16 March 2008

Barhaus - Pottery workshop


The pottery workshop was situated outside of Weimar, in Dornburg an der Saale. Starting in 1920, small groups of apprentices worked here together with the sculptor Gerhard Marcks as their artistic director and the master potter, Max Krehan. Krehan taught the basics in the crafts of turning, glazing, and firing in the production of simple utility receptacles, whose shapes and decoration remained entirely in the tradition of Thuringian farmhouse pottery. Then, Marcks enticed the advanced apprentices to try their hand at forming free, sculptural receptacle shapes.

In 1922, the journeymen Otto Lindig and Theodor Bogler started to work on the development of new prototypes for utility ceramics which could be produced in small series by slip casting, but which were equally well suited to industrial production. With his teapots, Theodor Bogler devised a totally new principle: they could be mounted together from standardized basic elements and according to a normed construction system. The aim, however, of cooperating with the ceramics industry was confined to slight attempts. In those days, only very few manufacturers were prepared to experiment with the production of unusual pieces from the Bauhaus potters, amongst them, nevertheless, being the Staatliche Porzellanmanufaktur Berlin and the Stoneware factories Velten-Vordamm.

When, in 1925, the Bauhaus in Weimar closed, no further pottery was installed in Dessau. The ceramists who had learned their trade in Dornburg - such as Theodor Bogler, Otto Lindig, and Marguerite Friedlaender - then set up their own workshops or found employment in the ceramics industry.

Source From :-www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhaus1919/werkstaetten

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