Ruth Hildegard Geyer-Raack

Interior Design, 1920s to 1950s

Ruth Hildegard Geyer-Raack (1894–1975) was a renowned interior designer and designer of murals, fabrics, wallpapers, and furniture in the Weimar Republic. She studied painting at the Teaching Institute of Berlin’s Kunstgewerbemuseum (Decorative Arts Museum). It was directed by the architect and furniture designer Bruno Paul (1874–1968), with whom Geyer-Raack later collaborated. In 1920 and 1921 she attended the summer semester at the Weimar Bauhaus and traveled several times to Paris for study purposes.
In 1924 Geyer-Raack opened her own studio in Berlin. She specialized in high-quality interior design for chic lifestyles. She produced innovative designs that brought
contrasting furnishing styles, such as the
Bauhaus and Art Déco, into harmonious unison. As artistic director of the International Interior Design Exhibition in Cologne in 1931, she became known well beyond Berlin. She presented there a diverse cross section of contemporaneous ideas for housing by the international architectural avant-garde. In the wake of the Great Depression and the World War II, her commissions declined considerably. In 1955 she became blind in one eye. Geyer-Raack continued to work until she died in 1975.