The tale of a teapot and its creator

LONDON: As teapots go, it's tiny, not much bigger than a teacup. It isn't made from precious metal, but from silver-plated brass. And the condition isn't perfect, because it is scratched and scuffed from years of use.

None of that mattered when this particular teapot came up for auction at Sotheby's in New York on Friday, and sold for a record-breaking $361,000. That's not only a record for a 20th-century teapot, but for the work of its designer, Marianne Brandt, and for anything made in the workshops of the Bauhaus, the legendary early 20th-century German art and design school.

Why was this teapot so expensive? The Bauhaus may be a famous name, but Brandt certainly isn't. Her teapot is lovely to look at, but its constructivist-inspired shape proved too complex to achieve her original objective of manufacturing it industrially. And it isn't entirely practical. The spout pours tea without dripping, but the handle is tricky to hold.

Lovely though it is, the teapot's record-breaking price has more to do with the rarity and fetishism that seduce collectors and inflate auction values, than with its merits as an object. But that's partly because the tale of this teapot - or the Model No. MT49 tea infuser, as it is officially called - is rather special.

Let's begin with the basics. The teapot was one of several prototypes designed and made by Brandt, when she was a student, and later a teacher, in the Bauhaus metal workshop. She made the original prototype in 1924, her first year in the workshop, which was then run by the charismatic Hungarian constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. The teapot sold on Friday is thought to have been among the last in the series, and to have been made in 1927.

The design was inspired by Moholy-Nagy's constructivist style. You can spot similar geometric compositions in his collages. But Brandt also strove to ensure that the teapot's form was directly related to its function: which was to become a fundamental principle of modernist industrial design. "Each individual part - lid, handle, spout and base - can be clearly read," said Christian Witt-Dörring, curator of decorative arts at the Neue Galerie in New York. "Brandt then put all of them together again by creating an abstract sculpture which, at the same time, is a teapot. The flat and spherical shapes harmonize perfectly."

A sad irony of the 20th-century design market is that designers' disappointments are often directly responsible for today's stratospheric auction prices. If the mid-century French designer Jean Prouvé had been a smarter businessman, his factory wouldn't have gone bankrupt, he'd have made more furniture, and wouldn't have been relegated to a posthumous role furnishing hedge fund lobbies. And if Brandt had managed to design a teapot that could be mass-manufactured, her MT49s wouldn't be so scarce, because there'd be original production models as well as the prototypes. Thanks to her failure, there are only thought to be seven surviving prototypes, and the one in Friday's auction was the last in private hands. All of the others are owned by museums, including the British Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, making it extremely unlikely that they'll ever come up for sale. The last to do so was bought by the Neue Galerie for $250,000 in 2002. Sotheby's auction last week was a final chance for collectors to bag one.

There was no shortage of interest, because the MT49 ticks an unusually large number of "collectible" boxes, not just scarcity. It has the fetishistic allure not only of having been made inside the Bauhaus, but of belonging to its golden age in the mid-1920s, when the director, Walter Gropius, had fired the mystical Johannes Itten, and hired Moholy to establish the school as a cradle of the modern movement. The MT49 evokes the optimism of that era. It is, as Klaus Weber, curator of the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, put it: "Bauhaus in a Nutshell."

Fashionable though modernism has become, there is still greater demand among collectors for handmade objects than for industrially produced ones. The MT49 can claim to be both, as despite Brandt's industrial ambitions, the prototypes were made by hand. The one in the British Museum even has hammer marks on its base. Brandt's design also straddles two styles. Like another 1920s icon, Eileen Gray's Bibendum chair, it is modernist with echoes of collectible Art Deco.

Then there is the allure of Brandt herself, both as one of the few women to have excelled in the man's world of design, and as a gifted, but tragic Bauhäusler. Until her arrival, women students had been forced to study ceramics or weaving. Thanks to Moholy's support, she was the first to be admitted into the male bastion of the metal workshop, only to be fobbed off with "all sorts of dull, dreary work," as she later described it.

Brandt persisted, and triumphed. She ran the workshop after Moholy left, and in 1929 quit the Bauhaus to work for Gropius's architectural office in Berlin. During the 1930s, when Gropius, Moholy and other Bauhäuslers fled Nazi Germany, she returned to her hometown of Chemnitz to look after her family.

Derided as a "decadent" Bauhäusler, she was unemployable under both the Nazis and the East German Communists after World War II. Gropius and his wife sent care parcels from their new home in the United States, but Brandt remained isolated on the icy side of the Iron Curtain until her death in 1983.

It was Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Mies van Der Rohe and the other Bauhäuslers who settled into prestigious teaching jobs in the United States, who dictated Bauhaus history, and still dominate it. Like her peers stuck in Germany, Brandt was often overlooked, until her rediscovery - sadly after her death - in the mid-1980s. Her work has since been celebrated in books and exhibitions, and her star has soared at auction. Some of her Bauhaus designs have even gone into production - though not the record-breaking MT49 teapot.

By Alice Rawsthorn
Sunday, December 16, 2007

Source: The International Herald Tribune