Though she did not attend the Bauhaus, Trude Guermonprez spent her career orbiting within the school’s powerful gravitational field. She was originally from Danzig, and early on studied with Bauhaus-trained weaver Benita Koch-Otte. After a harrowing war experience—her husband joined the Dutch Resistance and was murdered by the Nazis—Guermonprez joined her parents at the famed Black Mountain College, a center for Bauhaus émigrés including Anni Albers. She taught textiles at Black Mountain until the college closed in 1949, and then went to California, where she joined the potter Marguerite Wildenhain—also trained at the Bauhaus—at her experimental summer craft school, Pond Farm. Guermonprez also assumed a teaching role at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where she taught Kay Sekimachi, among other students.
As this biography might suggest, Guermonprez approached weaving from an avowedly modernist point of view, using the loom as a machine to invent abstractions. She created both flat wall hangings and sculptures composed of intersecting planes. What sets her apart from Albers and other weavers of her background is the atmospheric quality of her work. Notes to John I, which is essentially a woven poem, is typical in its restraint, and is featured in the Objects: USA 2020 catalogue. Made while her husband was absent for a time, it calls to mind the old idea of the “Dear John” letter (in which a soldier is informed of a breakup), but also the more general connection between text and textile.