Tempo, Tempo!

Marianne Brandt (1893-1983) is celebrated for her Bauhaus metal designs, beautiful and mass-reproducible objects created to revolutionize modern interior spaces. Much less well known are her photomontages, which constitute a critical complement to her metal works. In these pieces from the mid-1920s and early 1930s, Brandt focused an analytical gaze on contemporary society and politics. Drawing on the vast array of visual material made available by the Weimar Republic´s burgeoning illustrated press, Brandt´s photomontages relied upon the technologies of modern visual culture to challenge pictorial conventions, to denounce the dangerous side of modern technology that had become so apparent in the First World War, and to image new roles for women in interwar society.

Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt is the first publication to present, document and analyze the full range of Brandt´s work in photomontage, a medium which is only now being rediscovered as one of the essential sites of Modernist artistic practice.