As part of the theme years on Jewish life and culture in Germany and Thuringia, the Bürgel Ceramics Museum is showing works by the important ceramic artist Marguerite Friedlaender from July 8th, 2021 to September 5th, 2021 and subsequently in the Rococo castle Dornburg.

For the cosmopolitan, who was born near Lyon in France, her Jewish religion never played a decisive role, and yet it left her with the typical stamp of the twentieth century. Marguerite Friedlaender came from emancipated European Judaism and grew up in Berlin, among other places, and took her high school diploma at an English boarding school in Folkestone. This childhood already shaped her into a citizen of the world.

At the Weimar Bauhaus, she was one of the protagonists in the pottery and was the only woman to pass the journeyman's examination in the ceramic workshop. She then became the first female potter to take over the management of a university workshop at the Burg Giebichenstein/Halle art school. Here, in collaboration with the State Porcelain Manufactory in Berlin, she created icons of porcelain design with the "Halle Form". The seizure of power by the National Socialists brought a sudden turning point. She had to leave the art school and Germany and built up the pottery - "Het Kruuikje" - in Putten near Amsterdam with her husband Franz Wildenhain. In 1940, she emigrated again from the now occupied Holland to the USA. Here she played a decisive role in shaping modern American ceramics.

The exhibition provides an insight into Marguerite Friedlaender's ceramic work and also shows works that have not yet been shown to the public. Among them are individual pieces from the Bauhaus period - here, unlike her fellow students Theodor Bogler and Otto Lindig, Friedlaender was more closely connected to the traditional craft of her master craftsman Max Krehan. But the decisive factor is the impulses she sets in porcelain design at Burg Giebichenstein. Her clear forms and dignified decorative variants are fascinating. Friedlaender's ceramic work gained a new independence in Holland and even more so in the United States, where she was inspired by indigenous pottery. Her methodology and teaching, as well as her basic understanding of form, were always influenced by her training at the Bauhaus.

The accompanying catalogue to the exhibition is available for 5 euros.

The anthology »Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus: An Eyewitness Anthology ​​​​« ​​is available in English for 80 euros.