arranged for her family to leave for London, but her husband refused to leave their family home, and the couple spent the war in Frankfurt.
Reclusive and shattered by the destruction of many of her major early works in the fire at her family home in Paderborn in 1945, Ella Bergmann resumed her artistic activity long after the end of the war. In the 1950s and 1960s, she devoted herself, always one step ahead, to a form of Abstract Expressionism and then to Op Art, whose optical illusions demonstrate her continuing interest in the movement of light.
Her film work is regularly exhibited worldwide. A significant collection of works by both her and her husband is on long-term loan to the Sprengel Museum in Hanover.
ART BASEL PARIS
Grand Palais, Paris 8e
Stand 1.J9
From October 22 to 26, 2025
artbasel.com
// Ella Bergmann-Michel