Vase with farmyard scene

Frans Wildenhain

1947–50 · Stoneware · The American Wing

German-born Franz Wildenhain studied at the Bauhaus, where he worked with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and also studied with Paul Klee. While there, he met his future wife, Marguerite Friedlaender, who was one of the other potters at the Bauhaus workshop in Domburg. They were married in 1930, at which time they were at the pottery workshop at the State School of Applied Art at Burg Giebichenstein, Halle. The couple left Germany when Marguerite, being Jewish, was fired from her position, and the set up a pottery workshop in the Netherlands. When they finally immigrated to the United states, they joined the artists’ colony of Pond Farm, in California, north of San Francisco. Wildenhain moved to Rochester in 1950, now separated from his wife, and became a founding faculty member of the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he likely made this vase.

Artist

Frans Wildenhain

Date

1947–50

Medium

Stoneware

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Gift of Martin Eidelberg, 2020