Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt

Germany’s interwar years, the time of the Weimar Republic, brought the world Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Christopher Isherwood’s gay underworld, the Bauhaus and a burgeoning illustrated press. When Marianne Brandt wasn’t designing the beautiful, mass-reproducible metal home furnishings— including lamps and teapots still in production today—with which she and her compatriots revolutionized modern interior space, she was cutting and pasting newly abundant magazines and printed material into these witty, politically and artistically savvy photomontages. Their full range is investigated, analyzed and illustrated for the first time in Tempo Tempo! a striking portfolio and critical complement to Brandt’s metalwork. She used the technology of the era’s visual culture to denounce that same technology, to re-imagine the roles of women and to challenge pictorial conventions. As photomontage is rediscovered as a privileged site of Modernist artistic practice, Brandt will be considered one its luminaries.