Bauhaus Legacy

Germany, 1919. A young artist named Marguerite Friedlander (later Marguerite Wildenhain) was among the first students to join the newly formed Bauhaus School, a movement which set out to unite craft and fine art into a new concept: design. In 1925, Marguerite became the first woman in history to attain the rank of Master Potter in the ancient European ceramics guild, and soon after became one of the most widely-praised ceramicists of her generation.

While she was breaking boundaries at the Bauhaus, darker forces were taking root in Berlin. Marguerite, a woman of Jewish heritage, was forced to flee the Nazi regime in 1933. Having lost her practice and been separated from her family, she re-dedicated herself to pottery in her new studio at Pond Farm in the Redwood forests of California. By the time she passed in 1985, she and her Bauhaus contemporaries had revolutionized industry and culture across the world, and the students she took on became her new family. 

In 2025, Marguerite’s final students, the last of a great Bauhaus master, decided to mend the century-long rift between the two hemispheres of her life by re-tracing her steps across Germany and visiting the workshops where she studied and produced era-defining work. This is their story.