After studying art in Weimar and developing a relationship with the artist Robert Michel, who would become her husband and part-time collaborator, Bergmann-Michel was associated with the Bauhaus for a short time before moving on to more Dada-inflected endeavors. The couple hosted Dada meetings and worked on photo collages at their home in Vockenhausen, near Frankfurt.

In Bergmann-Michel’s abstract, constructivist drawings, geometric components become vaguely dystopian, precarious mechanisms that suggest a metaphor for civilization gone awry. She might be all but forgotten if Man Ray, Duchamp, and Katherine S. Dreier hadn’t included her and Michel’s work in the Société Anonyme, the organization they founded in 1920 to show avant-garde...