Station: [8] Henry van de Velde and Bürgel Art Nouveau

“The existing factories in Bürgel, which produce luxury ceramic goods, have very little prospect of recovering unaided. It is beyond measure sad to see the miserable shapes to which these manufacturers apply an even more miserable style of enamelling – in other words, glaze. I feel a great weight bearing down on me, given that I have undertaken to replace this deficiency of artistic education with the means at my disposal.”

The words of none other than the Belgian artist and designer Henry van de Velde. In a report for the Grand Duke from December 1902, he appears horrified at the backwardness of Bürgel’s potteries. Their products, with the

“clay in such disgustingly commonplace colours as grey, brown, muddy green”

… on which clearly no chemist had every worked, had to be “eliminated”, insisted van de Velde.

A little over seven years later, in April 1908, he was able to report “job done”. With a large measure of self-promotion, he claimed his mission had been successful. In cooperation with the pottery manufacturers, he had managed, he said, to develop ceramics that were internationally saleable and would bring honour to the good name of the Grand Duchy.

So what had happened? Henry van de Velde had set up cooperative projects with several pottery businesses in Bürgel and supplied them with designs. The potteries involved -- Gebauer, Eberstein, Neumann and Schack – produced his pieces and, taking them as a base line, developed their own product lines. 

At the same time, van de Velde set up a ceramics department at the Weimar School of Applied Arts and revived the local modelling school originally established in the middle of the 19th century. Young artisans were trained to draw ornaments and familiarised themselves with the new forms. 

Under van de Velde’s influence, the range of colours used in Bürgel ceramics was substantially increased with the addition of yellow, red, turquoise, black, blue, white and orange glazes.

Van de Velde’s new aesthetic allowed Bürgel’s ceramics output to break out of the tired mix of styles that hadn’t changed since the late 1800s. At the same time, the artist encouraged the introduction of new styles of utilitarian pottery and adopted the blue and white decoration developed at the end of the 19th century.