Marguerite Friedlaender

Marguerite Friedlaender , also Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain , (born October 11, 1896 in Écully near Lyon , † February 24, 1985 in Guerneville , California ), was a German-English ceramist and porcelain designer. She learned in the ceramics workshop of the Bauhaus and taught at the Burg Giebichenstein Art College in Halle , where her creative influence can still be felt today. Because of her Jewish origins , she emigrated to the Netherlands in 1933 and later to the USA .

Life

Descending from a Franco-German father (Theodor Friedlaender) and an English mother (Rose Calmann) with Thuringian roots and raised in France and from 1910 in Berlin, her origins determined her lifestyle, she was a world citizen . In 1914 she passed her high school diploma at an English boarding school in Folkestone. She studied wood carving and drawing at the Berlin School of Applied Arts . From 1916/17 she was a decorative normal in a Rudolstadt porcelain factory. From 1919 to 1925 Marguerite Friedlaender was enrolled at the Staatliches Bauhaus , and after completing the preliminary course, she initially completed an apprenticeship in the ceramics workshop at the Bauhaus in Dornburg / Saale under form master Gerhard Marcks and master craftsman Max Krehan . She then worked in the ceramic workshop in Dornburg until 1925. In 1926 she passed her master craftsman examination in Halle (Saale), and in early 1928 she spent three months studying in Höhr-Grenzhausen.

“Hallesche Form” vase External web link Sotheby's, 2007

From 1925 to 1933 she worked at the Burg Giebichenstein School of Applied Arts in Halle (Saale) , designing and teaching as head of the ceramics department. As Germany's first female master potter in such a position, she developed her own ceramic range from 1926 onwards. From 1929 she headed the newly established porcelain workshop and handed over the ceramics workshop management to her husband Franz Rudolf Wildenhain. At the same time, the collaboration with the Staatliche Porzellanmanufaktur Berlin (KPM) began , which made its technical know-how available to the Kunstgewerbeschule and thus promoted Friedlaender's experiments. For KPM she designed a. a. In 1929 the coffee, mocha and tea service "Hallesche Form", which was presented in 1930 at the Leipzig trade fair .

In addition to the “Halle” vase series, she designed five sets. Friedlaender developed a total of 59 individual forms for KPM. White porcelain with a functional, modern design as tableware was considered a novelty at that time, although Friedlaender's KPM tableware "Hallesche Form" was also decorated on the market, most successfully with the "Goldringe" decor designed by Trude Petri in 1931.

Wilhelm Nauhaus wrote about this collaboration with KPM : “In the short period from January 1930 to January 1933, the Staatliche Porzellanmanufaktur Berlin brought out several tea and coffee sets, vases and tins of unsurpassed artistic and technical quality that made the old manufactory famous newly established and carried rapidly across continents. The artist, who was forced to emigrate in 1933, was served tea made from Friedländer porcelain at a company soon after she had set foot in America, without the host having any idea of ​​the connection between guest and dishes ” .

In 1930 she married the ceramist Franz Rudolf Wildenhain , also a student of the Dornburg Bauhaus workshop. Immediately after the Nazis came to power , she was dismissed under pressure from the National Socialists because of her Jewish origins. She left Halle and first emigrated to the Netherlands . The already developed designs of the “airplane cup”, the saucer of which was shaped as an open circular ring (referred to by Friedlaender himself as the “ring mocha cup”), was no longer in production at KPM At the beginning of the war, production continued, but from 1933 without naming the Jewish designer. In Putten near Amersfoort and Amsterdam, she set up the private pottery studio "Het Kruikje" (The Mug), which she ran with her husband. In 1937 the government of the Netherlands commissioned her to make a tea set for the De Sphinx factory in Maastricht. “Five O'Clock” was her last design of its kind. Although this tableware was awarded a silver medal at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937 , it did not go into production.

In 1940 Marguerite Friedlaender went to the USA, forcibly without her husband. From 1940 to 1942 she was director of the ceramic workshop at the College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland . From 1942 to 1949 she worked at the Pond Farm artists' colony in Guerneville, California. In 1949 Marguerite Friedlaender and Franz Rudolf Wildenhain separated , who had only been able to follow her to the USA in 1947. The "Pond Farm" was dissolved. Then she founded her own ceramic workshop, the "Pond Farm Pottery", in which she worked as a school teacher until her death and, based on the ceramic forms of the Dornburg Bauhaus pottery, developed a European tradition of pottery in the USA. The use of elementary forms and their balanced composition to form overall shapes characterize both her studio ceramics and her designs for series production. In addition to her ceramic work, Marguerite Friedlaender was also active as a journalist, gave lectures at numerous congresses, wrote magazine articles and published her memoirs.

At the beginning of 2013, the Bröhan Museum dedicated an exhibition to her (as well as Margarete Heymann-Marks and Eva Stricker-Zeisel ) as part of the Berlin Theme Year 2013 - Destroyed Diversity .

In the art gallery “Talstrasse” in Halle (Saale) from November 18, 2018 to February 24, 2019, the exhibition “We go to Halle” on Marguerite Friedlaender and Gerhard Marcks was shown, a contribution to the Bauhaus anniversary in 2019. Then there was the exhibition from March 7, 2019 to June 30, 2019 in the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus Bremen.

The former Second Integrated Comprehensive School in the city of Halle (Saale) has been called Marguerite Friedlaender Comprehensive School since autumn 2019.

Portrait

• Charles Crodel : The potter Marguerite Friedlaender , Berlin Secession, 64th Exhibition: Artists among themselves. Painting. Plastic. March / April 1931, No. 9 (Art Service Publications No. 57)

Works (selection)

From 1929 to 1933 for KPM:

• "Halle" vase series (in parts back in production since 2000)
• Coffee, mocha and tea service "Hallesche Form" (still partially in production today)
• "Burg Giebichenstein" dinner service
• Hotel crockery "Hermes" (for Halle-Leipzig Airport)
• Airplane cup ("Ringmoccatasse"), 1933, (2000 re-edition in limited edition by the Meissen porcelain factory )

Own writings

• Wildenhain: Pottery, Form and Expression (Pacific Books, Publishers, Palo Alto, California 1962), ISBN 0-87015-238-6 .
• Marguerite Wildenhain: The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts (Pacific Books, Publishers, Palo Alto, California 1973) ISBN 0-87015-201-7 .
• Marguerite Wildenhain:… that We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians (South Bear Press, Decorah, IA, 1979) ISBN 0-89279-025-3 .
• Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain: A life for ceramics. The craftsmanship of the great ceramist of the Bauhaus. Verlag Neue Keramik, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-9802217-0-9 .
• Ruth R. Kath, ed .: The Letters of Gerhard Marcks and Marguerite Wildenhain, 1970–1981: A Mingling of Souls. (Iowa State University Press and Luther College, Iowa 1991) ISBN 0-8138-0504-X .

literature

• Katja Schneider: Ceramics from the Burg Giebichenstein School of Applied Arts (1925–1933), works by Marguerite Friedlaender, Franz Rudolf Wildenhain and Gerhard Marcks. In: Keramos. Journal of the Society of Ceramic Friends, Issue 118, October 1987, pp. 13-64.
• Margarete Jarchow: Berlin Porcelain in the 20th Century / Berlin Porcelain in the 20th Century. Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-496-01054-1 .
• Klaus Weber (Ed.): Ceramics and Bauhaus. Bauhaus Archive, Berlin 1989, ISBN 3-891-81404-6 (exhibition catalog).
• Renate Luckner-Bien: lines of tradition. A contribution to the history of ceramics. In: Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle (ed.): 75 years of Burg Giebichenstein 1915–1990: Contributions to history. Selected and introduced by Renate Luckner-Bien. Halle / Saale 1990, pp. 134–148 (exhibition catalog).
• Rita Gründig: ceramics and vessel design. In: Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg Halle; Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe; Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle (ed.): The Halle art school from the beginning to the present. Halle / Saale and Karlsruhe 1993, pp. 245–282 (exhibition catalog).
• Torsten Bröhan, Thomas Berg (eds.): Design Classics, Taschen, Cologne 2001, ISBN 3-8228-6876-0 , pp. 121–123.
• Katja Schneider: Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain: From the Bauhaus to the Pacific. In: Britta Jürgs (Ed.): From salt shakers to automobiles: Designerinnen, pp. 52–71, Aviva Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-932338-16-2 .
• Hans-Peter Jakobson, Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain. Give shape to your own ideas. Museum of Applied Arts Gera 2009. (exhibition catalog)
• Renate Luckner-Bien: "There is a bigger home ..." About Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain. In: KeramikMagazin Europa, 3/2009, pp. 8–13.
• Claudia Kanowski and Ingeborg Becker: Avant-garde for everyday life: Jewish women ceramists in Germany 1919–1939. Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, Margarete Heymann-Marks, Eva Stricker-Zeisel. Verlag Bröhan-Museum, Berlin 1st edition 2013, ISBN 978-3941588103 .
• Dean Schwarz, Géraldine Schwarz (Ed.): Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus. An Eyewitness Anthology. Thuringia's Dornburg and Weimar Bauhaus, Burg Giebichenstein, het kruikje, the Herr Family, Pond Farm workshops, Pond Farm pottery, Luther College, South Bear School and related institutions - a pottery tradition continues. South Bear Press, Decorah IA 2007, ISBN 978-0-9761381-2-9 .
• Charlotte Fiell; Peter Fiell (Ed.): Design of the 20th Century, Taschen, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-8365-4107-7 , p. 257.
• Katja Schneider, Castle in Exile I. Marguerite Friedlaender. In: Modernism in the workshop. 100 years Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. Moritzburg Art Museum Halle (Saale) 2015, pp. 88–92 ISBN 978-3-86105-100-8 .
• We're going to Halle. Marguerite Friedlaender and Gerhard Marcks, edited by Matthias Rataiczyk for the art gallery “Talstrasse”, Halle (Saale), 2018, with texts by Arie Hartog, Renate Luckner-Bien, Katja Schneider, Mirjam Verhey. ISBN 978-3-932962-96-7 .
• Annette Bußmann: Friedlaender-Wildenhain, Marguerite, b. Friedlaender. In: Eva Labouvie (Ed.): Women in Saxony-Anhalt, Vol. 2: A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the 19th century to 1945. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 2019, ISBN 978-3-412-51145-6 , p. 158-162.
• Mienke Simon Thomas, Giebichenstein Castle in Halle. From the Bauhaus to the Netherlands via the Burg. In: netherlands ↔ bauhaus. pioneers of a new world. Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen 2019, pp. 91–100, ISBN 978-90-6918-310-7 .
• Hans-Peter Jakobson, Bauhaus ceramics. ( Online ).
• Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 17-19.

Web links

• Literature by and about Marguerite Friedlaender in the catalog of the German National Library
• Bauhaus Collection , accessed on March 26, 2015
• Exhibition at Bröhan Museum , accessed on March 26, 2015
• Annette Bussmann: Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain . In: FemBio. Women's biography research (with literature references, links and quotations)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Annette Bußmann: Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain in: Frauen in Sachsen-Anhalt 2. A biographical-bibliographical lexicon from the 19th century to 1945, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 2019, ISBN 978-3-412-51145-6 with many other references.
2. ↑ Katja Schneider: Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain: From the Bauhaus to the Pacific . In: Britta Jürgs (Hrsg.): From salt shakers to automobiles: Designerinnen , p. 52, Aviva Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-932338-16-2 .
3. ↑ Margarete Jarchow: Berlin Porcelain in the 20th Century , Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1988, ISBN 3-496-01054-1 , p. 42 f.
4. ↑ Katja Schneider: Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain: From the Bauhaus to the Pacific . In: Britta Jürgs (Hrsg.): From salt shakers to automobiles: Designerinnen , p. 52, Aviva Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-932338-16-2 .
5. ^ Wilhelm Nauhaus: "Die Burg Giebichenstein", o. P.
6. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from July 11, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) 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. Airplane cup in catalog, accessed March 26, 2015. 
7. ↑ http://www.broehan-museum.de/infoseiten/a_avantgarde.html , accessed on March 26, 2015.
8. ↑ New name for IGS II: From the 2019/20 school year Marguerite Friedlaender School . focus.de. January 3, 2019. Retrieved December 3, 2019.