Expanding our understanding of Weimar culture

books:


	• Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt Elizabeth Otto Jovis, 2006 - 176 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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Expanding our understanding of Weimar culture

Tempo, Tempo! is a highly informative, beautifully presented, and intriguing look at a set of photomontages by one of the few women members of the Bauhaus collective, Marianne Brandt. Elizabeth Otto's selection, analysis, and interpretation of Brandt's work gives us a fascinating glimpse of part of the history and culture of Weimar Germany. Brandt's photomontages, and the images she used to create them, drew on a number of themes--global militarism, changing perceptions of masculine and feminine gender roles, industrial development and machinery, metropolitan spaces, images of the "exotic"--that have as much resonance today as they did when she created this body of work. The photomontages reveal more and more as you study them, and Otto's accompanying texts, in both English and German, guide the reader to further insights on how to read these complex works of art. It is an erudite text, but not an inaccessible one. It is an enjoyable read, and the photomontages themselves are fun to study. I definitely recommend this text for anyone interested in Weimar history and culture, women in art, or art history generally.

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Fascinating Study

Extremely well researched and uniting for the first time an extensive body of Brandt's photomontage, this book brings together a critical study of interwar Germany with an abundance of visual material. The author (Art History, SUNY Buffalo) places Brandt's forays into montage in the context of wider social, economic and technological changes arising out of the World War I. Reuniting collections previously fragmented between the United States and the former East and West Germanys, she demonstrates the myriad ways through which Brandt drew meaning and significance from the splinters of the past and on topics as diverse as gender, militarization, and the transformation of modern urban life. Readers interested in Bauhaus design or in Brandt's metal work will find this book a fascinating complement to a little known side of Brandt oeuvre. A thoroughly pleasurable book, I highly recommend it to all those interested in the arts of the Weimar era, the study of gender in interwar Germany, or to anyone interested in art history more generally.

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Splendid

Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt is a comprehensive look at the works of this fascinating woman. One can read the book in English or German, or attempt to go back and forth between the two. The author does a tremendous job interpreting Brandt's images and relates them to the culture of the time. One can learn a lot about Brandt and history through this book.

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.

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