Brandt conscious

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 2006 by Louis Hellman

TEMPO, TEMPO! THE BAUHAUS PHOTOMONTAGES OF MARIANNE BRANDT

By Elizabeth Otto. Berlin: Jovis. 2005. [pounds sterling]19.99

Bauhaus students saw themselves as radical and left-wing, sporting strange modernist appearances, especially the females with their New Woman short hair and unconventional dress. Unlike other schools, men and women were not segregated but free to join any of the workshops. In practice about thirty per cent of the students were women, most of whom opted for weaving, and only one of the directors was female. Marianne Brandt (1893-1983) was one of the exceptions. Encouraged by Moholy-Nagy she joined the metal workshop, being the only woman there, and soon rose to prominence despite the male chauvinism of her colleagues, becoming acting director. She designed many iconic products like the Kandem table lamp or silver and ebony teapot as well as light fittings for the new Bauhaus building at Dessau.

But almost in private Brandt developed a different art form, photomontage, which had been pioneered by Moholy-Nagy in mainly geometric and abstract Constructivist mode. Brandt, however, employed montage (the printed result of collage) in a figurative manner to comment on contemporary inter-war society especially the role of women, gender politics and the militarisation of technology. From the mid-1920s until 1930 she cut out pictures from new periodicals, combining new and old images as allegories of society's positive and negative trends, often incorporating subtle references to historic fine art.

Elizabeth Otto's book reproduces most of the photomontages with detailed and erudite descriptions and analyses of each element in the works. This makes interesting reading but the collages themselves without the commentary are fairly impenetrable and not particularly inspiring as images in their own right. Many references seem quite personal, not quite as auto-obsessed as our own Tracy Emin perhaps, and their message is often obscured in a brown 1920s nostalgia soup. They would never have the power and historic importance of the later anti-Nazi photomontages of John Heartfield.

Brandt successfully worked as designer for various industries but her brilliant career was ended by a combination of the depression, new Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer (who combined the metal and cabinet-making workshops into an interior design department), and the rise of the Nazis who made sure no lefty Bauhaus product got any work.