100 Artists
Margarete Marks 1899-1990
Ceramicist and painter Margarete Marks (née Heymann) was born in 1899 to a wealthy Jewish family in Cologne. Her daughter, Frances, described her exile in England as “an upper class German woman living in working class London”.
She studied painting at the College of Applied Arts in Cologne and the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf, before studying at the Weimar Bauhaus in 1920. The following year she was accepted onto a trial term at the ceramics workshop directed by Gerhard Marcks, while also attending courses taught by Georg Muche, Paul Klee and Gertrud Grunow.
Although Marks left the Bauhaus early, in autumn 1921, in somewhat unclear circumstances, its teachings had a lasting impact on her work, enabling her to absorb and synthesise various strands of modernism, and to retain a particular interest in geometric form and colour. In 1923, together with her husband, Gustav Loebenstein, Marks founded the Haël Workshops for artistic ceramics in Marwitz, near Berlin, from which her distinctive designs were exported to prestigious clients in America and the UK, including Heal’s and Liberty stores in London, thus bringing Bauhaus modernism into the British domestic sphere.
After her husband’s death in a car accident in 1928, Marks continued to run the business until 1934, when the Nazis forced her — as a Jew — to sell the factory (which had employed over 100 staff at its peak) at a price far below market value, to a member of the party. Her own works were labelled “degenerate” by the regime, and featured in the Nazi propaganda publication Der Angriff in 1934, juxtaposed against ceramics produced by Naziapproved Hedwig Bollhagen, who had taken over the factory.
Marks subsequently travelled to Palestine, visiting potteries in Jerusalem, as part of an unsuccessful attempt to relocate her business, before immigrating to Britain in 1936, helped by connections to the export manager at Heal’s store in London. Moving to Stoke-on-Trent, the centre of the UK ceramics’ industry, she initially taught at Burslem School of Art (where she held a solo exhibition in 1937) and worked for the renowned Minton Pottery, where one of her own avant-garde forms was reproduced, but she was unable to recapture her earlier commercial success, faced with a more conservative British audience.
The Bloomsbury Gallery, London held a solo exhibition of her work in 1938 and in July of the same year, one of her watercolour landscapes was featured in the final section (‘Artists now working in England’) in the Exhibition of Twentieth Century German Art, held at the New Burlington Galleries, as a riposte to the Nazi’s Degenerate Art exhibition of 1937.
Following her second marriage to Harold Marks in 1938 (whose surname she adopted), Marks founded her own studio, Greta Pottery (with studio mark ‘GP’) which she had to close in 1940.
According to her daughter, “ceramics and painting were of equal importance throughout my mother’s life”. Marks also produced silverware and designed two largescale murals for office buildings in Bradford in 1960 and 1966 (the 1960 mural has been relocated and is on view at City House, Cheapside, Bradford). She died in 1990. Her work is represented in collections, including Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, British Museum and the V&A.