Marguerite Wildenhain and Pond Farm Pottery: A Bauhaus Master Potter in California

A landmark for a potter

Pond Farm Pottery, outside Guerneville, California, is a National Historic Landmark because of Marguerite Wildenhain's place in the American studio pottery movement. A master potter and a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany, she brought Bauhaus methods and ideas to the United States through her teaching, her books and the pottery she made while living there from 1942 until her death in 1985.

Training at the Bauhaus

Wildenhain was born in 1896 in Lyon, France, to a British mother and a German Jewish father, who raised his children speaking three languages so they would be citizens of the world rather than of one country. She went on to live in five countries and visit at least 47 of the 50 states. In 1919, soon after deciding to become a potter, she saw a notice for the new Bauhaus workshops.

The Bauhaus, a German design school founded by Walter Gropius, joined hands-on craft training with fine art — a response to the Industrial Revolution's lifeless mass production. Each workshop had two masters, one for technical craft and one for artistic form, because every object — a building, a tea set, a tapestry — was to be beautiful, useful and well made.

• Wildenhain was among the school's first students at Weimar, training in ceramics under master of craft Max Krehan and master of form Gerhard Marcks.
• Women faced deep bias: believing they couldn't think in three dimensions, Gropius limited the programs open to them. She worked eight- to ten-hour days, six days a week, and remembered the apprenticeship warmly.
• On finishing in 1925, she became the first woman to earn the title of Master Potter.

As Germany's politics shifted right, the Bauhaus's funding was cut, and after Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, police acting for the new Nazi government raided and closed it. It lasted only 14 years, but it shaped modern design, and its teachings lived on through its exiled students.

Twice a refugee

• 1933: as schools purged "non-Aryan" teachers, the mayor of Halle — in tears, by her account — asked her, the only Jewish teacher, to resign. She left the next day. With her husband, Frans Wildenhain, she fled to Holland, where they opened the Het Kruikje ("Little Jug") studio.
• May 1940: after seven years, she fled the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands for the United States. By then the U.S. had quotas on Jewish immigration and demanded moral affidavits, and consulates in occupied countries had closed. Born in France, she could enter; her German husband could not. He was drafted into the German army in 1943 and couldn't join her for another four years.

Pond Farm

To help Frans immigrate, she found him a teaching post at the California College of the Arts in Oakland and taught in his place for two years — coming to dislike American art education for valuing degrees over real mastery.

In 1942, friends Jane and Gordon Herr invited her to Guerneville to help found an artists' colony. Frans arrived in 1947, and in 1949 they started the Pond Farm Workshops. The workshops disbanded after three years, and by 1952 Frans had left for a teaching post at the Rochester Institute of Technology and remarried. At 56, having rebuilt her life and studio twice after fleeing the Nazis, she faced starting over once more.

Teacher and advocate

She stayed, deciding Pond Farm was her life after all, and — as she later wrote — found herself again, strengthened by what she had come through. That same year she began her own summer sessions:

• students lived in spartan housing and worked eight hours a day, with rigorous discipline and total commitment;
• she revived the Bauhaus apprentice–master bond she found missing in American art schools, and taught students as people as well as artists;
• her students included influential potters Frances Senska, Hui Ka Kwong, Dean Schwarz and Peter Deneen.

For her, excellence was never a place one arrives and rests, but a challenge renewed every day. Her work kept growing: still rooted in the Bauhaus, she took to natural glazes in the browns, blues and greens of the surrounding landscape.

She also defended American pottery. To critics who called it deficient and lacking tradition, she answered that this was its strength — room for new forms of expression drawing on the country's diversity. Her three books:

• Pottery: Form and Expression (1959);
• The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts (1973);
• That We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians (1973).

By her retirement in 1980 she had taught hundreds of students, many of whom carry on her legacy. Pond Farm Pottery was designated a National Historic Landmark in 2023.

More: the Pond Farm Pottery documentary, Wildenhain's marks and the Bauhaus.

Sources

Based on "Marguerite Wildenhain, a Life of Renewal at Pond Farm Pottery," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain; its quotations from Wildenhain's The Invisible Core are paraphrased. The article draws on the Pond Farm Pottery National Historic Landmark nomination (December 2023) and a BBC Radio 4 In Our Time episode on the Bauhaus.