Station: [9] Art Déco and the New Objectivity

Following the outbreak of the First World War, van de Velde, as a Belgian citizen, was obliged to leave Thuringia and end his cooperation with Bürgel. Then, shortly after the war, there was a generational change among the town’s potters. Otto Neumann took over the workshop of his uncle, who had been an important Art Nouveau producer. Carl Fischer, who had studied at the specialist ceramics school in Bunzlau (now Bolesławiec in Poland) took on the Eberstein/ Hohenstein business and founded the Carl Fischer Bürgel Art Ceramics Workshop.

The Bürgel potteries retained the forms and colours established by van de Velde until the 1930s, while supplementing them with in-house designs and adapting the decoration to changing contemporary tastes. 

Often, several surface designs exist for one and the same vessel form: with the typical drip glazes introduced by van de Velde – and with a later decoration that is clearly moving towards Art Déco.

Local businesses continued to seek to work with prominent artists. In the early 1920s, the Carl Fischer workshop created a tea service in the radical New Objectivity style. The design was by Gustav Weidanz, professor of the ceramics department at the Burg Giebichenstein College of Art in Halle. Fischer also established links with the Bauhaus ceramicists surrounding Otto Lindig in Dornburg, which was just 15 kilometres or nine miles from here.