Marianne Brandt

Marianne Brandt (born October 1, 1893, Chemnitz, Germany—died June 18, 1983, Kirchberg, Saxony) was a German painter and Bauhaus photographer and designer who specialized in metalwork.

Brandt focused on painting early in her career and began her studies at a private art school in Weimar, Germany, in 1911 at age 18. In 1912 she transferred to the Grand Ducal College of Art, also in Weimar. Her early work consisted primarily of Expressionistic portraits, which were exhibited for the first time in 1918 at the Galerie Gerstenberger in Chemnitz. She married Norwegian painter Erik Brandt a year later, and they returned to Weimar in 1921.

Brandt enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1924 and studied under László Moholy-Nagy. Upon his recommendation, she fostered her talent for industrial design in the metal shop, a department that until then had accepted only men. Brandt approached her work from a functionalist perspective that was revolutionary for her time, and the simple clean lines of her pieces reflected the Modernist influence of her mentor. Though she created an amazing quantity of everyday items, including ashtrays, teapots (specifically the now-iconic Model No. MT 49 teapot, 1924), and coffee sets, her lamp designs were particularly noteworthy. Brandt also worked with photography at the Bauhaus, taking photographs that featured unusual angles—in particular, self-portraits—and disorienting and distorting reflections in glass and metal surfaces.

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In 1926 Brandt left the Bauhaus with her husband to spend nine months in Paris. During that sabbatical she began her experimentation with photomontage, carefully composed collages of image and text cut from mass media sources. Though she is less well known for them, she made some 45 photomontages over the course of a decade. Her works show the influence of Moholy-Nagy’s experiments in photography as well as that of her contemporary Hannah Höch, who was known for her biting satirical photomontage works. Brandt’s photomontages often reflected the role of the “New Woman,” the liberated, more-independent women living in Europe’s major urban centres. Parisian Impressions (1926), for example, a lighthearted collage of personalities and scenes of the city, shows a number of women in various states of undress.

Brandt returned to the Bauhaus and eventually served as the deputy head of the metal workshop (1928–29) but resigned when it merged with other departments. In those last two years she also spent more time on photography and photomontage and participated in the landmark “Film und Foto” exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. After receiving her diploma in 1929, she began to work on furniture production and interior design projects at the Berlin firm of architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Later that year Brandt became the head of the design department at the Ruppelwerk hardware factory in Gotha, Germany, where she remained until financial woes forced her to return to her parents’ home in 1933. (She and her husband had been separated since 1926, and at his request they divorced in 1935.) The years Brandt spent living with her family (1933–45) forged a wedge between her and the art world, and though she continued to paint and create art, she was never able to repair the damage caused by that long gap. She spent a number of years working as an independent artist and teaching applied art and design in Berlin and Dresden (1949–54) and lived her last decades as a painter, weaver, and sculptor in Chemnitz.