Marguerite Wildenhain

Early life

Wildenhain was born on October 11, 1896, in Lyon, France, to a British mother, Rose Calmann and a German father, Théodore Friedlaender, who was a silk merchant. Her brother was the Israeli typographer Henri Friedlaender. She received a primary education first in Germany, then in Yorkshire, England. At the start of World War I, her family moved to Germany where she completed secondary school.

Beginning in 1914, she studied sculpture at the Berlin University of the Arts, then worked as a decorator of porcelain ware at a factory in Rudolstadt. It was at that factory where her passion for the potter's wheel ignited. When she was not working at the factory, she explored the countryside. Shortly after World War I, while in Weimar for a weekend, she happened upon the posted proclamation by architect Walter Gropius about the founding of the Bauhaus school in 1919: ""a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions which raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists". Then and there, as she recalled in her autobiography, she decided to become one of the first students to enroll. Wildenhain attended Bauhaus in Dornburg from 1919 to 1925.

1952 Seminar at Black Mountain College

Wildenhain was the featured lecturer and demonstrator at the Pottery seminar at Black Mountain College in 1952 that

influenced many younger potters who attended.