The Bunzlau pottery of Germany and Silesia

Magazine Antiques, July, 1997 by Charles R. Mack, Ilona S. Mack

The principal potteries of the early twentieth century(7) combined the procedures of the old-fashioned family-ran pot shop with those of more industrialized ceramic manufactories. The vessels were either hand turned or slip cast, and the colorful underglaze Pfauenauge or floral designs were applied by women using brushes or specially cut sponges. Peacocks' eyes with green pupils surrounded by blue were particularly popular, and applying the colors with sponges lent an appropriately feathery quality.

While all Bunzlau ware shares stylistic traits, there are subtle regional differences in design. One of the Lusatian potters, Paul Schreier from Bischofswerda, produced small, decorative pitchers and vases in a distinctive style, combining peacocks' eyes and geometric designs. He favored light blue and orange color schemes that proved quite popular. The examples in Plate XI were made for export to the United States and bear the country of origin stamp required by the McKinley Tariff of 1890.

Some of the potters working in the Bunzlau style might better be classified as art potters. An example is Friedrich Festersen, who probably trained at the Bunzlau Ceramic Technical School before moving to Berlin in 1909. There he worked well into the 1920s producing elegant art pottery vases of the type shown in Plate I.(8)

At the end of the 1920s, again under the leadership of the Ceramic Technical School, now directed by Eduard Berdel (1878-1945), the aesthetic course of Bunzlau pottery changed once more. Many of the manufactories in Silesia (but not Germany, where the firms were smaller) began to experiment with airbrushed designs, echoing the art deco style of the day. Shapes became more streamlined and angular, and folk art allusions and Jugendstil motifs yielded to constructivist and cubist patterns more suited to the technical demands of the airbrush [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE X OMITTED]. From the 1930s into the 1950s air-brushed, sponged, and brown-slip Bunzlau wares were sold side by side.

During the Nazi era there was a nostalgic rerum to the Prussian earthenwares of a century earlier. Coffee and dinner services, often with white relief decorations sprigged onto the brown-slip objects, were particularly popular with the military and the party hierarchy. In 1936, again with the encouragement of the Ceramic Technical School, several of the potteries in Bunzlau and Naumburg am Queis joined forces as the Aktion Bunzlauer Braunzeug (Bunzlau Brown Wares Consortium) to make elegant brown-slip pottery and various artistic variations of it. The pitcher in Plate VII, with its brown-slip interior and its exterior decorated with slip-trailed spirals, is a good example of the consortium's production.

With the Polish occupation of Silesia at the end of World War II, most of the remaining German potters in Bunzlau and the neighboring communities were forced to move to West Germany, where many of them have continued to turn out pottery in the Bunzlau style. Meanwhile, their Silesian factories were rebuilt into state-run makers of utilitarian ceramics. The surviving potteries of Lusatia, Saxony, and Brandenburg (then all in East Germany) continued to function and today, following reunification, seem poised for a period of prosperity as they are being rediscovered by a clientele fascinated with the folk art tradition of the region. With the end of the cold war the state-run potteries of Boleslawiec have turned increasingly from the production of sewer pipe and bathtubs to the hand-crafted, brightly decorated wares for which Bunzlau was once celebrated.