Brandt was born in 1893. Trained as a painter, she burned all her canvases after seeing a Bauhaus exhibition in 1923. She apprenticed in the school's metal workshop, entranced with the new, eventually becoming its head.
The lamps, fixtures, and other housewares Brandt designed remain models of sleek, functional elegance. Her silver-and-ebony teapot, of 1924, is Bauhaus design at its formal height. Or there's the samovar she did a year later, an example of which sits in a nearby Busch-Reisinger gallery. It looks like a metallic version of the strange, squat creatures that crop up in Max Ernst's paintings.
An affinity with Ernst makes sense. Intimations of Surrealism are very much present in Brandt's photomontages, not to mention Cubism and, especially, Constructivism. Above all, there's Dada. Photomontage, with its capacity for radical incongruity, was the supreme Dada form -- unless nonsense counts as a form, too. And the masters of photomontage were Dadaists: Kurt Schwitters, that wondrous magpie; and John Heartfield, with his hilarious, magisterial, agitprop.
Those few years at the Bauhaus must have seemed all the more precious during the rest of Brandt's very long life (she died in 1983). She briefly moved to Berlin to work in the architectural firm of Walter Gropius, the former Bauhaus chief; then, with the rise of the Nazis, settled in the small east German city of Chemnitz. It wasn't much of a move greographically, but it took her from the absolute center of the artistic avant-garde to its periphery. Living under Hitler, then Communism, Brandt effectively disappeared from art history.
It could have been worse, of course. She might have ended up in a concentration camp or the gulag. But looking at her photomontages, with their giddy energy and inebriate immersion in mass culture, one wonders if she didn't have some premonition of what was to come. Were these an attempt somehow to balance the grim, deadening decades that lay ahead?
