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Grete Marks

Margarete (Grete) Marks (1899-1990

Margarete Marks was born Margaret Heymann on 10th August 1899 in Cologne, Germany. She studied at the Cologne School of Arts and at Dusseldorf Academy before entering the Bauhaus School of Arts in Weimar in November 1920.

The Bauhaus School was intended to be a "consulting art centre for industry and the trades" according to its Director, Walter Gropius, and to achieve this end every student was to be trained by two teachers in every subject - an artist and a craftsperson. Margaret (Grete) Heymann’s tutors included the sculptor and painting theory teacher Johannes Itten and the designer Gerhard Marcks, who was responsible for the pottery and sculpture course. The Bauhaus ran a separate pottery workshop at Dornburg, where a master craftsman was employed. It was there that Grete learned practical pottery skills.

By 1921 Grete had left the Bauhaus to work in a pottery at Frechen and, shortly after, to teach at the Arts and Crafts School in Cologne. In 1923 she married Gustav Loebenstein and they established the Hael-Werkstatten for Artistic Ceramics Co. Ltd. at Marwitz. This company was a member of the Deutscher Werkbund, an organisation committed to progressive design.

The factory was successful, employing one hundred and twenty workers at its height, and producing simple geometric forms for tableware and teaware with coloured glazes. Wares were sold across Germany, the USA and England, with the London department store, Heals, importing her ware. In 1928 Gustav Loebenstein was killed in a car accident, leaving Grete a widow with young sons.

Grete continued to run the factory but the worsening economic conditions in Germany, combined with increasing hostility towards Jews by the Nazis, made life difficult and dangerous for Grete and her sons. She ceased production in 1932 and in 1935 her factory was forcibly purchased from her by the National Socialists. She decided to flee Germany. Ambrose Heal, whose department store had regularly stocked Grete’s ware, helped her to make the journey to England and she arrived with a one month visa, during which time she had to find a job if she and her sons were to stay in the country.

Grete was advised to come to Stoke-on-Trent and seek the help of Gordon Forsyth who was Art Adviser to the Pottery Manufacturers’ Federation and Superintendent of Art Education in the city. He arranged for her to hold a small exhibition at Burslem School of Art and also to teach there while she sought employment within the industry. Within a few months Mintons offered Grete the opportunity to run an independent studio within their factory, designing her own shapes and patterns to be produced by Mintons under the backstamp Greta Pottery at Minton. Although her designs were bought by Heals and by Fortnum & Mason, Minton decided that they were not commercially successful and after six months, and some conflicts between herself and the art director, her contract was ended.

In 1938, Grete rented an old tile works, the Summer Street Pottery in Stoke, and then space at Goss’s Falcon Works. Here she bought in unglazed wares from other manufacturers (such as Goss and Wedgwood), decorating and glazing them to her own designs. She used soft matt and semi-matt glazes and simple painted decoration in muted colours with the mark GP for Grete Pottery

In addition to her own studio, Grete was involved in free-lance design work for other potteries. For Foley China she produced printed designs picked out in hand painted enamels. For Ridgways of Shelton she produced a range of teawares in severe geometric forms and matt glazes, many of which were based on the wares that she had been producing in Germany in the early 1930s.

It was while she was working in Stoke-on-Trent that Grete met her second husband, Harold Marks, an extra-mural tutor for Oxford University working with the Workers’ Educational Association, and they were married in 1938. The outbreak of war the following year brought Grete Pottery and her freelance work to an end.

The Marks moved to the Staffordshire Moorlands and Grete concentrated on her painting while Harold was in the army. In 1945 they moved to London where she continued to paint, and also began to make studio pottery and pottery pictures in her own home, combining specially made pieces with broken pottery.

It is perhaps indicative of the conservative attitudes of the Stoke-on-Trent pottery manufacturers that no-one took advantage of the services of this well-trained European designer with her experience of modern German industrial production.

Grete Marks died in London in November 1990, aged 91.

COLLECTION DETAILS

In 1984 Grete and Harold Marks contacted this museum offering a gift of some of Grete’s pottery from her years in Stoke-on-Trent. Since then both the Ceramics Section and the Arts Section have acquired works by Grete, from her period in Germany to the late 1940s.

FURTHER READING

BUCKLEY, C. Potters and Paintresses: Women Designers in the Pottery Industry 1870-1955, The Women’s Press, 1990

BUCKLEY, C. Women and Modernism : a Case Study of Grete Marks (1899-1990) in SEDDON, J. and WORDEN, S. Women designing. University of Brighton, 1994

HALFPENNY, P. Greta Pottery, Northern Ceramic Society Journal, volume 8, 1991, pp.61-72

Revised ST Feb 2000