Marianne Brandt
The Bauhaus metal designer.
Marianne Brandt was one of the few women in the Bauhaus metal workshop. Her teapot and lamps became classics of modernism.
Marianne Brandt was born in 1893 in Chemnitz in Germany. She studied painting and sculpture at the art school in Weimar and in 1919 married the Norwegian painter Erik Brandt. The couple lived for a time in Norway and Paris. In 1924 she enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar.
Women at the Bauhaus were usually steered towards the weaving workshop, but László Moholy-Nagy, who ran the metal workshop, encouraged her to work in metal. According to her own recollections, the male students were not welcoming at first. As early as 1924 she designed a small teapot in brass and silver, built up from a hemisphere, a cylinder and a circle. It is regarded as a classic, and examples are held by the British Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.
She became one of the metal workshop's most important designers and was its acting head in 1928–29. Together with others she developed lamps for mass production, including a bedside lamp for the firm Körting & Mathiesen under the Kandem brand, which sold in large numbers. She also made photomontages and photographs, among them self-portraits reflected in metal surfaces.
After the Bauhaus she worked briefly in Gropius's office and then for a metalware factory in Gotha. During the Nazi era she was stuck in Germany and found it hard to work. After the war she taught at art schools in Dresden and East Berlin. She died in 1983. Her teapot is now produced as a reproduction, and she is seen as one of the foremost women in the history of the Bauhaus.