Photograph by Fran Ortiz
The ceramist Marguerite Wildenhain was among the first students to enroll at the Bauhaus upon its opening in 1919. She became one of the most skilled, too, having already studied sculpture and worked as a ceramic designer prior to her arrival. Forced to abandon the school with the rise of the Nazis, she emigrated first to the Netherlands and then (in 1940) to America, where she soon set up her own pottery at Pond Farm, an artists’ colony north of San Francisco. There, Wildenhain established a pedagogical approach that was legendary for its rigor. Students would leave at the end of a summer course without a single pot in hand, having sliced through them unfired to study them in cross section, but with a lifetime’s worth of lessons in their heads.
She also propagated her ideas through writing—notably the 1962 book Pottery: Form and Expression, which defined functionalism in the medium for a generation. By the time of Objects: USA, Wildenhain was seen as a conservative figure in ceramics, known for her antipathy to expressionist tendencies in the discipline. Art historian Jenni Sorkin has provided an important corrective in her recent study Live Form, pointing to the vitality of Wildenhain’s emphasis on process over product.¹
¹ Jenni Sorkin, Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), ch. 2.