The Founding Appointment
Gerhard Marcks was among the first three artists Walter Gropius brought to the Bauhaus in 1919, alongside Lyonel Feininger and Johannes Itten. Trained as a sculptor with roots in Expressionism and a commitment to direct material engagement, Marcks embodied the early school’s premise that fine art and handwork should be taught together rather than separated into different institutions. Gropius assigned him Form Master of the ceramics workshop when it was established in 1920.
The workshop was not in Weimar itself. Gropius relocated it to Dornburg an der Saale, a small town about twenty kilometres away, where an old stable building could be adapted for kilns and potters’ wheels and local clay was available. Max Krehan, an experienced local potter, served as Werkmeister, handling technical instruction while Marcks provided artistic direction. The two worked alongside each other at Dornburg for five years. Students including Otto Lindig, Theodor Bogler, and Marguerite Friedlaender passed through the workshop and developed work that extended its reach.
The Dornburg Workshop
The ceramics workshop produced functional stoneware: vessels, tableware, pitchers, bowls. The forms were simple and geometrically clear, suited to the hand and to daily use, with the material — clay, glaze, fire — evident rather than disguised. Around 1923, the workshop shifted from the potter’s wheel toward ceramic casting as a method for producing prototypes suited to industrial replication, an alignment with the school’s growing interest in connecting workshop practice to manufacture. The output was not experimental in a primarily formal sense; it was careful, skilled, and oriented toward objects that could be used.
Marcks’s own work at Dornburg was primarily sculpture. He maintained a studio in the workshop complex and continued producing wooden and ceramic figures throughout the five years. His most noted piece from this period is Adam (1925), worked on in the Dornburg studio. He was clear about his priorities: direct contact with materials, resistance to formalism, making as the ground of artistic thought. In letters to Gropius, he argued that the Bauhaus should remain a workshop in practice and not drift toward a school model in which ideas replaced objects.
1925
When the Bauhaus relocated to Dessau in 1925, the ceramics workshop did not follow. The school was rebuilding in an industrial city with a new building and a new direction; pottery, along with sculpture and woodcarving, was among the workshops discontinued in the transition. Marcks was the only Form Master from the Weimar period not invited to continue in Dessau. Max Krehan died in 1925, ending the Dornburg partnership. Marcks went on to teach sculpture at the Burg Giebichenstein School of Applied Arts in Halle.
The Dornburg workshop operated for five years and produced a body of work that represented the Bauhaus’s genuine early investment in craft as a serious discipline equal to fine art. Its closure marked not a failure but a change in the school’s direction — a decision in 1925 to become something different from what it had been in 1919. Marcks represented the earlier version, and his departure was a consequence of the distance between those two models of what the school was supposed to be doing.