Biography

Margarete Marks (née Heymann) – better known as Grete Marks - was born in Cologne, Germany. From 1920-21 she studied at the Weimar Bauhaus. In 1923 she founded the Haël Pottery at Marwitz with her husband Gustav Löbenstein; he died in 1928, leaving two young children. Haël Pottery became one of Germany’s leading manufacturers of modernist ceramics, exporting all over the globe. The Nazis forced its closure in 1933. Following travels in Palestine (1933), Yugoslavia (1934) and Denmark, in 1936 she emigrated to Britain. Her work featured in the infamous Entarte ‘Kunst’ (Degenerate ‘Art’) exhibition opened in Munich in 1937. She designed pottery for companies such as Minton and also produced her own modernist ware under the name Grete Pottery. She held a solo show at the Bloomsbury Gallery in 1938. After the Second World War, she showed regularly in London at the Redfern Gallery and at the Ben Uri Gallery. Her ceramics feature in the permanent collections of the V&A, the British Museum, and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent. A solo exhibition was held at the Keramic-Museum in Berlin in 2012; this travelled to the Milwaukee Art Museum.