Marianne Brandt

Marianne Brandt

Marianne Brandt was a German expressionist painter and sculptor who studied at the Grand-ducal College of Fine Arts in Weimar before becoming a student at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1924. She became head of the metal workshop in the year 1929 after being an understudy to Laszlo Maholy-Nagy. Brandt Brandt produced many pieces during her years a the Bauhaus including her famous Teapot and Sieve of 1924. Moholy-Nagy recognized her aptitude early on and fostered her talent through her studies. The metal workshop was also one of the few branches of the school which aided the financial income by producing various incorporated designs to such companies as the lighting firm of Körting & Mathiesen. Despite hard work and the general free-spirited nature of the school Brandt faced a large amount of adversity in the form of sexism among the students who thought little of women in an industrial setting. When you couple that with the general contempt shown to the school by the reigning political regimes you can see the difficulty she encountered to make her mark on the art world that we today take for granted ( i.e. the prevalence of modernism in good design.) After leaving the Bauhaus in 1929 she worked for a short period at Walter Gropius' architectural firm in Berlin designing furniture and working on interior design. She also worked at Ruppelwerke Metalware Factory in Gotha as the head of the design department until 1932. The Nazi party stifled much of her work until the end of WWII and then in 1949 she was provided an opportunity of a teaching position at the Institut für angewandte Kunst in East Berlin. She taught there from 1951-1954 and reputedly went back to her original love of painting after abandoning it years before for the allure of sculpture and design. In later years much of her work in photomontage was hailed for it's provocative accounts of Germany and the Bauhaus.