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Indepth Arts News:
"Tempo, Tempo: The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt"
2006-03-11 until 2006-05-21
Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard
Cambridge, MA,
USA United States of America
Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt, a pioneering exhibition of over 30 works, will be on display
at Harvard’s Busch-Reisinger Museum from March 11
through May 21, 2006. The montages, created by Brandt in
the mid-1920s and early 1930s, offer visually dynamic and
intriguing pictorial investigations of technology, gender
roles, and entertainment culture through a medium not
often associated with this artist. Although Brandt is better
known for her iconic metal work designs for the Bauhaus,
these works reveal an artist entirely at home in the medium
of photomontage. Brandt is not known to have shown the
photomontages until over 40 years after their creation, and
this exhibition brings together all but a handful of them for
the first time.
“This exhibition is a perfect compliment to the Busch-Reisinger Museum’s outstanding
holdings of Bauhaus art and design.” said Thomas W. Lentz, Elizabeth and John Moors Cabot
Director of the Harvard University Art Museums. “The Busch has a commitment to exploring
the richness and variety of modern German art, with a special concentration on the Bauhaus
era.”
Harvard University Art Museums—Tempo, Tempo!
In the early 1920s, Brandt had fully completed her studies as a painter when she attended a
Bauhaus exhibition; she promptly burned all of her paintings and joined the school. In 1924,
she became the only woman to apprentice and complete studies at the Metal Workshop. She
went on to create signature metal works, including teapots, ashtrays, and bowls, that would
become icons of Modernist design. After moving to Paris in 1926, she began to work intensely
in photomontage, a medium that has increasingly come to be seen as quintessentially modern.
Brandt created the photomontages using fragments of popular and media culture, drawing upon
the vast array of visual material made available by the period’s burgeoning illustrated press.
The works explore and critique a moment of great changes in German culture and society, one
in which dramatic shifts were taking place, including the advent of Germany’s first
parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic, and the granting of suffrage to women. The
montages may have been intensely personal reflections, but they also use the mass media
imagery of the time to comment on key social issues. Many of the works display and
investigate the rise of the New Woman, a figure seen to embody the free spirit of the time, and
explore themes of freedom, judgment, and limits placed upon women by male figures around
them. Other works focus on varied images of men—boxers, business tycoons, imperialists or
soldiers—to represent and indicate the problematic links between manhood, aggression, and
militarism in the wake of the First World War.
The exhibition was organized by Elizabeth Otto, assistant professor of art history at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, for the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin and was coordinated at
the Harvard University Art Museums by Peter Nisbet, Daimler-Benz Curator of the Busch-
Reisinger Museum. Otto based the exhibition on her PhD research, in which she uncovered a
great deal of new information about the photomontages including the existence of works that
were thought to be lost.
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