Marianne Brandt
Marianne Brandt, Untitled (double-exposed self-portrait), c. 1930–1932. She is at once feminine—with flowing hair, lipstick and a beaded necklace—and a constructivist type in a lab coat, with design tools and the camera’s shutter release at hand.
Born: Marianne Liebe, October 1, 1893, Chemnitz, Germany Died; June 18, 1983, Kirchberg, Saxony, Germany
Matriculated: 1924
Locations: Germany, Norway, France
The record for the highest price at auction for a Bauhaus object is held by a tiny, silver and ebony, tea-extract pot made in 1924 by a new apprentice in the metal workshop named Marianne Brandt. It sold in 2007 for $361,000 and is one of a handful of these diminutive pots she manufactured under the workshop number MT 49. Designed for brewing concentrated tea to be thinned with hot water, MT 49 encapsulates a number of Bauhaus principles: harmony through pure forms including the circle, cross, and square; and sleek modernity in a practical object for daily use. Indeed, Brandt published an essay in the in-house journal bauhaus in 1929, in which she refuted the idea of “Bauhaus” as a mere style and explained that it was instead a method which simply yielded the best forms. Recalling their experiments to ensure optimal functionality of every object produced in the metal workshop—a workshop that was, not coincidentally, under her direction at the time—she wrote that their teapots “had better not drip.” And yet MT 49 also embodies Bauhaus contradictions not visible to the naked eye. While it gives the appearance of machined precision and mass reproducibility, in fact it is a luxury object composed of costly materials that could only be laboriously hand fabricated in limited numbers.
Marianne Brandt, Tea Extract Pot (MT 49), 1924. Photograph by Lucia Moholy
Even aside from the high prices her designs now fetch, Brandt and her work are central to Bauhaus history. Not only was she the only woman to receive her diploma from the male-dominated metal workshop, she held multiple leadership positions during her five years there. Brandt was a visionary metal designer, but also a painter, photographer, and creator of photomontages. These latter works are clearly the products of an astute interpreter of interwar mass-media culture and of its signature figure, the “New Woman.”
Christened Marianne Liebe, she grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Chemnitz, Germany. In 1911 she moved to Weimar for drawing school and the following year enrolled in Weimar’s Grand Ducal Saxon College of Fine Art (Grossherzogliche-Sächsische Hochschule für Bildende Kunst) to study painting with expressionists including Fritz Mackensen. In 1918, she received her diploma and married fellow painter Norwegian Erik Brandt in 1919. The marriage changed her name and automatically made her a Norwegian citizen. The pair spent the next two years traveling and painting in Norway and France. After returning to study sculpture in Weimar, Marianne Brandt saw the Staatliches Bauhaus exhibition in 1923, the school’s first major self presentation. As she later wrote, she “was drawn to the Bauhaus almost magically.” Her decision made, Brandt burned her paintings and started again at the Bauhaus in January of 1924, with the preliminary course (Vorkurs) under Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy who then suggested she specialize in the metal workshop, of which he was head. Brandt selected it and initially experienced hazing from her fellow male students. She would later recall thinking that endless repetitive and mundane tasks were the norm for all of the workshop’s beginners, but her colleagues later admitted that they were trying to scare her off. Luckily, Brandt also soon had success with iconic designs like the teapot and kindred household objects—metal ashtrays, coffee services, and serving bowls—that were quickly recognized as epitomizing director Walter Gropius’s recent reorientation of the school away from expressionism to the slogan “Art and Technology, a New Unity.”
When the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to its purpose-designed building in Dessau, the metal workshop supplied the building’s light fixtures. Brandt had a hand in designing nearly all of them. A photograph from 1926, the year the Dessau Bauhaus opened, shows the weaving workshop decked out with the nickel-plated overhead lights designed by Brandt and Hans Przyrembel and known as model ME 78b. Functional, practical, and recognizably modern, their height was easily adjustable through a weighted pulley system.
The weaving workshop of the Dessau Bauhaus with Model No. ME 78b hanging light by Marianne Brandt and Hans Przyrembel, 1926
Brandt became the workshop’s Mitarbeiter, or staff associate, in 1927, a paid position as Moholy-Nagy’s right hand with responsibilities for running the workshop. In April of 1928, both Gropius and Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus for Berlin, and Bauhäusler from throughout the school assembled a portfolio titled 9 Jahre Bauhaus: eine Chronik (9 Years of the Bauhaus: a Chronicle) to thank Gropius for his work as founding director. Brandt contributed the metal workshop’s page, simply titled me, the Bauhaus’s abbreviation for anything produced by the metal workshop. Workshop members, their products, and views of the Bauhaus building orbit a large metal lampshade-cum-planet at the composition’s center. Included are a comically stoic Moholy-Nagy and Brandt herself, reclining to his lower left. Stacked shades for the ME 78b lamp rise like an architectural column in the work’s upper portion to evoke the workshop’s design and manufacturing capabilities. With Moholy-Nagy’s departure, Brandt was hired as acting director of the metal workshop, a position of public leadership that required contract negotiations with firms such as Schwinzer & Gräff in Berlin and Leipzig’s Körting & Mathiesen to produce workshop designs. As homes were increasingly connected to the electrical grid, a new market for household lamps had emerged, an important opening for Bauhaus designs. Desk and night table lights are common now, but Brandt and her colleagues were imagining these items for the first time.
Marianne Brandt, me (Metalwerkstatt / metal workshop), 1928, photo collage on cardboard. From the portfolio for Walter Gropius, 9 Years of the Bauhaus: a Chronicle
Brandt’s me was not her first foray into cut-and-paste compositions; in 1926, while the Dessau Bauhaus was still under construction, Brandt took a nine-month sabbatical with her husband in Paris. Away from the workshop, she produced complex and engaging glued pictures, which would have been called “photomontages” at the time to highlight their machine-like properties, since “montage” was the work of a “monteur,” a mechanic or technician. Brandt’s 1926 Pariser Impressionen (Parisian Impressions) is a delightful assemblage that suggests the celebrated New Woman, or flapper, as a figure free to roam and let loose on the “City of Lights.” Art, film, and showgirls—including the famous American dancer, Josephine Baker—are arrayed against the backdrop of the Eiffel Tower and accompanied by images of female mobility. Women are on the move with buses, cars, and even a baby carriage. Women’s legs appear throughout the work as dual symbols of the female body’s sexualization and its potential for movement and agency. Once Brandt returned to the Bauhaus, she continued to make photomontages, and she produced almost fifty during her Bauhaus period. Brandt was also a photographer of Bauhaus life and still lives, and of photographic self-portraits that frequently feature her own image combined with mirrored and metallic surfaces, the main material of her Bauhaus work. These photographs often revel in surface textures and explore the relationship of the camera—a machine—to image creation.
Marianne Brandt, Untitled (self-portrait with Bauhaus fabric, balls, and corrugated cardboard), c. 1928
By 1929, Brandt was successfully heading the metal workshop, one of the few women in an official leadership role at the Bauhaus. But she had grown frustrated too with frequent challenges to her authority by her male colleagues. She also wanted to get back to full-time design work, as she wrote to director Hannes Meyer in April of 1929 to announce her plans to depart the Bauhaus in summer. When she left, she had her official diploma from the Bauhaus’s metal workshop in hand, the only one ever issued to a woman.
Brandt spent six months working in Gropius’s Berlin architecture office. In 1930, her metal designs were included in the Werkbund Exhibition in Paris, curated by Moholy-Nagy. That same year she became head of household-goods design at the Ruppelwerk metalwares factory in Gotha. Brandt redesigned the firm’s oldfashioned and often kitschy product lines, further realizing the Bauhaus dream of making simple, elegant, and useful things through mass production. Despite the design impact she was having, in a letter to Gropius, Brandt confessed her frustration at being hemmed in by the outdated taste of her bosses.
Like so many women and men of the Bauhaus, the rise of the Nazi government effectively put an end to Brandt’s flourishing creative life. She divorced from her husband in 1935 and survived the Nazi years, Second World War, and subsequent life in the German Democratic Republic mostly in her family home in Chemnitz, later Karl-Marx-Stadt, relatively withdrawn from society. In the later 1940s and early 1950s, she taught industrial design at Dresden’s College of Art and Craft (Hochschule für Werkkunst) and then at the College for Applied Art (Hochschule für angewandte Kunst) in Berlin-Weissensee, and she traveled to China with an exhibition she curated, German Applied Arts of the GDR. Late in her life, a recognition of the Bauhaus’s significance dawned in East Germany, and Brandt’s work began to be exhibited and discussed. Today, some of Brandt’s metal designs are again in production, and her work is prized by museums around the world.