"Tempo, Tempo!" could not have been a more fitting title for the Marianne Brandt show, which features the compact, visually complex effect of photomontage. On display at Harvard's Busch-Reisinger Museum through May 21, 2006, the show exhibits over thirty photomontages that strike a palpable balance between the fast, industrial, powerful content of the cut-out images and the calculated deliberateness of their placement.
Brandt took many of the clippings from the newspapers and magazines abundant in her age of the modern printing press, following the trends of her society's entertainment and transforming politics. This particular world was Germany in the mid-1920s and early 1930s, which changed dramatically after World War I with the institution of the country's first parliamentary democracy, the Weimar Republic. The post-war years also saw the beginning of Germany's feminist movement, with the granting of women's suffrage in 1918.
The most pervasive theme included in nearly every work in the gallery is that of the New Woman, one who defies the entrapment of femininity and makes her way into the workplace and sports competitions, boasting men's fashions like smoking pipes and wearing top hats. The entertainment of the generation also included women in a different, more glamorous way, and images of vaudeville, dance, the circus and well known actresses all enter Brandt's compositions with the intention of satire, paradox or admonition.
The political nature of her work is indicative of the German art and architecture school, Bauhaus, which embraced progressive ideas of design and challenged the conventional concept of what constituted art. In 1923, Brandt saw a Bauhaus exhibit, and just before joining the school, burned all of her paintings.
Known as the only woman to apprentice and study at the Bauhaus's metal workshop, her mentor was L??szl?? Moholy-Nagy, whose method of camera-lens photography (laying objects directly onto light sensitive paper) was adopted by Brandt in two early works shown in the exhibit. The rest of the montages in "Tempo, Tempo!," though different from her better-known metal work, incorporate the very same emphasis on design and politics, characteristic of the Bauhaus perspective.
"It's a Matter of Taste" (1926) is a piece magnificently well-planned and executed, with the images connected by lines drawn to fit perfectly - the steel grating of a billboard is fixed delicately to a rising skyscraper by way of strong, branching lines, indications of Brandt's painstaking arrangement and brilliant sense of relationships between images.
Upon first glance, the sheer density of some of the works confronts the viewer with an off-putting sense that these pictures were merely thrown together, and the presence of so many similar pieces in a single room may tempt many to walk quickly through the exhibit.
These are works that need time and close inspection, as if Brandt implores the viewer to have the same patience she required in using such a tedious medium.
To step close to one of these photomontages is to fully recognize the genius sense of space and aesthetic prowess of a pioneer in the art world. Some works are almost Cubist, with the stark white page cutting into the image. This technique defies the flat barrenness of the paper, which acts as a background and emphasizes the cut-and-paste quality of the art.
Without shadow and line, these compositions are amorphous, floating entities, arranged to make the eye course over them in specific ways that produces an overall witty, surrealistic portrayal of serious issues.
Brandt's choice of images is indisputably exclusive to her time, but the concepts they suggest are entirely universal. "Our Unnerving City," made in 1926 in the midst of industrial progress, is a piece which explodes from its center in an overwhelming bombardment of crowds and angles. It's the geometry of urban life, with a theme worthy of an Edvard Munch oil painting.
Yet Brandt has more room to play, and the sprawling scene, heavy with a collapsing gravity, is humorously - or symbolically - held up by a small male figure, dwarfed by the array above him, but seemingly unaware, and standing unfettered and at ease.
These are the liberties that may be taken in the medium of photomontage, a mode of art so characteristic of contemporary art that occasionally one wonders how the artist found such vintage images.
In fact, these particular pieces were not exhibited until 40 years after their creation, and interest in them rose in the 1960s and 1970s. "Tempo, Tempo!" is the first full retrospective of these works.
While their closeness to each other in vicinity and style may seem daunting, one close look reveals valuable traces of Brandt's toil, with pencil marks, outlines and the sheer meticulous cutting that asks the viewer to play along, admiringly piecing the clever puzzle together.
