Gertrud Grunow

Gertrud Grunow (8 July 1870 – 11 June 1944) was a German musician and educationalist who formulated theories on the relationships between sound, colour and movement and was a specialist in vocal pedagogy. She taught courses in the “theory of harmonisation” at the Bauhaus in Weimar, where she was the school’s first woman teacher and the only woman teacher during the school’s Weimar years. Life and work Grunow was born in Berlin, Kingdom of Prussia on 8 July 1870. She began exploring the relationships between sound, colour and movement as early as 1914 and gave her first lectures on her theories in Berlin in 1919. Later that year she was invited by the Swiss painter and designer Johannes Itten, to teach at the Bauhaus, where he was a master. She began teaching a course in the “theory of harmony”, later called the “theory of harmonisation”, at the Bauhaus from the end of 1919, and remained at the school until the summer of 1924. Unlike her male colleagues, she was paid on a freelance fee basis and was not taken on as a contracted employee until the summer of 1923. Both masters and students attended her courses. Grunow, along with Itten, Lothar Schreyer and others, was regarded as one