Marianne Brandt`s Experimental Landscapes in Painting and

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Marianne Brandt's Experimental Landscapes in
Painting and Photography during the National
Socialist Period
Elizabeth Otto
Published online: 14 May 2013.
To cite this article: Elizabeth Otto (2013): Marianne Brandt's Experimental Landscapes in Painting and Photography during
the National Socialist Period, History of Photography, 37:2, 167-181
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Marianne Brandt’s Experimental
Landscapes in Painting and
Photography during the National
Socialist Period
Downloaded by [Elizabeth Otto] at 19:53 14 May 2013
Elizabeth Otto
A much earlier version of this essay was
published in German: Elizabeth Otto, ‘Der
Berg ruft: Landschaften des Exils in
Marianne Brandts Malerei und Fotografie in
der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus’, in Frauen
des Bauhauses während der NS-Zeit:
Verfolgung und Exil, ed. Adrian Feustel, Inge
Hansen-Schaberg and Wolfgang Thöner,
Munich: Richard Boorberg Verlag 2012,
175–96.
Email for correspondence:
eotto@buffalo.edu
1 – Die Metallwerkstatt am Bauhaus, ed.
Klaus Weber, Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv and
Kupfergraben Verlagsgesellschaft mbH 1992,
162. Lamps and other metal designs by
Brandt are currently manufactured by the
German company Technolumen and by
Italy’s Alessi.
2 – Alice Rawsthom, ‘The Tale of a Teapot
and its Creator’, International Herald
Tribune (17 December 2007), 11. See the
listing in Sotheby’s, Deutscher Werkbund to
Bauhaus: An Important Collection of German
Design, New York, 14 December 2007, Sale
No. 8459, cover and 75–85 (Lot 56). The
price realised was $361,000. There are only
seven extant versions of Brandt’s Tea Infuser,
and some might attribute the high price of
this object to its rarity. However, in this same
Sotheby’s catalogue there is a good
comparison object, Hans Przyrembel’s
silver-plated tea caddy of 1926. This is
likewise an iconic Bauhaus object that is
again in production; in the case of the
Przyrembel, there are only six known
examples. Yet in the same Sotheby’s sale this
object was sold for $34,000, less than onetenth of the price fetched by the Brandt.
3 – Rawsthom, ‘The Tale of a Teapot’, 11.
4 – Anja Baumhoff, The Gendered World of
the Bauhaus: Politics of Power at the Weimar
Republic’s Premier Art Institute, 1919 –1932,
New York: Peter Lang 2001, 131 and 146.
This essay examines the profound changes in Marianne Brandt’s life and work after
her failed attempt to leave Germany in the spring of 1933. It shows that both because
of photography’s status as one of the central media of Modernism, and due to its
indexical qualities, this medium holds a very special place in Brandt’s troubled and
troublesome oeuvre from the time of National Socialism.
Keywords: Marianne Brandt (1893–1983), László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), Leni
Riefenstahl (1902–2003), Bauhaus, Berg (mountain) photography, Expressionism,
gender, German Democratic Republic, National Socialism in Germany (Nazism)
By many measures, Marianne Brandt can be considered one of the most successful
artists of the Bauhaus. She is known particularly for her sleek designs produced in
the school’s metal workshop and for her lamps manufactured by the Leipzig-based
lighting firm Kandem, a number of which are again in production today.1 One of
her small tea extract pots, made in 1924 during her first year as an apprentice,
recently set a record for the highest sum ever paid at auction for a Bauhaus object
(figure 1).2 In a statement to The International Herald Tribune, Bauhaus-Archiv
curator Klaus Weber called this work ‘Bauhaus in a nutshell’.3 Indeed, Brandt’s
iconic modernist objects define what we think of as the Bauhaus aesthetic.
Prior to joining the Bauhaus in 1924, Brandt had already completed her training
as a painter at Weimar’s Großherzoglich-Sächsische Kunstschule (Saxon Grand
Ducal Art School) in 1918. The following year, Brandt, who had been born
Marianne Liebe, married a fellow art student, Erik Brandt, who was from Norway.
They travelled extensively in Scandinavia and France before Marianne Brandt
returned to Weimar in 1923. She arrived just in time to see the Staatliches Bauhaus
Ausstellung, the Bauhaus’s first major exhibition. Deeply impressed by the show,
which moved boldly away from the Expressionism in which her previous art training
had been rooted, she joined the Bauhaus to recommence her studies. Brandt completed the Preliminary Course with László Moholy-Nagy and, at his suggestion,
became an apprentice in the metal workshop in spring 1924. As Anja Baumhoff
has suggested, this was one of the most male-dominated divisions of the Bauhaus.4
While Brandt initially faced discrimination in the metal workshop because of the fact
History of Photography, Volume 37, Number 2, May 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2013.769780
# 2013 Taylor & Francis
Elizabeth Otto
Figure 1. Marianne Brandt, Tea Extract Pot,
1924. # 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy
Sotheby’s.
that she was a woman, very soon thereafter she received recognition for her designs
and began to take on leadership roles.5 By 1927 she was on the staff as the metal
workshop’s Mitarbeiter or assistant, a paid position. When her mentor Moholy-Nagy
left the school in 1928, she became the workshop’s acting director.
Brandt was a quintessential Bauhaus artist in that she worked in multiple media,
including metal, photography, photomontage and graphic art. Her designs in metal
are surely her most enduring Bauhaus creations.6 But her Bauhaus diploma also lists
‘engagement with photography’ as an official part of her studies at the school for
1928 and 1929.7 In addition, she created over forty photomontages that were made
between 1924 and approximately 1932, many of them large and intricate works on
par with those made by her contemporaries Hannah Höch or László Moholy-Nagy.8
In these varied media, Brandt’s work was by turns practical, experimental and
obliquely socially critical. Yet despite these numerous successes, Brandt’s importance
for the Bauhaus, its history and its legacy has not been sufficiently acknowledged. As
Magdalena Droste has cogently argued, the fact that Brandt was a woman had a large
impact on her fate and reception.9 Not only did she encounter resistance to her
leadership in the metal workshop, but, as Droste reveals, after Brandt left the
Bauhaus she was, unlike her male peers Herbert Bayer and Marcel Breuer, ultimately
unable to create a vibrant career or to make a name for herself. A close investigation
of the work that she produced during the period of National Socialism in Germany
(1933–45) shows just how far she fell from her years of intense and productive
creativity at the Bauhaus.
If Brandt’s impact on the Bauhaus is as yet too little studied, her artistic
production during the Nazi period is the least understood of all. There are good
reasons for this. Study of the Bauhaus was largely neglected and even actively
suppressed during much of the existence of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik
(German Democratic Republic; GDR), Brandt’s country of residence after the war.
Therefore the reputations of Bauhäusler who lived in the East still often lag behind
those of their counterparts who lived in West Germany or other countries, their
career opportunities were much more limited and all of Brandt’s work is less well
known than it might otherwise be.10 Further, some of Brandt’s papers and artwork
were destroyed when her house was severely damaged in the bombing of Chemnitz at
the end of the Second World War. Consequently, aspects of her production from the
time after the Bauhaus and up to 1945 are difficult to reconstruct. Above all else,
however, Brandt’s work from the Nazi years has probably never received much
168
5 – Marianne Brandt, ‘Letter to the Younger
Generation’, in Bauhaus and Bauhaus People,
ed. Eckhard Neumann, New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold 1971, 98.
6 – The most complete information on
Brandt’s metal work is available in Die
Metallwerkstatt, ed. Weber, 138–83; and
Bauhausleuchten? Kandemlicht! Die
Zusammenarbeit des Bauhauses mit der
Leipziger Firma Kandem, ed. Justus Binroth,
Leipzig: Grassimuseum 2002.
7 – The listing is ‘beschäftigung mit
fotografie’. Hannes Meyer, ‘BauhausDiploma: Marianne Brandt’, 10 September
1929, collection of the Bauhaus-Archiv,
Berlin.
8 – Elizabeth Otto, Tempo, Tempo! The
Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt,
Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv and Jovis Verlag
2005.
9 – Magdelena Droste, ‘The Bauhaus Object
between Authorship and Anonymity’, in
Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity,
Discourse, and Modernism, ed. Jeffrey
Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei, New York:
Routledge 2009, 215–21.
10 – There was not the same appetite for
creating a Bauhaus-like institution in the
context of East Germany as there was for
West Germany’s Hochschule für Gestaltung
Ulm, Chicago’s New Bauhaus, or Black
Mountain College in North Carolina.
Brandt’s Experimental Landscapes during the National Socialist Period
11 – László Moholy-Nagy and Walter
Gropius, Marianne Brandt, BefähigungsZeugnis (Statement of Credentials), 23
March 1928. Reproduced in Galerie am
Sachsenplatz Leipzig, Bauhaus 2, Leipzig:
Staatlicher Kunsthandel der DDR 1977, 75.
12 – Film und Foto der zwanziger Jahre, ed.
Ute Eskildsen and Jan-Christopher Horak,
Stuttgart: Gerd Hatje 1979, 51. Brandt’s
contributions included Untitled (Still-Life
with Clock and Ball) and probably Untitled
(Metal Shavings and Grinding Machine),
both ca. 1929. For reproductions see
Marianne Brandt: Fotografien am Bauhaus,
ed. Elisabeth Wynhoff, Stuttgart: Hatje
Cantz 2003, 82 and 83.
13 – Marianne Brandt, letter to Walter
Gropius, 26 July 1935, collection of the
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
14 – Marianne Brandt, letter to Hin
Bredendieck, 10 July 1930, collection
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; cited in Olaf
Thormann, ‘Bauhaus – Kandem: Daten,
Fakten, Quellen’, in Binroth,
Bauhausleuchten? Kandemlicht!, 180–1.
15 – Marianne Brandt, letter to Lászlo
Moholy-Nagy, 17 July 1930, collection
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau; cited in
Thormann, ‘Bauhaus – Kandem’, 181; and
Brandt to Gropius, 1935.
16 – ‘es ist alles stockdunkel u. besonders
hoffnungsvoll sieht die Situation für mich
nicht aus’. Marianne Brandt, letter to Marthe
Bernson, May 1932, collection of the
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
17 – Magdalena Droste points to a letter that
Brandt’s father wrote to her on 23 November
1932 as evidence that it was her own decision
to leave the Ruppelwerk: ‘It seems from the
content of your letter that you are planning
to break camp in Gotha’ (‘Du stehst nach
Inhalt Deines Briefes davor, Deine Zelte in
Gotha abzubrechen’). Collection of the
Bauhaus-Archiv, Museum of Design, Berlin;
quoted in Droste, ‘The Bauhaus Object’, note
57, 224–5.
18 – ‘Da dort die Zustände durch die
Machtübernahme des Hitler-Regimes
unerträglich wurden, fuhr ich im Mäi nach
Oslo’. Marianne Brandt, ‘Lebenslauf zum
Antrag auf Wiederlangung der Deutschen
Staatsangehörigkeit’, undated (late 1950s),
collection of Bernd Freese, Frankfurt a.M.
19 – Brandt, ‘Lebenslauf’.
scholarly attention simply because of its remarkable lack of innovation compared
with the explosive creativity she had consistently demonstrated while at the Bauhaus.
Most of her art from this period remained in her possession until her death in 1989.
At that point the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (Bauhaus Dessau Foundation) was able to
purchase a large quantity of drawings, paintings and photographs made during her
pre-Bauhaus and post-Bauhaus years. This archive has been extremely informative
for the reconstruction of Brandt’s work under Nazism that is at the heart of this
essay.
Brandt’s work made between the years 1933 and 1945 does have important
stories to tell. Contextualising this material in comparison with her production at the
Bauhaus and understanding it as, in part, a result of her experience of the Nazi period
not only reveals more about Brandt’s trajectory as an artist, but it indicates the
outlines of the crushing yet often invisible machine of Nazi culture, which embraced
aspects of modernism to demonstrate its own modernity while rejecting most of the
artists associated with earlier modernist movements. Further, while Brandt’s
Bauhaus modernism is only barely visible in most of her art from the Nazi period,
some of these works evidence a fraught tension with her remembered Bauhaus past
as she struggled with her difficult existence under Nazism.
Brandt lived in near total artistic isolation in the 1930s and 1940s, although her
path to this was not a foregone conclusion. Her many successes at the Bauhaus
included garnering more contracts for the production of her metal designs than any
other of the shop’s members, a fact that suggested a thriving career lay before her.11
Because of her range and strengths as an artist, she maintained the active support of
both Moholy-Nagy and Walter Gropius for years after the Bauhaus period. The year
1929 was one of achievements and significant changes for Brandt. In the spring she
showed five photographs – still-lives and a portrait – at the Werkbund’s
Internationale Ausstellung Film und Foto (FiFo), in the section curated by MoholyNagy.12 In July, she left her position as acting head of the Bauhaus metal workshop
after facing challenges to her leadership from the shop’s other members. But she left
as the only woman to receive her diploma from that workshop and went directly to a
job at Gropius’s Berlin architecture studio for five months.
Late that same year she moved from Berlin to the relatively provincial town of
Gotha, to become the head of design for the enamelled steel household goods
department at the well-established Ruppelwerk metal factory. She spent the next
three years completely revamping this product line.13 In addition to providing a
further chance for Brandt to design for the mass market, this position enabled her to
weather several years of the global financial crisis that began with the crash of the
stock market in New York, also in 1929, and to support a number of her family
members and some friends from the Bauhaus.14 Yet her work at Ruppel was also a
source of frustration for her, primarily because of the lack of creative freedom
compared with the Bauhaus. She was forced to compromise some of her ideals in
favour of the middle-class kitsch on which Ruppel had made its name.15 In a letter to
her friend Marthe Bernson written in the spring of 1932, Brandt lamented: ‘everything is pitch black and the situation doesn’t seem particularly hopeful for me’.16
Brandt gave up her position at the Ruppelwerk in autumn 1932 and decided to
try her hand at freelance work.17 She moved to Hamburg in January 1933, but seems
to have had little success there. She left Germany – as she would later write, ‘because
the circumstances there became intolerable due to the Hitler regime’s takeover of
power’ – and travelled to Oslo.18 Her time in Norway was cut short; after a month,
her parents asked her to return to Germany and to her hometown of Chemnitz in
order to take care of her aging father.19 For the next sixteen years – until 1949 –
Brandt lived in Chemnitz and held no permanent position. She was cut off from her
Bauhaus contacts, many of whom had left Germany, except through occasional
letters. In 1935 she divorced Erik Brandt at his request, and her father, with whom
she had been close, died in 1936.
169
Elizabeth Otto
The Nazi period was thus in many ways a time of prolonged crisis for Brandt,
personally, professionally and politically. The separation from the Bauhaus and the
ideological and stifling cultural programme of the National Socialist regime appear
to have broken Brandt as an artist, an event from which her creative faculties would
never fully recover. Brandt seems to have kept her official connections to the regime
as limited as she felt possible. She was never a Nazi Party member, but she eventually
did join the Reichskulturkammer (National Socialist Reich Culture Chamber) in
August 1939. She later stated that she did this only in order to obtain materials
and participate in exhibitions, but that this membership was of little help.20 In fact,
Brandt did show her work in one exhibition in 1938 – prior to becoming a
member of the Kulturkammer – at the Städtische Kunstsammlungen
Chemnitz. Only one other show would follow once she held membership, at the
same, minor location.21 In 1941, she participated in a design competition for the
cover of the magazine Die neue Linie, in which the work of many Bauhaus members
had been published. She received seventy-ninth place among the honourable mentions – hardly an encouraging response.22 Throughout this period, Brandt appears to
have had very little contact with other artists. Chemnitz offered Brandt the support
of family and some rich traditions in art, craft and industrial production, but few
links to the avant-garde. After decades of a free life that had included study at a range
of art schools, travel abroad, marriage, participation in one of the liveliest and most
interesting art movements of the day and work as a professional in her field, Brandt
now found herself unemployed, living at home and without access to a metal workshop or any of the tools of her trade. For one who had been at the heart of the
Bauhaus for a number of years in the 1920s and who had helped to run the metal
workshop and had lived and worked in the school’s Prellerhaus wing of studios, this
was an exceedingly lonely existence. In Chemnitz, Brandt was at home and yet cut off
from the creative contexts that had earlier so energised her. In her personal correspondence there are traces of a dream of emigration, perhaps to Paris or Oslo.23 If
leaving Germany and Chemnitz was possible in theory for Brandt, in practice it was
not, or rather, it was not possible much of the time. As we shall see, Brandt did travel,
and these were important trips.
Despite her profound unhappiness during the Nazi period, Brandt was still
productive. She completed drawings for metal designs and worked in several other
media.24 Perhaps most remarkable of all among the types of art that she turned to
was painting. Even though Brandt had made a decisive break with her past as an
Expressionist painter by burning her pre-Bauhaus works in the mid-1920s, she
returned to representational, Expressionist-influenced painting in the 1930s.25
Expressionism in Germany had, in earlier decades, been a movement associated
generally with the larger revolt against the status quo and specifically with the
country’s November Revolution of 1918–19.26 But by the early 1920s it had ceased
to be radical in formal or cultural terms; by the 1930s it was simply passe. Brandt’s
Expressionist-style still-lives, portraits and landscapes, made from approximately
the mid-1930s onwards, seem to have been half-hearted gestures of participation
and, in some cases, attempts to create saleable works that might generate income in
the new cultural climate. She did many of these paintings in watercolour or
tempera, inexpensive media in which she could have completed a work quickly
or in stages. Thus these paintings required less time commitment from an artist
who was probably having trouble working at all. Further, these media would not
have called attention to her as a Bauhaus artist or have raised any red flags with the
National Socialist regime. After all, painting was a venerated tradition that was
celebrated through such Nazi cultural events as the annual Great German Art
Exhibitions held from 1937 to 1944, and watercolour and tempera were the
preferred media of many hobbyists.27 Brandt’s Expressionist and representational
painting went along with a general regression forced upon her by her economic and
political situation at this time.
170
20 – Marianne Brandt, letter to Mart Stam,
22 December 1948, collection Stiftung
Bauhaus Dessau. The card catalogue in the
Bundesarchiv for the members of the artists’
section of the Reichskammer der bildende
Künste (Reich Chamber of Visual Art)
contains a card for Brandt that reads simply:
‘Brandt, Marianne, Chemnitz 1, Heinrich
Beck-Str. 22 II, geb. 1.10.93. Staatsangeh.
Norwegen; Malerin’ (Brandt, Marianne,
Chemnitz 1, Heinrich Beck-Str. 22 II, born
1.10.93. Nationality: Norwegian; Painter).
Indeed, as Alan Steinweis makes clear, the
Nazi culture chambers were umbrella
organisations with which it was nearly
impossible to avoid working. Whether artists
and other cultural workers were members of
the chambers or not, they were still subject to
their laws. See ‘Nazi Coordination of the Arts
and the Creation of the Reich Chamber of
Culture, 1933’, in Alan E. Steinweis, Art,
Ideology, and Economics in Nazi Germany:
The Reich Chambers of Music, Theater, and
the Visual Arts, Chapel Hill: The University
of North Carolina Press 1993, 32–49.
21 – Brandt, ‘Lebenslauf’.
22 – Ute Brüning, ‘Bauhäusler zwischen
Propaganda und Wirtschaftswerbung’, in
Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus:
Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung, ed.
Winfried Nerdinger, Munich: Prestel-Verlag
1993, 45. For more on the history of the
Bauhaus and Die neue Linie, see Patrick
Rössler, Die neue Linie, 1929–1943, Berlin:
Bauhaus-Archiv and Kerber Verlag 2007.
23 – Marthe Bernson, letter to Marianne
Brandt, 5 August, 1933, collection Stiftung
Bauhaus Dessau; and Marianne Brandt,
letter to Marthe Bernson, 5 April 1935,
collection Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
24 – In a 1935 letter to Brandt, Moholy-Nagy
praised new metal designs that she had sent
and stated that he hoped that he would be
able to use them to find her work. MoholyNagy, letter to Brandt, Berlin, February 1935,
collection Sächsisches Industriemuseum
Chemnitz.
25 – Karsten Kruppa dates the destruction of
these paintings to 1926. Karsten Kruppa,
‘Marianne Brandt, Annäherung an ein
Leben’, in Die Metallwerkstatt, ed. Weber, 50.
26 – Joan Weinstein, The End of
Expressionism: Art and the November
Revolution in Germany, 1918–19, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 1990.
27 – See Peter Adam, ‘The ‘‘Great German
Art Exhibitions’’’, in Art of the Third Reich,
Chapter 6, New York: Harry N. Abrams
1992, 92–119.
Figure 2. Marianne Brandt, Unser Garten
(Our Garden), watercolour and gouache,
1938. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. # 2013
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
28 – Clement Greenberg, ‘Modernist
Painting’, Art and Literature, 4 (1965), 193–
201; reprinted in Art in Theory, 1900–1990:
An Anthology of Changing Ideas, ed. Charles
Harrison and Paul Wood, Oxford: Blackwell
1992, 754–60.
Even if the subjects and approaches of Brandt’s paintings from the Nazi period
might best by characterized as arrière-garde, some of them stand as attempts to
continue her life as an artist and to understand her radically changed world. One of
her watercolours, Unser Garten (Our Garden) from 1938 (figure 2), is unlike anything she had made during the Bauhaus period, and it serves as an indicator of how
much she had lost. This painting probably shows a view that Brandt would have
looked at often, the garden behind her family’s house as seen from an upper-storey
window. This view from above shows influences of the neues Sehen or New Vision
movement in photography to be sure, but not in a manner that would have created
the positive shock of new recognition that went along with neues Sehen photography
in the years of the Weimar Republic. The garden that Brandt represents appears cold,
snowy and sterile; it is dominated not with plants, but by fences and a barren tree
stump. The painting itself is schematic, almost awkward, and uses colour fairly
literally. It could more easily be the work of a talented Sunday Painter than that of
a skilled Bauhaus member.
On the surface, the subject matter, approach and medium of Unser Garten, like
much of Brandt’s work from this period, would seem to be a rejection of the
Bauhaus. Yet a deeper analysis of her paintings from this time reveals echoes of
Brandt’s past, even in works that visibly struggle to engage her present. Brandt’s
paintings of landscapes and figures are painstaking, careful and fraught. Famously, in
his later work of the 1960s, Clement Greenberg argued that Modernist painting’s
central preoccupation was painting itself, rather than representation or illusion.28 In
creating this influential argument, Greenberg was absorbing and interpreting early171
Elizabeth Otto
and mid-twentieth-century avant-garde trends towards abstraction, but he was also
reacting against the literalism of some of the art of previous decades, including the
realism trumpeted by fascist regimes.29 Part of what Greenberg’s logic overlooks is
the way that some forms of representational painting that might qualify as ‘kitsch’ in
the Greenbergian lexicon could have led to productive if unintentional dead ends. In
perhaps his best-known article, ‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch’, written during the same
period that the images under study in this article were made, Greenberg defined
kitsch as ‘ersatz culture [. . .] destined for those who, insensible to the values of
genuine culture, are hungry nevertheless for the diversion that only culture of some
sort can provide’. It uses ‘for raw material the debased and academicized simulacra of
genuine culture’.30
Brandt’s return to Expressionism and representative painting can be considered
a form of kitsch. She enacts this return in a context where Modernist art – while still
present in circumscribed ways – was most often categorised as ‘Degenerate’. She did
many paintings like Unser Garten, and these seem to mourn through their rejection
of Modernist abstraction.31 They evoke Brandt’s loss of the freedom to make avantgarde work and seem to a degree to ironise the artistic kitsch that the Nazi state so
often supported. There is a harshness in these paintings’ realism that is also evident
in, for example, a portrait of Brandt’s younger sister Susanne from 1940 (figure 3).
Her face is angular, mottled and almost bruised-looking; her flapper bob from the
1920s lingers as if to hold on to that era, but it also serves as a reminder that she – like
Brandt herself – has grown older. Like their Expressionist and somewhat kitschy
approach, the lesser degree of skill exhibited in these paintings as compared with her
earlier work cannot be counted as a strategy per se, since it seems to have been a result
of the limited world in which Brandt lived. However, it can be seen as a way of facing
her historical present, as a manifestation of her experiences and, perhaps, as a subtle
form of protest.
The portrait of Susanne appears to be a materialisation of Brandt’s own negative
outlook on the world under National Socialism. Yet this painting also reaches into
the past, since it is one of a number of representations of women in melancholic
poses that Brandt created over the years. For example, Brandt had explored the
melancholic modern woman in her 1928 photomontage Es wird marschiert (On the
March) (figure 4).32 In this work, a fashionable New Woman has been critically
activated and seems to stand in for Brandt herself. She is surrounded by a landscape
filled with scenes of conflict and unrest that are cut from the illustrated papers, and
she is engaged in contemplation of this array of contemporary scenes. This work also
directly references Albrecht Dürer’s famed Melencolia of 1514 through the specific
details of its composition: the landscape, its figure’s melancholic pose and her
seeming inability to act despite her evident perceptiveness about the precarious
state of affairs. During her time at the Bauhaus, Brandt worked allegorically through
montage to engage the troubles of her time. In the Nazi period, she retained elements
of this critical process, as we see in her repetition of the melancholic pose for the
portrait of Susanne, but any traces of specificity about her historical present are
missing from this portrait.
And yet Brandt’s paintings from the Nazi period still offer space for melancholic
contemplation, if only in limited ways. If we look at some of her paintings from this
period collectively, we can imagine how they may have functioned as a private form
of reflection and perhaps even resistance. The severe look of Susanne’s melancholic
gaze in the painting from 1940 could be considered, for example, along with the
image of the family’s garden of two years earlier or another of Brandt’s bleak landscapes. ‘Is this all that we have left?’, they may ask, accusingly. But these elements
appear only in extremely limited form and never together in a manner that could
mark Brandt as a radical. Looked at individually, the Nazi-period works are devoid of
any critical function. And that is as we would expect, since it is unlikely that Brandt
would have dared to create art that criticised the regime or those around her given
her disempowered, marginal state.
172
29 – With Greenberg now firmly established
as a giant of art history, it is easy to forget the
scholarly truisms against which he was
working. For example, in a 1954 lecture: ‘The
tendency is to assume that the
representational as such is superior to the
nonrepresentational as such; that all other
things being equal, a work of painting or
sculpture that exhibits a recognizable image
is always preferable to one that does not’. See
Greenberg, ‘Abstract, Representational, and
so forth’, Ryerson Lecture, the School of Fine
Arts, Yale University, 12 May 1954,
published in Clement Greenberg, Art and
Culture: Critical Essays, Boston: Beacon Press
1961, 133.
30 – Clement Greenberg, ‘Avant-Garde and
Kitsch’, Partisan Review, vi:5 (Fall 1939),
reprinted in Pollock and After: The Critical
Debate, ed. Francis Frascina, New York:
Harper and Row 1985, 25.
31 – Painting as mourning has been fruitfully
explored in a different vein by Yve-Alain
Bois, who has diagnosed the trajectory
toward abstraction in painting as a form of
negation that is engaged in a process of
mourning, as a loss of the possibility of
representing at all and, thus, as emblematic
of ‘the whole enterprise of modernism’. Neue
Sachlichkeit painting, by contrast, is for Bois
part of the post-World War I ‘return to
order’, and thus for him it is without merit,
since it is not part of the trajectory toward
abstraction. See Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Painting,
the Task of Mourning’, in Painting as Model,
Cambridge: The MIT Press 1990, 230.
32 – For a longer interpretation of this work,
see my entry in Otto, Tempo, Tempo!, 96–9.
Another example of this melancholic pose in
Brandt’s work is a painted tapestry design
that shows an angel playing music, bent in
contemplation while listening to the music.
Hans Brockhage attributes this work to the
years of National Socialism, but it is closer in
style and palette to Brandt’s pre-Bauhaus
work. See Hans Brockhage and Reinhold
Lindner, Marianne Brandt: Hab ich je an
Kunst gedacht, Chemnitz: Chemnitzer Verlag
2001, 44–5.
Figure 3. Marianne Brandt, Bildnis Susanne
(Portrait of Susanne), oil on canvas, 1940.
Neue Sächsische Galerie, Chemnitz. # 2013
Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG
Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Figure 4. Marianne Brandt, Es wird marschiert (On the March), photomontage, 1928. Militärhistorisches Museum der Bundeswehr Dresden. # 2013 Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
173
Elizabeth Otto
Most of all, Brandt’s Nazi-era work shows traces of trying to survive as an artist.
Like a number of former members of the avant-garde, it was particularly through
landscapes that Brandt again found her footing, if only to a limited extent.33 An
untitled 1939 painting shows a landscape that is snowy and barren, but which
features another seemingly allegorical element: a young tree that reaches for the
sun and shows the first signs of buds, despite the harsh climate.34 This painting has a
strong sense of design and rhythm, as if elements of a Bauhaus colour or form
exercise were hidden within it.35 A few aspects of Bauhaus modernism could thus live
on for Brandt, even as she cloaked them in painterly traditionalism.
In addition to her painting and design work, Brandt made photographs during
the period of National Socialism. She had been very engaged with photography at the
Bauhaus; from the period 1924–29, at least one hundred photographs can be securely
attributed to her, and more may have existed and been lost in the bombing of her
house.36 Most significant for her work in the Nazi period is an extensive series of
approximately eighty-five photographs that she made during a ski trip of several
weeks in the Dolomites in the spring of 1936. These are much more than standard
vacation photographs. They show a break in her difficult existence and a brief period
during which her creativity seems to have been revived more fully than in any of her
other work. It is significant that this occurred outside Germany, as if she experienced
her presence in this foreign landscape as a weight lifted from her shoulders. The
Dolomites photographs foreground the breath-taking scenery of the mountains, and
thus they participate in a tradition of Berg (mountain) photography that had deep
and complex roots in Central Europe. But these mountains also provided a set of
forms for Brandt’s visual experimentation. As in some of her paintings, in photography landscape seems to have provided a language for Brandt to resume the task of
creative exploration as an artist. And, also similar to her paintings, these photographs
draw on past traditions but also respond to the profoundly difficult time in which
they were made. The Dolomite photographs are linked to the genre of Berg photography; yet, read closely, some of them also renew engagement with elements of her
Bauhaus photography. She transposed snippets of Bauhaus modernism into an
austere and dramatic visual landscape that seemed to allow her to dream of happiness again and of some form of escape.
As in her earlier photographs and photomontages, female figures often dominate
in her photographs of this beautiful but extreme landscape. In one of these (figure 5),
a blinding white snowscape gives way to jagged mountain peaks that nearly brush the
33 – Examples of other artists who turned to
the seemingly neutral genre of landscape
painting during the National Socialist period
include Otto Dix and Max Pechstein.
34 – This picture is Inventory number I
43400 at the Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. I also
reproduce it in Otto, ‘Der Berg ruft!’, 184.
35 – See Rainer K Wick, ‘László MoholyNagy als Kunstpädagoge’ and ‘Ästhetische
Erziehung in gesellschaftsverändernder
Absicht: Zu einigen Aspekten im Denken
von László Moholy-Nagy und Herbert
Marcuse’, in Bauhaus: Kunst und Pädagogik,
Oberhausen: Athena 2009, 220–51.
36 – Marianne Brandt, ed. Wynhoff, 21.
Figure 5. Marianne Brandt, Untitled
(landscape in the Dolomites, female crosscountry skier on the right), gelatine silver
print, 1936. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.
# 2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
174
Figure 6. Marianne Brandt, Untitled (female
cross country skiers in a row in the
Dolomites, half-undressed), gelatine silver
37 – This particular photograph shows
typical Dolomites peaks, possibly from the
Geisler group.
38 – Johannes von Moltke, No Place Like
Home: Locations of Heimat in German
Cinema, Berkeley: University of California
Press 2005, 44.
39 – For a literary example, see Thomas
Mann, Der Zauberberg, Berlin: S. Fischer
1924.
clouds.37 A female skier to the right confronts this sublime scene from her own high
altitude. We witness her alone, lost in a reverie at the profound sight before her. Her
struggle to reach this height has been rewarded with an almost holy communing with
nature in a sight that – but for this photograph – only the few who make this journey
could see. Further, our view of this figure is from slightly above and from a distance, so
that she becomes a marker of scale, close enough to see clearly but far enough away to
emphasise the landscape’s grandeur.
In their engagement with the glorious mountain landscape, Brandt’s photographs call up the traditions of Berg film, photography and literature that were
already well established prior to the Weimar Republic, in the work of such pictorialist
photographers as Heinrich Kühn. The 1920s saw a dramatic increase in alpine
tourism and a continued fascination with the imagery of the mountains as captured
on film.38 Throughout the interwar period, the spectacle of human beings in inhospitable and sublime alpine landscapes fascinated readers and writers as well as
makers and viewers of film and photography.39 As Matthew S. Witkovsky has
argued, while Central-European photography of the 1920s through the 1940s can
be said to have been fixated on modernity as its central subject matter, the representation of land was also critical: ‘In nationalist rhetoric [. . .] becoming modern
175
Elizabeth Otto
(landscape in the Dolomites, female figure
standing on a hill to the left), gelatine silver
meant in part ‘‘recovering’’ ties to folk wisdom and to the land itself, ties that had
supposedly been severed’.40 Thus in the Weimar period we see Bergfotografie appearing alongside images of modern technology and culture in the illustrated papers and
even in the work of individual neue Sachlichkeit photographers such as Albert
Renger-Patzsch.41
During the Nazi period, mountain imagery was often heavily freighted with
ideological messages that linked it overtly to nationalist notions of Heimat. In the
work of such photographers as Wilhelm Angerer or in the popular press, the visual
language of snow and mountains was easily conflated with that of blood and soil.42
Yet the attraction of mountain imagery even during this period cannot be reduced
only to nationalism; Berg imagery held a powerful draw for many and could be used
to a wide array of ends. For example, Der Berg ruft! (The Mountain Calls!), a 1938
Bergfilm that tells the story of the first ascent of the Matterhorn by competing Italian
and English teams, exemplifies the layers of simultaneous meaning that could exist
within this visual trope. Luis Trenker, the film’s director and star, was a National
Socialist supporter who would officially join the party in 1940.43 Der Berg ruft! fits
neatly in Nazi ideologies; the central figure of Antonio Carrel (Trenker) is shown to
embody not one, particular (Italian) national ideal, but rather what could be seen by
176
40 – Matthew S. Witkovsky, Foto: Modernity
in Central Europe, 1918–1945, New York:
Thames and Hudson 2007, 161 and 175.
41 – See for example, Renger-Patzsch’s
photograph of Erzgebirge, Sosa, ca. 1930,
reproduced in Albert Renger-Patzsch: Joy
Before the Object, ed. Aperture Foundation,
New York: Aperture Foundation 1993, 25.
42 – On Angerer, see Elizabeth Cronin, ‘Lost
Somewhere in the Mountains: Wilhelm
Angerer and Austrian Heimat Photography’,
History of Photography, 32:3 (Autumn 2008),
248–59, esp. 258.
43 – Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion:
Nazi Cinema and Its Afterlife, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press 1996, 83–4.
(landscape in the Dolomites, female crosscountry skiers to the left), gelatine silver
print, 1936. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau. #
2013 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
/ VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
Figure 9. Marianne Brandt, Untitled (house
in a village in the Dolomites), gelatine silver
177
Elizabeth Otto
German nationalists as typically German ideals of loyalty and national duty.44 Yet
this film can also be understood as arguing that it was only through collaboration
and friendship across nationalities that such a feat as the conquering of the
Matterhorn could be achieved. After the war, Trenker would use such contradictory
implications in his films as an element in his significant rewriting of his own lifestory in order to rehabilitate himself as an anti-Nazi.45
In addition to their powerful but politically ambiguous representation of the landscape, beginning already in the second half of the 1920s, the specific imagery of female
figures in such climates became iconic in the film appearances of Leni Riefenstahl. Her
career in mountain films began with Arnold Fanck’s 1926 Der Heilige Berg (The Holy
Mountain). In Die weisse Hölle vom Pitz Palü (The White Hell of Pitz Palü) of 1929,
Riefenstahl played the newlywed mountain climber Maria Majoni and performed her
own stunts. While the narratives of these films often ultimately relied upon a variety of
traditional ideas about gender – that women are closer to nature, for example – they also
provided a bank of influential images of the modern female mountaineer who could
meet any challenge that nature might set for her.
The call of the mountains was indeed heard by many, and for Brandt it offered a
temporary way out of her small world of retreat in Chemnitz. While Brandt’s
Dolomites photographs do not feature the extreme feats seen in the typical
Bergfilm, they draw on its recently created bank of female imagery. They also rely
on a key part of the tradition of Berg film and photography that Johannes von Moltke
has called ‘the Alpine sublime’, in which ‘man’ is pitted against ‘nature’, which is
posed as a threat but also a marvel.46 Further, this group of Brandt’s photographs
have such key characteristics of the Bergfilm as ‘auratic landscapes [and] breathtaking
atmospherics’.47 These photographs represent members of Brandt’s group of friends
at home with these sublime, snow-covered mountains. In one photograph, skiing
female figures present a study of contrasts (figure 6). Arrayed in an aesthetic row as
they glide up a snowy incline, with their backs to the viewer, these female skiers defy
the harsh elements in their states of partial undress, as they rise up to the unseen
landscapes that lie ahead. The women appear as dark forms against the white, and
each figure demonstrates repeated complex elements – skis, poles, white chemises
and dark jackets tied at the waist – which contrast strongly with the smooth surface of
the snow that is broken only by their tracks. In another of these photographs, the
stark silhouette of a woman rises above a craggy peak while a chain of mountains
extends above and behind her, not dwarfing her, but instead underscoring the feat
she has accomplished simply by appearing in this place (figure 7).
Also typical of the genre of mountain imagery are strategies that play upon
various scales of temporality. These include ‘pseudo-ethnographic view(s) of the
local population’.48 Such imagery exists in Brandt’s suite of photographs, an
approach which also links her work to tourist photography since it increases the
sense of escape. Further, Brandt’s photographs enact an ambiguous relationship to
her historical present by creating a tension between what Eric Rentschler has called
‘Mountains and Modernity’.49 In the Bergfilm, this can play out in the framing of the
narrative with the arrival of modern visitors in cars to a town seemingly forgotten by
time, as in Riefenstahl’s 1932 Das blaue Licht (The Blue Light), a film that was,
incidentally, set in the Dolomites. This tension is also evident in the very media of
Berg film and photography; timeless mountains are captured by the most powerful
new visual technologies of the day. In Brandt’s work this tension is evident not only
in the way that old traditions and eternal mountains are captured on film, but also in
the contrast between photographs of women in local dress or images of those
unchanging mountains and the modern clothing and equipment of those in
Brandt’s group (figure 8).50
But, for all their connections to traditions and updated Berg imagery, Brandt’s
Dolomites photographs are also remarkable for a very different reason: embedded in
the mixture of snow, mountains and New Women mountaineers are cloaked elements of Bauhaus modernism. One of these images shows a timeless and functional
178
44 – Christian Rapp, Höhenrausch: Der
deutsche Bergfilm, Vienna:
Verlagsgesellschaft 1997, 228.
45 – Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion, 79
and 84–5.
46 – Moltke, No Place Like Home, 44.
47 – Eric Rentschler, ‘Mountains and
Modernity: Relocating the Bergfilm’, New
German Critique, 51 (Fall 1990), 137.
48 – Moltke, No Place Like Home, 43.
49 – See Rentschler, ‘Mountains and
Modernity’, 137–61.
50 – There are several photographs of
women from the local towns in Brandt’s
series. See, for example, Inventory numbers I
6601 F, I 6602 F, and I 6603 F, the Stiftung
Bauhaus Dessau.
51 – Reproductions of this photograph are
widely available on the internet. For a print
version, see Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From
the Bauhaus to the New World, ed. Achim
Borchardt-Hume, New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press 2006, 72.
52 – For the 1920s photograph, which
appears to come from an urban setting, see
Untitled (Light/Shadow Composition), ca.
1928–29 in Wynhoff, Marianne Brandt, 80.
The related photograph from Brandt’s 1936
Dolomites trip shows the stairs and railings
by a ski lodge, and the railings’ uprights are
echoed in a stack of skis leaning against a
wall. This image is in the archive of the
Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, Inventory number
I 6659 F.
53 – László Moholy-Nagy, Malarie Fotografie
Film, (1925, 1927), ed. Hans Wingerler,
Berlin: Mann 1986.
54 – These two photographs are so close as to
look almost like prints of different portions of
the same negative, but there are a few subtle
differences in the composition. To imagine
the second version, which I do not reproduce
here, take about 10% off of the left side of the
image reproduced in figure 11, and about
15% off of the top. (Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau,
Inventory number I 6621 F.)
55 – Norbert Schmitz, ‘The Preliminary
Course under László Moholy-Nagy: Sensory
Competence’, in Bauhaus, ed. Jeannine
Fiedler, Königswinter: Könemann 2006,
369–70.
56 – Elizabeth Otto, ‘A ‘‘Schooling of the
Senses’’: Post-Dada Visual Experiments in
the Bauhaus Photomontages of László
Moholy-Nagy and Marianne Brandt’, New
German Critique, 107 (Summer 2009),
120–4.
57 – László Moholy-Nagy, Von Material zu
Architektur (1929), Berlin: Kupferberg 1968.
building, the façade of which is covered in stucco and structured by an array of
simple wooden balconies (figure 9). This could almost be an ethnographic architectural study. Brandt, however, has photographed it as a partial view and at a radically
tilted angle that disorients the viewer and takes away any attempt at the objective gaze
of the ethnographer. These were routine gestures by members of the Bauhaus –
including Brandt’s mentor, Moholy-Nagy – and by other proponents of neues Sehen
photography in the 1920s, as in Moholy-Nagy’s well-known 1926 photograph,
Bauhaus Balconies.51 In Brandt’s photograph of the ancient building from the
Dolomite village, she makes it modern by echoing Bauhaus experiments while
applying them to a completely different context. A number of her other photographs
also reference her Bauhaus photography. For example, both in the 1920s and on the
1936 trip, she experimented with images of the contrasts made by the light and dark
shadows of cast iron railings on stairs.52 Such visual experiments draw on MoholyNagy’s ideas and teaching at the Bauhaus and were widely disseminated in his
publications, such as Painting Photography Film of 1925, in which he situated
photography as a method for obtaining new views of the world and a visual form
that also allowed for experimentation with light and abstraction.53
While nearly all Brandt’s Dolomites images are loaded with iconic natural imagery, a number of them threaten to dissolve into experiments in abstraction. Natural
elements such as snow and sky or tracks and contours become line, shade and surface
texture (figure 10). Images such as these disorient and play on perceptual responses in
an invitingly empty stretch of polished and patterned snow. In another photograph, a
study of snow, rock, water, mountains and Bonsai-like alpine trees, Brandt brings
together a complex and evocative array of forms and textures (figure 11). Here too,
Brandt plays on contrasts. Water flows despite the snow, and the enormity of a ridge of
mountains is dwarfed by the weathered trunk of a tree that has survived the snow and
found footing in rock. Brandt made two nearly identical photographs of this scene.
Figure 11 shows the slightly more expansive of the two, which reveals much more of
the mountains. Brandt mounted the print of this photograph onto paper, which makes
clear that she valued it enough to display it and suggests that it may once have been for
sale. The second, nearly identical, photograph of this view is not mounted, but appears
simply in the large batch of prints from this trip. In this second photograph, the
mountains, which many would see as the image’s most important element, have been
almost completely cropped out.54 This choice draws the focus away from the famously
dramatic imagery of this scene so that other elements can win the viewer’s attention.
Devoid of the mountains’ evocation of the sublime, the photograph becomes a field for
experimentation in visual textures and forms. As Norbert Schmitz has pointed out,
one of the central elements of Moholy-Nagy’s teaching was to train students towards
Sinneskompetenz (artistic sensory competence).55 In this alpine still-life, Brandt returns
to her schooling by allowing our eyes to peruse a diverse array of extreme forms
compressed into a tight space. They evoke such interconnected sensations as cold
(snow and ice), chill (water), crispness (mountain air), prickliness (pine needles),
roughness (bark of the little tree) and knobbliness (soil).
In one of her earlier photomontages, Kontraste – Struktur, Textur, Faktur
(Contrasts – Structure, Texture, Facture), of 1928, Brandt had already experimented
with Sinneskompetenz in an unsettling collection of images that demonstrate photography’s power to capture a range of disparate and strange objects, including largescale architecture and small-scale life forms, and to set them as equals.56 Throughout
this montage Brandt noted different terms to designate the qualities that she found in
these snippets, including ‘Struktur’ beneath a collapsing train bed, ‘Textur’ by the
horns of a giant beetle and ‘Faktur’ centred over a temple. All of these were terms
upon which Moholy-Nagy had elaborated in his teaching and subsequent publications.57 Brandt’s exploration of the synesthetic properties of visual images continued
in the photograph of the small mountain-stream ecosystem. It brings together the
intimate Struktur of this landscape and the organic surface – or Textur – of the trees,
snow, rock and water, to investigate photography’s powerful evocative potential and
179
Elizabeth Otto
(landscape in the Dolomites), gelatine silver
Figure 11. Marianne Brandt, San Pellegrino,
Dolomites (Italy), gelatine silver print
mounted on paper, 1936. Stiftung Bauhaus
Dessau. # 2013 Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
thus to form a kind of pensive return to the Bauhaus through the found forms of the
Dolomites.
While her paintings from the Nazi period seem largely to be engaged in mourning
her lost past and the emptiness of her present, these photographs made outside Germany
are a much stronger attempt to return to the considerable skills she had developed at the
Bauhaus and to create something new. Brandt draws on the imagery and traditions of
mountain photography and film and translates the contrasts and extremes of this
landscape into Bauhaus aesthetics. Further, she uses this context to create a new archive
of images of women who are unconstrained, capable, triumphant and free. These are
sensations that she would rarely have witnessed or experienced while at home in
Chemnitz. Painting was something that Brandt seems to have been able to do on an
occasional basis throughout much of the Nazi period, but it was in photography that she
180
58 – For an excellent study of the tensions
around Socialist Realism in Germany, see
Heather Mathews, ‘Formalism, Naturalism,
and the Elusive Socialist Realist Picture at the
GDR’s Dritte deutsche Kunstausstellung,
1953’, in Edinburgh German Yearbook 3,
Contested Legacies: Constructions of Cultural
Heritage in the GDR, ed. Matthew Philpotts
and Sabine Rolle, Rochester: Camden House
2011, 90–105.
59 – See Bauhaus 1, ed. Gisela and HansPeter Schulz, Leipzig: Galerie am
Sachsenplatz 1976.
60 – Considering that in a 1929 letter of
recommendation for Brandt written to
Werkbund director Ernst Bruckmann,
Moholy-Nagy referred to her as ‘my best and
most ingenious student’, it is astonishing
how underemployed she was during
subsequent years and that she is still often
treated as a minor part of Bauhaus history.
Moholy-Nagy, letter to Ernst Bruckmann, 26
June 1929, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau.
61 – Peter Blickle, Heimat: A Critical Theory
of the German Idea of Homeland, London:
Camden House 2002, 68.
managed to make new experimental works that were hybrids of the powerful tradition of
Berg imagery and her own Bauhaus methods.
Brandt ultimately did live through the years of National Socialism and survived the
air-raid bomb that struck her family home in Chemnitz. She would spend the next several
years rebuilding the damaged house, another difficult time in which she needed to rely
upon the tremendous range of her skills and scrounge materials as she could, and during
which some of her few basic necessities came from care packages sent by her Bauhaus
friends Ise and Walter Gropius. She would live on under the regime of the GDR and, in the
later 1950s, give up the Norwegian Citizenship she had been assigned through her marriage
to become a GDR citizen. Brandt helped to influence a new generation of designers
through her teaching in Dresden at the Hochschule für bildende Künste (College of Fine
Art, 1949–51) and in Berlin-Weißensee at the Hochschule für angewandte Kunst (College
of Applied Art, 1951–55), both positions to which she was named by their head, the Dutch
architect and erstwhile Bauhaus instructor Mart Stam. But Brandt’s status as a former
Bauhaus member did her no favours in the GDR, since the regime supported Socialist
Realism despite its problematic aesthetic links to Nazi art.58 Thus, for many of her GDR
years, Brandt was underemployed or even unemployed. Late in her life, the Bauhaus began
to be tolerated by GDR officials, a change that allowed members of the public to start
exploring the school’s history. A series of exhibitions and sales of Bauhaus works were held
at the privately-run Galerie am Sachsenplatz in Leipzig starting in 1976.59 These featured
Brandt’s work prominently and helped to lead to her rediscovery. Brandt’s death seven
years later, in 1983, just before her ninetieth birthday, came too soon for her to witness a
much broder renewel of interest in her work. In retrospect, while the Bauhaus was not
always an easy place for Brandt as for many of its female students, outside that institution
Brandt encountered much more resistance and was unable to regain her footing as a
professional in the same way that so many of her male Bauhaus colleagues did.60
In his critical study of the German concept of Heimat (homeland), Peter Blickle
makes a crucial point – namely ‘that Heimweh [homesickness], through the loss of
one’s Heimat, is a forced process of individualization, whereas having a Heimat is the
permission to remain asleep in a disindividualizing world’.61 Brandt’s experiments in
landscape photography during the National Socialist period seem to have given her
solace at a time when her own existence and her homeland were both so miserably
reduced from her experiences of them in earlier times. They offered Brandt a way out
of this shrunken homeland and her homesickness for the world that she had
experienced before the Nazi period, and they gave her the chance to attempt to
grow and explore again as an artist. Following traces of the Bauhaus in Brandt’s work
from the Nazi period does not lead to the conclusion that this work is at the same
level of achievement as that she had made in earlier times, since this is not the case.
Rather, in the successes and failures of her painting and photography, we can come to
understand this Bauhäuslerin’s attempts to return to an open and unhindered landscape of imagination and how, through these works, she struggled to engage the
impossible world in which she was living without forgetting the powerful and
liberating lessons of her Bauhaus past. For many, the mountains served as enduring
symbols of anti-modernist glory, as antidotes to the ills of modernity and industrialisation, or as visual manifestations of the proud roots of a mythical Volk. For Brandt,
by contrast, photographs of these mountains provided her with a literal and figurative view far beyond her otherwise limited horizons. They served as a temporary
escape from National Socialist Germany as a place but also as a time, back to her life
as a free thinker and creator at the Bauhaus.
181

Marianne Brandt`s Experimental Landscapes in Painting and

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