DesignerSwedish
Monica Bratt
3 active items
Monica Elisabeth Bratt was born in Stockholm in 1913, trained as a visual artist at a time when Swedish glassworks rarely looked to painters or fine artists for product design work. Her hiring at Reijmyre Glasbruk in 1937 was a departure from convention: the factory's management took a chance on a young woman with no prior industry experience, partly on the strength of a recommendation from her former teacher, the painter Otte Sköld. What followed was a collaboration that lasted more than two decades and fundamentally altered the character of one of Sweden's oldest glassworks.
Bratt's brief at Reijmyre was broad. She was given the task of building an entirely new collection, and she approached it with a clear guiding principle: to make everyday objects more beautiful without making them precious or remote. Her shapes drew directly from the physical behavior of molten glass, the natural drop-form that the material assumes when worked by hand. Rather than imposing geometry from the outside, she let the logic of the material guide the silhouette. The resulting forms were fluid, honest, and well-suited to daily use.
Colour became central to her practice at Reijmyre. She introduced a range of saturated tints at a time when much Swedish utility glass remained clear or lightly tinted, and over time the factory developed its production of ruby-red glass to meet the demand her designs created. That deep, warm red became so closely associated with Bratt's output that it functioned almost as a signature. Her tableware services, pitchers, and vases in ruby red remain the works most collectors identify with her name.
By 1952, after fifteen years as Reijmyre's principal designer, Bratt received a solo exhibition at Nordiska Kompaniet in Stockholm, the department store that served as a showcase for Swedish applied arts throughout the mid-century period. A further exhibition followed at Röhsska museet in Gothenburg. She also participated in group exhibitions on contemporary glass, both within Sweden and internationally, placing her work in conversation with the broader Scandinavian design movement that was attracting international attention during the postwar years.
Bratt left Reijmyre in 1958 due to illness, and she died in Gothenburg in 1961, aged 47. Her career was shorter than it might have been, but the work she produced between 1937 and 1958 gave Reijmyre Glasbruk a visual identity that outlasted her tenure by generations.
At Swedish auction, Bratt's glass appears regularly in the secondary market, most often at regional houses. The 71 items tracked in current auction data are dominated by glassware, reflecting the category that defined her output. Top results include a 35-part Reijmyre service at 2,201 SEK and a set of nine wine glasses at 2,200 SEK, with most lots selling as complete services or matched sets. Houses such as Gomér and Andersson in Linköping, Karlstad Hammarö AV, and Metropol in Stockholm are among the most active sellers of her work.