“a comprehensive survey now up at the Museum of Modern Art, the curators write about the museum's -- and America's -- last major exhibition on the subject, in 1938. That show, they maintain, offered a scattershot presentation of the Bauhaus, complety ignoring its last five years, after Walter Gropius, the school's larger-than-life founding director, had resigned. Not coincidentally, they suggest, most Americans have a limited understanding even now of what the Bauhaus accomplished or how it fit into the history of its time. We think of the word Bauhaus as shorthand for ''an international modern style unmoored from any particular moment,'' the curators write, and their show, on view through Jan. 25, does a lot to counter this impression. It connects the evolution of Bauhaus art and design -- painting, furniture, glass constructions, metalwork, photography, textiles and theater design -- with the extreme social and political changes that roiled Germany during the Weimar Republic. More than 400 works by artists and designers including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy testify to the wealth of visions and the shifting social contexts that shaped the school up to its tragic end in 1933, when its remaining faculty members shut it down rather than work with the Nazis.”
Deadly Style: Bauhaus's Nazi Connection
Authors: WEBER, NICHOLAS FOX
Source: New York Times. 12/27/2009, p23.
“When in 1923 Walter Gropius called for a redirection of the Bauhaus curriculum toward industry, he dismissed the school's nineteenth-century aesthetic of hand craftsmanship and promoted a new, twentieth-century aesthetic of the machine, introducing the elements of what would later be recognized as a "Bauhaus style." To advance the conceit that the Bauhaus workshops were being directed toward industrial production, Gropius supported stratagems to make the school's products appear to have been made by machine, regardless of how they were actually manufactured. This article looks at ways in which evidence of the hand was minimized in order to make Bauhaus metalwork seem as if it were factory made. This is demonstrated by comparing examples by Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Marianne Brandt from the metal workshop, and by studying the way metal objects were selectively chosen for reproduction in early Bauhaus publications, including some that were misleadingly pictured or even retouched to emphasize machinelike qualities.”
“Marianne Brandt was born in 1893. She studied painting and sculpture at the Grossherzoglich-Sachsische Hochschule fur Bildende Kunst in Weimar, 1911-17, following which she set up her own studio and worked as a freelance designer. In 1919 she married and lived in Norway and France. In 1923 she enrolled at the Staatliches Bauhaus in 1923. She took an apprenticeship in the metal workshop run by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. It was during this period that she produced some of her most innovative work including tableware and light fixtures for Schwintzer & Graff in Berlin. By 1928, Brandt had become deputy director (assistant master) of the metal workshop. In 1928 she also co-designed the 'Kandem' lamp with Him Briedendieck. In 1929 Brandt left the Bauhaus to work in Walter Gropius's architectural office in Berlin (1928-29) before being appointed as a designer for the Ruppelwerk GmbH, a metalware manufacturer in Gotha (1929-32). In 1932 she returned to freelance work and to painting. From 1949 to 1951 she taught at the Hochschule fur Freie und Angewandte Kunste in Dresden and at the Institut fur Angewandte Kunst in Berlin (1951-54). From then on until her death in 1983, she did occasional freelance work for industry and continued her painting and sculpture.”
Subject/artist: Brandt, Marianne [1893-1983. Germany. Industrial Designer\Metalsmith]
Title: Silver teapot by Marianne Brandt
Publication title: The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts
“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. 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. “
TEMPO, TEMPO! THE BAUHAUS PHOTOMONTAGES OF MARIANNE BRANDT
Image Source 1: Table Lamp
Creator: Marianne Brandt, Bauhaus Metal Workshop, (Artist), German, 1925-1932
Bauhaus Metal Workshop, Germany, (Manufacturer)
Work Type: Design Objects
Aluminum and nickel-plated brass
h. 16" (40.6 cm), base diam. 6 1/4" (15.9 cm) shade diam. 10 1/2" (26.7 cm)
This lamp was originally loaned to The Museum for the 1938 "Bauhaus: 1919-1928" exhibition.
It was given as a gift in 1958 by Dr. Anna Moellenhoff, Black Mountain College, North Carolina.
This lamp was formerly attributed to Marianne Brandt.
Gift of Anna Moellenhoff
Image Source 2: Hot Water Jug
Marianne Brandt, (Artist), German, 1893-1983, Bauhaus Metal Workshop, Germany, (Manufacturer)
Work Type: Design Objects
Material: Nickel silver, ebony, and raffia
.2 (overall): h. 6 7/8' (17.5 cm) .2.a (jug): h. 6' (15.2 cm), rim diam. 3' (7.6 cm) .2.b (lid): h. 7/8' (2.2 cm), diam. 3' (7.6 cm)
The use of the library for gathering information on specific designers from the 20th century and before is very useful and reliable as it includes multiple texts and pictures of almost any designer that created an impact on the way design is today. It also includes reviews and opinions from other people’s experiences and views based on texts and pictures which can be helpful for extra information that may not be found in the resources supplied by the website. The Victoria university Library will be a very reliable and incredibly useful tool for students doing the Bachelor of Design Innovation for the following three years and should be used to its fullest potential in every way possible.
