Tea Service: Tea Infuser (Pot)

This rare silver tea service was designed and made during designer Marianne Brandt's time at the Bauhaus, a famous modern German art and design school. This and a smaller version of Brandt's tea pot, designed at the same time, were widely praised for their simplicity of form and practicality of construction: the push-on lid placed to the right, away from the spout, did not drip (unlike the usual hinged lids on most metal teapots) and the wood knob and handle grip on the hinged bow-shaped silver handle were heat resistant. The combination of geometric shapes—cylinders, spheres, and hemisphere—in this tea service is closely related to the Constructivist paintings and prints made by Brandt's mentor Moholy-Nagy and also reflects the abstractions of other Bauhaus teachers such as Josef Albers (his later Homage to the Square paintings are also in the Smart Museum's collection). The concentration on form rather than decoration was intended to produce designs suitable for industrial production, but early Bauhaus designs such as this one were actually handmade and therefore remain in the tradition of costly craft-based metalworking.