For this year’s International Women’s Day, in the centenary of the Bauhaus design school, SoMo celebrates one of the rare women leaders to emerge from this renowned 1920s institution: Marianne Brandt.
This story is not just one of a master designer. It is a story of a true trailblazer. Marianne established her credentials in the realm of industrial design, a field that is seldom associated with women, even today.
Marianne began her studies in painting and sculpture at art schools. (Itself revolutionary, given that women were traditionally tutored at home.) Within a few years, she applied to the Bauhaus, a daring experiment in progressive idealism where anyone could study, regardless of gender, class or nationality.
One of her first teachers, the master László Moholy-Nagy, recognized Brandt as his “best and most ingenious student.” It was he who encouraged her to join the school’s metal workshop. Until then, women at the school were relegated to study textiles or weaving, despite the founder’s declarations that Bauhaus was a place where there would be no divisions between genders.
Marianne was soon accepted as the Bauhaus metal workshop’s first woman apprentice. Though she still faced the challenge that many who are “the first” must navigate. In her words:
“There was no place for a woman in a metal workshop, they felt. They admitted this to me later on and meanwhile expressed their displeasure by giving me all sorts of dull, dreary work. How many little hemispheres did I most patiently hammer out of brittle new silver, thinking that was the way it had to be and all beginnings were hard.”
But those “little hemispheres” proved to be valuable practice for Marianne. One of her early metalwork designs at the Bauhaus, a prototype she hand-made in her very first year, was an elegant silver-and-ebony tea infuser: the MT49. It featured a novel, dripless spout and cool-to-the-touch handle. Celebrating crisp, geometric shapes, it was a sculpture as teapot and a teapot as sculpture — in other words, iconic Bauhaus design.
The MT49 prototype would one day sell at Sotheby’s for $361,000. A record-breaking price not just for Brandt but for any item made at the Bauhaus School.
Marianne calmly pushed the boundaries for what women could achieve in the realms of education and business. As a student, her lighting fixtures were chosen to grace the halls of the Bauhaus campus in Dessau. (They are still there today.) Together with a colleague, she also designed the Kandem lamp, which was the most commercially successful design to come out of the Bauhaus.
By her third year, she became Associate of the Metal Workshop, and the nominated contract negotiator for commercial production of student designs. It was a key contribution to the school’s growth, establishing a vital source of income.
Marianne’s instinct for fusing design and commerciality is an aspiration even for designers today. It won her the merit of working with the Bauhaus pioneer Walter Gropius on his own architectural practice. Later, she would go on to reform the entire design department at an established metalwork factory, Ruppelwerk. She took strategic decisions to streamline the product range, to focus on beautiful, functional pieces, in keeping with the Bauhaus vision.
In this way, Marianne carried the Bauhaus flag into her career. One might say that she had as much to do with promulgating the tangible value of the Bauhaus as did her male counterparts whose names are more widely known.
Marianne did this not just as a professional, but also as a teacher. During her last year at the Bauhaus (1928–1929), Brandt was chosen to be Deputy Head of the metal workshop, succeeding her own mentor László Moholy-Nagy. Few Bauhaus women were ever given the chance at paid teaching positions there. After the Bauhaus was forced to close its doors in 1933, she continued to share her vision and wisdom with students at prominent art schools in Dresden and Berlin.
Her designs were such masterful expressions of the Bauhaus spirit that her pieces are now featured in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum and Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as the British Museum in London. In a career of just nine years, Marianne left an essential mark, not only on the body of work that emerged from the Bauhaus School designers, but on the possibilities for modern design — and for modern women.
At a time when the words “industrial design” and “women” were rarely uttered together, Marianne carved a path so that individuals of any gender could imagine and create more than ever before. In fact, it’s thanks to the visionary work of Marianne and her fellow women students that Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius was able to make good on his promise of a truly democratic school. #BalanceforBetter
