Naum Slutzky (28 February 1894 in Kiev, Russian Empire (now Kyiv, Ukraine) – 4 November 1965 in Stevenage, England) was a goldsmith, industrial designer and master craftsman of the Bauhaus. In the art history literature his first name is sometimes spelled as Nahum or Nawn.

Bauhaus

Slutzky studied to become a goldsmith at Wiener Werkstätte (for Josef Hoffmann and Edward Wimmer among others) in Vienna. From 1919 he taught at the Bauhaus in Weimar, working with Johannes Itten. He mainly designed jewellery and lamps, but also teapots and coffee pots (there is a silver teapot in the collections of Victoria and Albert Museum London, and a coffee pot in Nationalmuseum/National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm). In 1924 he left Bauhaus to become an independent designer.

England

In 1933, when the Bauhaus school was closed by the Nazis, Slutzky fled to England where he initially found work at the progressive art college, Dartington Hall in Totness, Devon. He went on to be a design teacher at Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art in London. While in Birmingham, he worked at The College of Arts and Crafts and collaborated with local firm Best & Lloyd ^[1] At the end of his life, Slutzky taught Three-Dimensional Design at Ravensbourne College of Art and Design, Bromley, Kent 1963-1965.

Exhibitions

Works in museums

• Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin
• Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg
• British Museum, London
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London
• Goldsmith's Hall, London
• Nationalmuseum, Stockholm

References

• Rohde, Alfred: Hamburgische Werkkunst der Gegenwart. Broschek-Verlag Hamburg, 1927
• Monika Rudolph: Naum Slutzky - Meister am Bauhaus, Goldschmied und Designer, Arnold'sche, Tübingen, 1990 ISBN 3925369066
• Rüdiger Joppien (ed.) Naum Slutzky - Ein Bauhauskünstler in Hamburg. Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, 1995
• Klaus Weber (ed.), Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus, Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin, 1992 ISBN 978-3-89181-405-5
• Alan Powers, "Britain and The Bauhaus", in Apollo magazine, May 2006.