The Ceramics Workshop of the State Bauhaus in Dornburg

by Hans-Peter Jakobson, Director of the Gera Museum of Applied Art

The ceramics workshop was the only workshop of the State Bauhaus located outside Weimar. After a failed attempt to establish one in Weimar, Walter Gropius chose Max Krehan, a master potter in Dornburg near Jena who shared Gropius’s attitude toward craftsmanship, as the ideal candidate to head the Bauhaus ceramics workshop. Gropius was impressed by the unsurpassed patterns and functionality of Krehan’s unpretentious stoneware which he formed on his potter’s wheel, decorated by hand and hardened in the kiln. Starting in May 1920, it was there that an entire generation of Bauhaus students received training in the basics of traditional pottery-making. On 1 October 1920, the official Bauhaus ceramics workshop opened in the former royal stables across from the Rococo castle – one of three castles in Dornburg (located today at Max-Krehan-Str. 1). There, students and the sculptor Gerhard Marcks, a Bauhaus master of form, focused on solving form-related problems and optically unifying form and ornamentation. The students created unique vessels, based on formalistic sculptural principles, but which exhibited bizarre and even grotesque details and proportions. At this stage, the appearance of these “sculpted vessels” was more important than their actual functionality.

In preparation for the major Bauhaus Exhibition in 1923, Gropius urged all the workshops to come up with models which could be manufactured in serial production. The journeymen Otto Lindig and Theodor Bogler created prototypes for industrial production and offered them to Thuringian porcelain companies. While Bogler’s ceramic pieces, such as his “combination teapots”, seem to have something of the roughness of the drawing board, Lindig preferred a sculpted physicality with flowing contours in his pieces. When the Bauhaus left Weimar in 1925, the ceramics workshop remained in Dornburg. The Bauhaus in Dessau did not offer a course in ceramics.

We continue to remember the courage and endurance of a small group of young men and women and two forward-looking, upstanding instructors who dared to venture in new directions in ceramic-making. Despite deficiencies in the production of the pieces, their radiance and exemplary nature remain as strong as ever.  

The Bauhaus ceramic artists were able to individually convey their principles to their students. Even today, artists continue to produce handmade ceramics in the workshop in Dornburg.

Ulrich Körting
Max-Krehan-Str. 1
07778 Dornburg

phone: +49 (0) 36 42/72 24 02