Marianne Brandt - Work

Work

Brandt's designs for metal ashtrays, tea and coffee services, lamps and other household objects are now recognized as among the best of the Weimar and Dessau Bauhaus. Further, they were among the few Bauhaus designs to be mass-produced during the interwar period, and several of them are currently available as reproductions. In an auction in December 2007, one of her teapots —the Model No. MT49 tea infuser— was sold for a record-breaking $361,000.

Beginning in 1926, Brandt also produced a body of photomontage work, though all but a few were not publicly known until the 1970s after she had abandoned the Bauhaus style and was living in Communist East Germany. The photomontages came to public attention after Bauhaus historian Eckhard Neumann solicited the early experiments, stimulated by resurgent interest in modernist experiment in the West. These photomontages often focus on the complex situation of women in the interwar period, a time when they enjoyed new freedoms in work, fashion and sexuality, yet frequently experienced traditional prejudices. Brandt's montage works were subject of the touring exhibition entitled "Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt," organized by Elizabeth Otto, which appeared at the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum and the International Center of Photography in New York from 2005 to 2006. Otto's catalogue of the same name explores these works and Brandt's life.

Brandt is also remembered as a pioneering photographer. She created experimental still-life compositions, but it is her series of self portraits which are particularly striking. These often represent her as a strong and independent New Woman of the Bauhaus; other examples show her face and body distorted across the curved and mirrored surfaces of metal balls, creating a blended image of herself and her primary medium at the Bauhaus.