The Art of Resistance: Defending Academic Freedom since 1933 | Page 28

Margarete (Grete) Marks?German

A Refugee Artist
Compiled from material provided by Frances Marx

Cacti and Figures
Kindly donated by Frances Marx, Grete’s daughter

1955
Signed
Framed
Gouache on canvas
24 x 29.5 cm
Guide Price £430

Lot 7
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The Art of Resistance? Defending Academic Freedom

Margarete (née Heymann) was born in Cologne in 1899 to a Jewish
family. She studied painting at the College of Applied Arts in Cologne
and the Dusseldorf Academy, before entering the State Bauhaus
School of Arts in Weimar in 1920, where she studied under Paul Klee,
Georg Muche and Gertrud Grunow. Kandinsky, Feininger and Walter
Gropius were also key Bauhaus figures at that time.
Predominantly a ceramicist, she married Gustav Loebenstein and,
in 1923, the couple founded their ceramics factory Haël-Wekstatten in
Marwitz. It was allied to the Deutscher Werkbund, an association of
German craftsmen dedicated to the promotion of progressive design.
The factory was successful, employing over a hundred workers and
producing tableware and tea-ware with her distinctive constructivist
patterns and coloured glazes. They sold across Germany, as well as
being exported to the USA and England, where Fortnum & Mason and
Heal’s were important clients.
Although Grete’s first husband was killed in a car crash in 1928
and, shortly after, one of her two sons suffered a fatal accident,
she continued to run the factory until 1935 when, in a climate of
growing anti-Semitism and economic depression, she was forced to sell
the factory for a pittance. The National Socialist regime viewed her
modernist style as ‘degenerate’ and in 1936, under increasing risk,
she fled to England.
With the help of the Heal’s buyer, Harry Trethowan, she found
refuge and work with Minton’s Pottery in the industrial city of Stokeon-Trent. There she founded her own studio ‘Grete Pottery’, and met
and married her second husband Harold Marks. However, in a
conservative 1930s England more familiar with delicate and ornate
porcelain tea sets, she struggled to gain favour for her dynamic designs
and bright colours and closed the studio at the end of the war. Despite
this set back, Grete continued to develop artistically, shifting her
creativity from the world of ceramics to watercolours and oil painting.
In 1947, her watercolour landscapes were exhibited at the Ward
Eggleton Gallery in New York, where the reviewer from The New York
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