Marianne Brandt, Tea infuser (MT 49), 1924 / Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski / © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn

Marianne Brandt, Tea infuser (MT 49), 1924 Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, Photo: Gunter Lepkowski © VG Bild-Kunst Bonn

Marianne Brandt, Tea infuser (MT 49), 1924

Marianne Brandt already created this tea infuser at the end of her first year of studies in the Metals Workshop. In programmatic terms, it is constructed from elementary shapes typical of the Weimar period: the body of the vessel consists of a hemisphere, and the handle is a segment of a circle. Instead of the traditional ringed base, it sits on a cross, which emphasizes the pot’s main axes and also gives it a certain quality of weightlessness. The pot, only 7.5 cm high, thus looks like a sculptural implementation of compositions by László Moholy-Nagy, who headed the Metals Workshop at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928.