Fembio Special: Bauhaus women
Grete Heymann-Loebenstein
(Margarete Heymann [birth name], Margarete Heymann-Marks, Margret Marks [English-speaking world])
born on August 10, 1899 in Cologne/ Germany
died on November 11, 1990 in London/ England
German-British ceramic artist and painter
125th birthday on August 10, 2024
Biography
Grete Heymann-Loebenstein's name stands for outstanding, avant-garde ceramics and considerable entrepreneurial talent. Yet it also points to one of many inglorious chapters in Germany's dealings with its Nazi past.
INTERMEZZO IN THURINGIA
Grete Heymann-Loebenstein, born into a family of wealthy textile manufacturers and a descendant of Heinrich Heine, applied twice to study at the Bauhaus in Weimar; she was rejected both times. She attended the College of Applied Arts in her home town of Cologne and studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf before applying yet again. Her third attempt was finally successful, and the fledgling artist was able to begin her training at the Bauhaus in the fall of 1920.
She had supposedly achieved her objective, but upon completion of the obligatory preliminary course in March 1921 she found herself up against a second hurdle: her request for an apprenticeship in the ceramics workshop was denied. She was tersely informed that “no women were currently accepted in the ceramics workshop” (cited in Baumhoff, 2001, p. 129) and advised to apply for an apprenticeship in bookbinding instead. Refusing to be brushed off, Heymann-Loebenstein fought for months with master potter Gerhard Marcks and Bauhaus director Walter Gropius for admittance to the ceramics workshop. The files indicate that in the end she was accepted – albeit only on a trial basis.
“...FOR THEIR OWN SAKE AND FOR THE SAKE OF THE WORKSHOP”: GENDER CONFLICT AT THE BAUHAUS
Heymann-Loebenstein is one of the few female Bauhaus members identified to date who fought back against the regressive gender politics at the Bauhaus. In the fall of 1921, after only a year of training, she nevertheless chose to leave the art institute. We can only speculate about the reasons for her decision; the scant research into her life provides us with little information. Ulrike Müller has posited that perhaps the cosmopolitan woman — a photograph taken of Heymann-Loebenstein around 1930 shows her as a New Woman with a boyish haircut and wearing a colorful tie — simply did not fit in out in the countryside where the ceramics workshop had been set up in the stables of one of the Dornburg castles. It is also possible that she found Gerhard Marcks' anti-Semitic worldview and his artistic conservatism distressing. Regardless of whatever Heymann-Loebenstein experienced behind the high walls of workshop, her patience had in all likelihood been sorely tried by the delaying tactics that the masters continued to employ. “...(T)alented, but not suitable for the workshop ... decision postponed until the next session” (cited in Müller, 2009, p. 72) was the final entry in the files before she left.
In 1919 Gropius had emphasized in the founding manifesto that the Bauhaus would accept students “without regard to age or sex.” The decision Gropius and Marcks made around 1920/21 to staff the ceramics workshop exclusively with men thus stood in direct contradiction to this initial proclamation. Evidently — and despite her talent — Heymann-Loebenstein was deemed “not suitable for the workshop” solely on the basis of her sex. In 1923, two years after her departure, Gropius described ceramics as a craft that was “too hard for women” (cited in Baumhoff, 2001, p. 123) and justified the androcentric policy of “as few women as possible in ceramics” as “for their own sake and for the sake of the workshop” (cited in Droste, 2006, p. 40). The everyday routine at the art school was far less revolutionary than the meritocracy envisioned in 1919. Indeed, the masters were quick to remind each other that the “talent of women” was at best sufficient for “music, (and for the) decorative and ornamental” (Karl Scheffler 1908) – the bourgeoise maxim from pre-war times. The Bauhaus men believed that in any case no woman would choose to pursue art as a career. Female students were therefore pushed into the ‘women’s domains’ of weaving, bookbinding and - until 1920 – ceramics. Nevertheless, by the time the ceramics workshop was permanently closed in 1925, there had been only seven men among the 15 apprentices; Gropius and Marcks' conspiratorial, men-only approach had failed to attract a greater number of male applicants.
HAËL WORKSHOPS FOR ARTISTIC CERAMICS
In 1923 Grete Heymann-Loebenstein had just turned 24 and was newly married to Gustav Loebenstein, who held a doctorate in economics. Together with Gustav’s brother Daniel, the couple founded the Haël Workshops for Artistic Ceramics in Marwitz. Located approximately fifty kilometers northwest of Berlin and named after the initials of Heymann and Loebenstein, the company expanded rapidly. The trio worked hard and successfully to market the products by travelling from trade fair to trade fair and from exhibition to exhibition - including the epochal Breslau Werkbund exhibition “Wohnung und Werkraum” (1929). By the end of the 1920s, almost 100 people were employed in the Haël workshops and the goods were exported to Africa, Australia and South America.
Customers did not view Haël ceramics as simple objects for everyday use: the products were marketed and widely regarded as small, ultra-modern works of art. In 1924, the magazine Kunst und Kunstgewerbe, among others, praised the Haël range as artistically groundbreaking in terms of form, precision and glaze (Wendland 1924). Heymann-Loebenstein designed almost all the creations herself; they were then produced in batches using casting and turning techniques. Her first drafts were typically unpretentious and even down-to earth, but in the design process the creations became more and more unusual as a result of her passion for remarkable experimentation. Sometimes she created thick earthenware, other times wafer-thin china. Here shapes were sober and functional, there playfully curved. Some objects were glazed in bright colors such as lemon yellow, uranium red, and pitch black, others in pale monochromes. Here they were decorated with Kandinsky-like strokes of the brush, there with East Asian motifs. Haël stood for an unusually complex range of both practical and decorative ceramics: tapered tea, coffee and mocha services; opulent tableware; delicate vases; wide bowls; bulbous lamp bases; planters with protruding appendages; and candlesticks. There were also clocks and accessories such as smoking sets that could easily have been mistaken for constructivist sculptures.
The double-disk handles were without a doubt one of the company’s most striking trademarks. Heymannn-Loebenstein attached them to cups and pots in a wide variety of materials and colors, e.g. silver/alpaca and ebony and ivory. Haël ceramics were a testimony to the creativity of their designer. Wealthy customers wishing to break with the traditional –– at least as far as their china was concerned –– could feel avant-garde when they chose a Haël coffee service.
In August 1928, when Heymann-Loebenstein was just 29 years old and a mother of two, her husband and brother-in-law died in a car accident. From then on, she ran the workshops on her own. She demonstrated impressive entrepreneurial talent and steered the company safely through the Great Depression.
HAËL BECOMES HB
In September 1933, Heymann-Loebenstein's former fiercest rivals, the owners of the neighboring Velten-Vordamm earthenware factories, wrote: “The Marwitz factory must become a German company freed from the influence of non-Aryan persons” (cited in Müller, 2009, p. 74). Ten years had passed since the Haël workshops had been founded. Under Hitler, Heymann-Loebenstein’s Jewish roots meant that she now faced constant persecution in both her professional and in her private life. In March 1933, when her five-year-old son Stephan died in a fatal accident at home, she was charged with child neglect and temporarily imprisoned.
A few months later, in the summer of 1933, a second arrest loomed after two employees reported her, accusing her of “defamation and disparagement of German state authority” as well as of “inferior (...) treatment of her workers” (Hudson-Wiedenmann, 2012, p. 132).
To avoid being arrested again, Heymann-Loebenstein fled to Bornholm. Pressed for time, she found herself forced to sell the Haël workshops in April 1934. The buyer was Dr. Heinrich Schild, a member of the Nazi party and General Secretary of the German Skilled Crafts and Trades Association. The unusually low purchase price of 45,000 Reichsmarks included the factory, the kiln, molds, stock, machines, office equipment, customer files and the home. Schild appointed a friend - Hedwig Bollhagen (1907-2001) - as the new manager and the workshops were soon renamed HB Workshops for Ceramics. But it was not only Heymann-Loebenstein's initials that Schild and Bollhagen used: they continued to produce and sell almost half of the series she had designed. If in part the sales were meant to clear the stocks, the new owners were also apparently convinced that the designs would remain popular. Indeed, Heymann-Loebenstein's “Norma” service continued to roll off the production line until the 1960s.
KNOCKING DOWN AN ICON?: (NOT) COMING TO TERMS WITH THE PAST
In May 1935, one year after the sale of the Haël workshops and four months before the signing of the antisemitic and racist Nuremberg Laws, an article entitled “Jewish Ceramics in the Chamber of Horrors” was published under a pseudonym (“ran”) in the official National Socialist newspaper Der Angriff. Although no names were mentioned, ceramics by Heymann-Loebenstein and Bollhagen were shown side by side, and the article spread the fabricated story of how the factory and workers had been abandoned by the unscrupulous former Jewish owners and how it was only thanks to the new manager that the workers had been rescued. This distortion of events would remain unquestioned for decades. Among the many apparently sharing this view was the woman who rose to become East Germany’s model ceramist after 1945: Hedwig Bollhagen never convincingly distanced herself from this misrepresentation of historical events.
She was asked by cultural scientist Ursula Hudson-Wiedenmann a full 66 years after the founding of the HB workshops about any possible feelings of guilt given the fact that the company had been acquired at well below its value. Bollhagen replied that Heymann-Loebenstein had been “lucky, so to speak, ... to have found a buyer at all” (cited in Hudson-Wiedenmann, 2012, p. 129). Five years later, Bollhagen biographer Andreas Heger also resorted to euphemisms when he emphatically denied that the “chamber of horrors” – installed specifically to defame Heymann-Loebenstein – had ever even existed. In the meantime, additional evidence of the this defamation was uncovered by Hudson-Wiedenmann in 2007 during her research into the life of Heymann-Loebenstein (ibid., p. 136).
At around the same time, in the run-up to an opulent exhibition planned for Bollhagen's 100th birthday, Hudson-Wiedenmann once again encountered resistance when researching into HB's history: this time from Bollhagen's legal successors. The dispute was extended into the media even though Hudson-Wiedenmann had never questioned Bollhagen’s achievements as a ceramic artist. She explained that her sole concern had been to present the circumstances surrounding the founding of HB thoroughly and truthfully. Hudson-Wiedenmann argued convincingly that by being “less an icon” Bollhagen would gain “more humanity” (ibid., p. 130).
THREE POST-WAR BIOGRAPHIES
After the acquisition of the Haël workshops, and uninterrupted by the end of the war, the careers of both the buyer, Dr. Heinrich Schild, and his manager Hedwig Bollhagen advanced steadily. In 1945 Schild moved to the west of Germany where the former Nazi functionary then founded a new company and started a second political career as a member of the German Bundestag and the European Parliament. He was also a long-serving county commissioner for the CDU in the Oberberg district. In East Germany, Bollhagen was the sole managing director of the HB workshops. She received many awards before her passing in 2001 and she was celebrated - by no means unjustly - as one of the pioneers of German ceramic art.
Heymann-Loebenstein was forced to emigrate to Great Britain with her son Michael in 1936. Briefly employed by the prestigious, traditionalist ceramics manufacturer Minton, she called herself Margret Marks after her marriage to the university lecturer Harold Marks in 1938. She once again founded a company, Greta Pottery. However, the company did not survive the Second World War. Following the birth of her daughter, she opened a ceramics studio in London in 1945. At the same time, she returned to her beginnings and devoted more and more of her time to painting. She was never able to build on the Haël successes. Grete Heymann-Loebenstein-Marks died in London in 1990. Several monographs on Hedwig Bollhagen have been published. In contrast, there is not yet even a single comprehensive publication that does justice to Heymann-Loebenstein and to her outstanding contributions to 20th century ceramic art.
(Text from 2014; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2024)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
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