Marguerite Wildenhain: A Diary to Franz

by Dean L. Schwarz, Editor
South Bear Press, Decorah, Iowa, 2005
Unpaged [154 pp.], illus. col. and b/w. Paper, $39.95
ISBN: 0-9761381-1-5.

Available from South Bear Press, 2248 South Bear Road, Decorah, Iowa 52101 for $43.95 postpaid, or inquire at <dschwarz50@hotmail.com>

Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern Iowa, USA

ballast@netins.net

I myself gained immeasurably from reading this book, in part, because it is about the psychological life of a French-German ceramic artist named Marguerite Wildenhain, who was one of the first students at the Weimar Bauhaus. She was also one of my teachers, as was this book’s compiler, American potter, Dean Schwarz. Together, in the summer of 1964, Schwarz and I were students at Wildenhain’s Bauhaus-styled pottery school, called Pond Farm, near Guerneville, California. While I was never a serious potter, Schwartz returned to work with Wildenhain year after year, introduced other students to her methods and philosophy, and then, founded his own influential summer school, called South Bear School, near Decorah, Iowa. As Wildenhain aged, she advised that students study at South Bear before applying to work with her. As a consequence, today, Decorah’s nearby Luther College houses the largest U.S.-based collection of Wildenhain-related artifacts and research documents called "The Pond Farm Collection," among them dozens of original works by Wildenhain, the German sculptors Gerhard Marcks (her form master at the Weimar Bauhaus), Franz Wildenhain (to whom she was married before he resettled at RIT), and many of her students. Another major reason for this book’s significance is that virtually everything in it has not been previously published.

Let me explain: Pond Farm School, which has since become part of California’s Austin Creek State Park, was actually established through the efforts of Gordon Herr, a Bay-area architect who for years had wanted to set up an artists’ colony in Northern California. With that in mind, he traveled to Europe in early 1939, to seek out other artists whose work and attitudes might be compatible with those of his wife Jane and himself. While in Holland, he stayed for a week in a pottery shop in Putten called Het Kruike (’little jug"), which was owned by the Wildenhains. Herr convinced the couple that they should emigrate to California and join his anticipated colony. As it happened, Marguerite (a French citizen of Jewish ancestry) was able to set sail for the U.S. in early 1940, while her husband (a German citizen) was not allowed to leave. As a result, the Wildenhains were physically separated for seven years and, during the first months of that period, had no contact of any kind. Marguerite did not know Franz’s whereabouts, nor even if he had survived. As it turned out, he had been forced to join the German Army. During part of that time, especially as she traveled slowly across the U.S. en route to California, she made drawings and letter-like entries to Franz in a diary of sorts. This book is the first publication of those pages, with her text translated into English. Throughout, her words are supplemented by wonderfully rich illustrations——vintage drawings and photographs, examples of her pottery, specimens from their rock collection, and a suite of commemorative woodblock prints by Luther’s David Kamm. A conspicuous highlight is a stunning sepia photograph of a beautiful and exquisitely dressed Marguerite in 1929. The richness of her diary is largely because of her candor in describing what and who she meets: for example, her drawing and description of Niagara Falls or her disgust in response to a visit to the School of Design in Chicago of former Bauhaus teacher Laszlo Moholy-Nagy ("I thanked him, but I was glad to get out of that joint. A real proletariat of the arts.")

Artists, designers, art historians, women’s studies scholars, and historians in general will find this book of value. In addition, any readers who have been in love or married to someone from whom they’ve become separated, for whatever reason, should find themselves drawn into the painful details of the text.

(Reprinted by permission from Ballast Quarterly Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, Winter 2005.)