My quest to find Margarets for my Pinterest Board led me to an artist who had a proliferation of names, variously Margaret, Margit, Margarete, or Grete, and Heymann then Loebenstein(her first husband who was killed in a car accident in 1928), then Marks(her second husband). It took me awhile to realize this was all the same person. A name becomes so entwined with identity, yet she is called by so many, depending on the author. Her final name seems to have been Grete Marks, so that is what I will call her.
Grete Marks was born Margarete Heymann in Germany in 1899, and studied at the Bauhaus school of design, where she was pressured by the administration to be a weaver rather than a potter, because she was a woman. Marks prevailed, and when she married Gustav Lobenstein, they opened a pottery together. When Lobenstein died, she took over the company herself, but had to flee Germany. She was Jewish, and the Nazi’s called her work “degenerate,” and forced her to sell the factory at a loss in 1934. A former client brought her to England, with her two sons, where again Marks worked The Potteries at Stoke-on-Trent. Her singular vision, and imaginative shapes did not sit well with the traditional ceramics industry in English countryside, and the Pottery let her go.
When you think of “tea set” from 1930’s England, these are not what come to mind. No flowers. No gilded edges. Look at those delicious colors below, luminous yellow, with robin’s egg blue glowing from the inside.
Marks moved to London and continued to make pottery, and also started painting. According to Collection Soehlke, she also made “pottery pictures” with pieces of broken pottery. I couldn’t find any photos of her pottery pictures, and the mosaic artist in me wants to see what they looked like, a manifestation of a desire to reunite a fractured career and life.
Interview with Frances Marks, Daughter of Grete Marks
Fabulous series about acquiring a Grete Marks Tea Service for a Museum, by Mel Buchanan
Her shapes and colors are so modern feeling. I just love these! And what a clever idea for a Pinterest board!
I’m the daughter of magret marks [another spelling she used to sign her paintings.]She did make mosaics i have many of them in england. frances
Thank you for writing! I love knowing more about the people I write about.
I visited your mother’s studio in South London as a boy in the 50s. She was a good friend of Terrese “Resi” Ganz, who looked after me as a child. My mother, Mona Radcliffe, was a potter based in Hastings, where your mother visited (again in the 50s) and painted some scenes there. She gave me the most fabulous watercolour sketch of the fishing boats on the beach. My mother was either given, or purchased, a magnificent mosaic by her of Arab women collecting water from a well. I had it for many years and now it belongs to my daughter.
I spent the past week with “Peter Lob”, who is my cousin.
I hope you are keeping well.
Wow, what a treasure, all from poking around, looking for your name. I love her sense of style and color, and I never would have known her or her story if not for you.
I am awed by the stories I am finding by looking for something as random as one name. I’m glad to share them.
Very interesting story! An avant garde artist that lived through personal tragedy and WWII. I can’t imagine the struggle to be creative and endure such times.
Fascinating story. She was ahead of her time in her design. I love that plate and pitcher. So interesting to look at.