Artist of the day: Artist of the day, October 18: Margarete Heymann, a German ceramic artist (#815)

Friday, October 18, 2019

Artist of the day, October 18: Margarete Heymann, a German ceramic artist (#815)

Margarete Heymann (1899 –1990), also known as Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein , was a German ceramic artist of Jewish origin and a Bauhaus student. In 1923 she founded the Haël Workshops for Artistic Ceramics at Marwitz that she had to close in 1933 and settled in Jerusalem. She moved to Britain in 1936 and continued her work, becoming world famous as “Greta Pottery”. Her finest work is considered to be from her working period in Germany.

Heymann studied at the Cologne School of Arts and at Dusseldorf Academy before entering the Bauhaus School of Arts in Weimar in November 1920. In 1923, she founded the Haël Workshops for Artistic Ceramics at Marwitz with her husband Gustav Loebenstein and his brother Daniel, where she manufactured her Modern ceramic designs. The company employed 120 people and exported its works to London and America. In August 1928, Gustav Loebenstein and his brother were killed in a car accident. Grete Heymann-Loebenstein, who was at the time the mother of two young children, continued to run the business; in 1930 she was able to put a new kiln into operation. However, the Haël Workshops, together with the porcelain and ceramics industry as a whole, suffered a severe drop in sales and recorded heavy losses.

Around 1 July 1933, Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein closed the business. In order to keep the jobs of the workers, the Director of the stoneware factory Vordamm (which continued to exist in the place of the Velten-Vordamm stoneware factory which had gone bankrupt in 1931) took up negotiations and, by October 1933, had arrived at a preliminary agreement for re-establishment of the company on the basis of a pro-rata share capital of 40,000 Reichsmarks. She broke off the negotiations and tried instead to set up a new company in Jerusalem—in October 1933, however, it became clear that the project there was not making any progress and she gave up the idea in November of the same year.

Nora Herz heard of these events at an early stage and she prepared her friend Hedwig Bollhagen for Loebenstein's premature return from Palestine and the possible resumption of negotiations—in order to keep the jobs, for herself and for the others affected by the bankruptcy and closure.

Margarete Heymann emigrated to England in 1936, initially settling in Stoke-on-Trent. She was able to move to England because of the assistance of Heals, whose London store had previously sold her work. She was able to find work in Stoke-on-Trent but the traditional potters there failed to take advantage of knowledge of modern design and manufacture. It was Mintons who decided after six months that her work was commercial. She continued to rent her own studios where she bought other peoples designs which she decorated.[3] She later married the English educator Harold Marks, in London and in Staffordshire she painted and continued to experiment with pottery made from broken shards.

In 2012 the Keramik-Museum Berlin exhibited an overview of her work for the Haël Workshops for Artistic Ceramics, which was followed by an exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Her work was considered degenerate by the Nazis: In an article which appeared on 22 May 1935 in the National Socialist magazine Der Angriff [The Attack], the ceramics designs were described as being degenerate art and of an inferior standard.

Her lack of success as a designer has been interpreted to be the result of her "gender, geography, genre and timing" conspiring against her. Marks story and one of her vases which is now in the British Museum was chosen by Neil MacGregor as the basis of a radio programme in Germany: Memories of a Nation - a history of Germany.

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