Station: [15] The Henry van de Velde Style in Bürgel

Pure forms, strong colours!

Henry van de Velde’s designs infused the spirit of Art Nouveau into the little pottery town of Bürgel:

”… I change profiles and shapes to speed up, or slow down the process of glazing; I interrupt it with projecting elements or divert the glaze into grooves in order to regulate the speed at which the glazes flow. To change the temperatures, I used filings and brass or copper wire, which – depending on whether the temperature was below or above a thousand degrees – produced greenish or red tints: those oxblood colours the Japanese and Chinese ceramicists valued above all others.”

Van de Velde’ own description of his activities in Bürgel.

In the pots produced from his designs, the colours are crucial: Some of his pots display the organic elements of Art Nouveau in tone-on-tone colour schemes. One example near the entrance is a blue vase with two-dimensional decoration in engobe painting.

The Belgian artist was also inspired by a design concept specific to Bürgel. Van de Velde adopted the blue-and-white decoration and integrated it into his own design idiom. With handles forming an acute angle, his designs were quite unlike the utility ceramics that had been produced to this date. The blue-and-white decoration had first appeared in Bürgel in the late 19th century. Van de Velde’s versions are now the earliest blue-and-white pieces that can be conclusively dated. The artistically demanding execution under van de Velde will certainly have significantly boosted the popularity and great prestige of the blue-and-white decoration, which persists to this day.

However, the real trademark of the van de Velde ceramics, and of the Bürgel Art Nouveau-style, is the drip glazes in a wide variety of colour combinations: yellow and blue, yellow and green, pale and dark blue, or brown and blue. Van de Velde chose the design of a pot so as to ensure that the glazes were able to run to best effect. But he still left a great deal of scope for chance in his creative work. What a pot will ultimately look like, is only decided during the firing process. In ceramics, each piece is unique, but that’s even more so in this instance, because the glazes never run in the same way twice. 

With that, van de Velde – consciously or unconsciously – built on the tradition of the “blue apron” – in other words, the random staining of the stoneware, which the potter achieves by blindly tossing the salt and cobalt mix into the hot kiln.

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Zitat van de Velde: Henry van de Velde und die Bürgeler Jugendstilkeramik, herausgegeben vom Förderkreis Keramik-Museum Bürgel und Dornburger Keramik-Werkstatt e.V., S. 29.