Francesco Ciaponi analyzes the work of designer and artist Marianne Brandt, focusing on her use of collage and photomontage as instruments of political critique aimed at revealing the artificial nature of the construction of the female body.
19 may 2025
In 1928, Marianne Brandt wrote a letter to László Moholy-Nagy, her mentor at the Bauhaus, in which she expressed her disillusionment with the academic environment and the growing industrialization of design.
“I don’t want to just design objects for a world that doesn’t belong to me—I want to deconstruct this world and rebuild it in my own way,” she declared.
This tension between creation and deconstruction lies at the very core of her work, especially in the photomontages she produced during the 1920s and 1930s—a visual body of work far less known than her lamps and teapots, yet still far more radical today.
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In 1928, Marianne Brandt wrote a letter to László Moholy-Nagy, her mentor at the Bauhaus, in which she expressed her disillusionment with the academic environment and the growing industrialization of design.
“I don’t want to just design objects for a world that doesn’t belong to me—I want to deconstruct this world and rebuild it in my own way,” she declared.
This tension between creation and deconstruction lies at the very core of her work, especially in the photomontages she produced during the 1920s and 1930s—a visual body of work far less known than her lamps and teapots, yet still far more radical today.
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Brandt’s Photomontages in the History of Collage
The technique of photomontage had already been explored by artists such as John Heartfield, Raoul Hausmann, and Hannah Höch, but Brandt approached it with an almost engineering-like precision.
Her photomontages are anything but chaotic: each element is placed with near-mathematical rigor, as if the final image were an industrial object in itself—a prototype of a new vision.
Works like Our Unnerving City (1926) or Ohne Titel (1930) employ advertising imagery, fashion photography, and urban landscapes to construct visions that seem to foreshadow the iconography of dystopian science fiction.
In a sense, Brandt anticipates cyberpunk: her fragmented bodies, hybridized with technology, evoke the worlds of Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell—decades before these imaginaries entered the mainstream.
An Aesthetic of Fragmentation and Social Critique
In Marianne Brandt’s work, collage is far from a mere aesthetic exercise—it is a deliberate political strategy. At a time when the image of women was being constructed and commodified through advertising and mass media, her photomontages break down and reassemble that image, exposing its artificial and manufactured nature.
The female figure in Brandt’s compositions is never passive; rather, it becomes a contested space where the forces of modernity, technology, the female body, and social control collide. Her work reframes the body not as an object of desire, but as a site of resistance and transformation.
This approach resonates even more powerfully today, in an age dominated by social media and digital image manipulation. If in the 1920s women’s bodies were shaped by cinema and advertising, today they are filtered and reshaped through Instagram effects, cosmetic surgery, and artificial intelligence.
Brandt had already sounded the alarm: every image is a political act, and the struggle over representation is far from over.
The Relevance of Her Work Today
Today, her collages find an unexpected continuity in post-internet aesthetics, glitch art, and subversive memes that deconstruct dominant communication. Her method of disassembling and reconstructing the image is the same one we see in remix culture, deepfakes, and the proliferation of hybrid aesthetics that define our contemporary visual landscape.
But there is a fundamental difference: Brandt worked with a critical awareness that is often lacking today. Her work was not just a formal game, but an act of resistance. In her vision, photomontage was not just a way to create new images, but to expose the workings of visual power.
Today, in a world where we are constantly bombarded by manipulated images, her work reminds us that it is not enough to consume images—we must learn to read them, deconstruct them, and understand their mechanisms.
Marianne Brandt is not only a pioneer of design but an early hacker of visual language. And in an era where image manipulation has become the norm, her work has never been more necessary.
Franceso Ciaponi is a professor of the History of Print and Publishing and the founder of the EdF Research Center. Here his bio.