Teapot
Design Date 1930
Designer Grete Marks (1899-1990, German-English)
Manufacturer Haël-Werkstätten Artistic Ceramics Company (1923-1935), Marwitz, Germany
Media porcelain
Dimensions 5 1/8 x 10 x 6 3/4 inches
Margarete Heymann-Löbenstein Marks was born Cologne, Germany in 1899. She attended the Bauhaus from 1920 to 1921. This teapot uses some of the simple forms that were at the center of Bauhaus design: the circle, the triangle and the square. The set was produced in other colors including blue, brown and turquoise. Her teapots were more popular outside of Germany than within. France, England and the United States were the primary importers of Marks’s pieces. With her husband, Marks founded a pottery company, the Haël Werkstätten für Kunstlerische Keramik (Haël Workshop for Artistic Ceramics), near Berlin in 1923. During the Third Reich, Nazi propaganda declared Marks’s pottery “degenerate,” in part because of its radically modern design, and in part because she was Jewish. In 1936 Marks was forced to sell her pottery company and move to England to avoid the worst of Nazi Germany.
ON VIEW in Bauhaus Gallery 5
Markings Bottom stamped in black, "Germany / 181 / 4 / 6 /" and manufacturer's "HW" logo mark
Credit Line Collection Kirkland Museum of Fine & Decorative Art
Accession Number 2010.0109
