Lieselotte Kantner

Lieselotte Kantner (born November 27, 1923 in Breslau ) is a German product designer . She headed the design department of the Friesland porcelain factory in Rahling for over 20 years and designed numerous award-winning coffee and dining services .

Life

Lieselotte Kantner spent her childhood in Silesia . After the Second World War , the family fled to Thuringia . In Sonneberg she began studying fashion and textile design at the technical college for applied arts . After coming into contact with clay there, Lieselotte Kantner increasingly devoted herself to sculptural design. She completed a degree in porcelain design and painting . She then gained her first practical experience during a traineeship in a porcelain factory.

In the early 1950s she went to Berlin to the Institute for Industrial Design at the University of Applied Arts , which at that time was headed by Mart Stam . After the institute was separated from the university and renamed the Institute for Applied Arts, the tasks for the designers working there also changed. After the institute was placed under the supervision of the State Commission for Art Affairs in 1952, advising the light industry in the GDR on artistic issues relating to industrial design was the main task of the institute. As head of ceramics at the institute, Lieselotte Kantner was also temporarily responsible for the development of industrial glass design.

In 1959, Horst Bentz, the director of the Friesland ( Melitta ) porcelain factory , brought her to Varel-Rahling as a designer for porcelain , earthenware , plastic and metal . Here she was head of the design department for shape and decor in the company for over 20 years . In doing so, she consistently implemented the company's guiding principle of form - color - practical value in her designs . At first, in the early 1960s, she stayed true to the company's design tradition with her designs for the Hamburg and Vienna coffee service . At the same time, she revised the decors for already existing services that were designed by Jupp Ernst in the early 1960s. In the following time, she developed a clear and factual design language with high functionality, which was based on Scandinavian post-war design. The commercially successful tableware series Copenhagen , Stockholm , Helsinki and Oslo emerged , which were produced in several decor variants. In the first ten years of her work in Rahling, she designed eleven tableware series, which formally followed the principles of the good industrial form of the Deutscher Werkbund , but were always offered with contemporary, colorful decors.

Service Stockholm was awarded a prize at the special show Die gute Industrieform in Hanover in 1962 . In 1963 and 1965, the award for the Hamburg coffee service followed , in 1964 for the Vienna coffee service and in 1967 for the Copenhagen stoneware dinner service .

In 1970 the coffee and dining service Berlin she designed came onto the market, for which she designed 19 different decors, including Dahlem , Grunewald and Bellevue . At the height of her work in the late 1960s to mid-1970s she developed for the established tableware series of the company the Zeitgeist adjusted - sometimes very strongly colored - decors.

In 1975 Liselotte Kantner launched the Jeverland service , which is still produced today - with different decors. For the market launch of the tableware series, celebrities like the actress Liselotte Pulver were won over to advertise the tableware series. Their HappyMix service , which was introduced in 1990, is still produced today in contemporary colors .

Today, the designs for Lieselottes Kantner's dinnerware are among the design classics and are featured in numerous museums of applied arts in special and permanent exhibitions, among others. a. shown at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich , the Kunstgewerbemuseem Berlin and the Grassi Museum Leipzig . Your best-known work is probably the simple household teapot , which served as a template for the Utah teapot .

Works (selection)

• 1961: Service Stockholm, Salzburg
• 1962: Service Hamburg
• 1963: Service Vienna
• 1964: Service Oslo
• 1965: Service Copenhagen, Bangkok
• 1968: Service Amsterdam, Rome
• 1969: Service Bremen, Heidelberg
• 1970: Service Helsinki, Berlin
• 1973: Service Lindau
• 1974: Service Bückeburg, Holstein
• 1975: Service Jeverland
• 1978: Service Lugano
• 1990: HappyMix service

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mechthild Hempe: 100 years of Melitta: history of a brand company . Ed .: Melitta Group. History Office Cologne, Cologne 2008, ISBN 3-940371-12-2 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Lieselotte Kantner - portrait of a designer . In: Ceramic magazine . tape 19 . Schmid, 1967, p. 662 .
3. ↑ Gert Selle: Design history in Germany - product culture as design and experience . Du Mont, Cologne 1987, ISBN 3-7701-1927-4 , pp. 251 .
4. ↑ ^{a b} Directory of company members and friendly companies of the German Werkbund. Deutscher Werkbund eV, 1971, accessed on June 25, 2017 . 
5. ↑ ^{a b} Melitta and Friesland Porcelain - 60 years of ceramic production in Varel . Catalog accompanying the exhibition Jeverland - burned in clay . In: Maren Siems (Ed.): Catalogs and writings of the Jever Castle Museum . tape 33 . Isensee, Oldenburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-7308-1177-1 , p. 43 f .
6. ↑ Melitta and Friesland Porcelain - 60 years of ceramic production in Varel . Catalog accompanying the exhibition Jeverland - burned in clay . In: Maren Siems (Ed.): Catalogs and writings of the Jever Castle Museum . tape 33 . Isensee, Oldenburg 2015, ISBN 978-3-7308-1177-1 , p. 12 f .
7. ↑ Barbara Mundt, Susanne Netzer, Ines Hettler: Interior + Design in Germany, 1945-1960 . In: Kunstgewerbemuseum - Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Hrsg.): Inventory catalog of the Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin . tape 19 . Berlin 1993, ISBN 978-3-496-01103-3 , pp. 201 .
8. ↑ Press photos special exhibition "Blumen Flowers Fleurs". (No longer available online.) Grassi Museum, 2017, archived from the original on August 31, 2017 ; Retrieved June 26, 2017 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.