Pond Farm Pottery

ABOUT

Two-hour interpretive tours of the historic home and studio of Bauhaus-trained master potter Marguerite Wildenhain, led by docent volunteers, take place monthly from May through October. The tour begins with a brief film sharing highlights of Wildenhain’s life, followed by a short drive from the park’s redwood valley floor up to Pond Farm, situated amongst the grassy meadows and oak woodland that Wildenhain loved. The walking tour along rustic paths includes three original buildings: the barn/studio, Wildenhain’s personal residence (currently being rehabilitated), and the refurbished guest cottage, designed by architect Albert Lanier and used by the park’s Artist in Residence program. The path passes through remnants of Wildenhain’s extensive gardens. Tours frequently include pottery-throwing demonstrations by former Pond Farm students at one of the original Wildenhain-designed kick wheels. Private tours available by request.

SPECIAL RESOURCES

“We need nature for the form-giving impulse it conveys… it nourishes the imagination with innumerable ideas of form, with details of expression. “

— Marguerite Wildenhain

Marguerite Wildenhain (1896–1985)

Marguerite Wildenhain (nèe Friedlander) enjoyed a remarkable and lengthy career as a master ceramicist. Born in France of English, German, and Jewish heritage, she lived in both England and Germany as a child. During her lifetime, she survived the hardships of World War I, studied with the famed Bauhaus school in Germany, and immigrated to the United States in 1940 to escape persecution under the Nazi regime. After the experimental artists colony she helped establish at Pond Farm collapsed, she opened her own pottery studio on the site. It was here that Wildenhain produced the bulk of her work, shaped the American Studio Pottery Movement’s discourse, and taught students in her intensive and widely renowned summer sessions, which introduced Bauhaus principles of form, technique, and artistry into American ceramics.

^{Three Iranian Women, Stoneware, 11 1/8 x 11 1/4, 1976. Credit: © Forrest Merrill.}

_{Marguerite Wildenhain on a hillside above Pond Farm (visible in the distance) with her students and some of her pots. Credit: Otto Hagel, 1950s, © 1998 courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona Foundation.}

LEARN MORE

Pond Farm Pottery is significant for its association with the mid-twentieth century American Studio Pottery Movement, and represents the life, work, and personal philosophy of Bauhaus-trained master potter Marguerite Wildenhain. For nearly forty years, Pond Farm Pottery served as both the home and studio of Wildenhain, who by the time she arrived at Pond Farm in 1942, was already a leading figure in the ceramics world. Wildenhain provided a voice for American pottery on an international stage, and is as central to the understanding of 20th century pottery as Walter Gropius is to 20th century architecture.

The Pond Farm property, located in the beautiful coastal range above Sonoma County’s Russian River Valley, includes two small residences and a historic barn repurposed as a pottery studio, as well as the remnants of an extensive cultivated garden of terraced fruit trees, vegetables, grasses, and succulents. The property’s modest scale and design belie its historical importance. Conceived in the 1930s by San Francisco couple Jane and Gordon Herr as an artist’s colony inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin Fellowship in Wisconsin, it developed into the Pond Farm Pottery Workshop with a faculty composed primarily of Jewish refugees; Wildenhain was no exception. Forced to leave her teaching post 1933 in Germany by the Nazi regime, she and her husband Franz established their own pottery workshop in Holland, but by 1940, she had fled Holland for America, eventually landing at Pond Farm.

Students attended the first Pond Farm Workshops in 1949, with a faculty led by weaver Trude Guermonprez, metal smiths Victor Ries and Harry S. Dixon, and fresco painters Lucienne Bloch Dimitroff and Stephen Pope Dimitroff, who had studied with Diego Rivera. Painter and sculptor Claire Falkenstein joined the faculty a year later, as did Jean Varda, who taught collage. While the artist colony closed after only a few years, Wildenhain remained until her death in 1985, running her nationally-renowned summer school at Pond Farm for three decades. In 2014, Pond Farm was recognized on the National Register of Historic Places, and in 2023 was designated a National Historic Landmark.

IN COLLABORATION WITH THE NATIONAL TRUST