Finding Lost Voices: Marguerite Wildenhain and the Legacy of Pond Farm
A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.
I've been writing sonnets since I was in grad school at NYU in the late 1990s—a lot of sonnets. It was at NYU, that I began a daily writing practice of writing an American sonnet. I’d write them in my Brooklyn apartment, where we sweltered without air conditioning or on the F-train riding into Manhattan. In total, I wrote over 120 sonnets that year. Then, I continued, and I’ve been writing ever since. After all that practice, the form of the sonnet has become ingrained in me. And still, when I compose a poem, I think it out first in the 14-line, ten-syllable box a sonnet allows me. Why am I telling you this? Because there is something to be said about learning a craft through the repetition of a form. Sitting for the past few decades with the form of the sonnet and the practice of writing a poem a day has taught me so much about my craft as a poet and my life. Something I saw reflected in the life of an extraordinary woman, Marguerite Wildenhain (1895 - 1985).
Last weekend, I got to go on an extraordinary field trip - a tour of Pond Farm located just above Armstrong Woods in Guerneville, CA. When I visited, you could still see the burn scars on the hillsides surrounding the property from the 2020 Walbridge Fire that nearly burned this historic place to the ground. But thanks to the efforts of first responders and volunteers, this historic site and the rich history it gives us still stands today. In many ways, it seems fitting to first view this place in this stage of regrowth and rebirth, for Pond Farm was always a place that pulsed with regeneration, especially for Wildenhain, the Bauhaus-trained master potter who relocated to this place after fleeting Nazi Germany during World War II.
Wildenhain was born to an English and German father in Lyon, France. At the start of World War I, her family returned to Germany, where she completed high school and went on to study sculpture and pottery at the Berlin University of the Arts. While studying art, she liked to draw inspiration from the natural world, so she’d go on hikes on the weekends. In 1919, while hiking in Weimar, Germany, Wildenhain came across a poster that changed her life: The Bauhaus Proclamation developed by Walter Gropius. The proclamation called for craftspeople and artists to come together to learn a craft so well that one becomes a master. After the horrors of WWI, Bauhaus offered an alternative way to envision the future of art. One that was less elitist. The idea was to dedicate your life to your art form and work daily to master it.
Wildenhain immediately connected with this idea, and signed up for the workshops. She studied at Bauhaus in Dornburg from 1919 to 1925. She was the first woman in Germany to earn certification as a Master Potter in Germany. In 1926, Wildenhain moved to Halle-Saale, Germany, where she became the head of the ceramics workshop at the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design. Konigliche Porzellan-Manufaktur (KPM) also enlisted her to develop elegant, mass-produced dinnerware prototypes. She was fast becoming a top European designer. However, in 1933, Hitler was elected, and because she was Jewish, she was quietly asked to leave her position so as not to place the school at risk. She fled to Holland, where she and her new husband, another ceramic artist named Franz Wildenhain, started a pottery shop called Het Kruikje (The Little Jug) in Putten, Netherlands. But in 1940, the threat of the Nazis once again derailed her life when they threatened to invade Holland. Wildenhain was forced to leave her home again. Because she was born in France and had a French passport, she could escape to the United States. Most other Germans, including her husband Franz, weren’t so lucky. Franz was forced to stay and enlist in the German army.
Wildenhain’s passage from Germany was lonely. As the ship drifted slowly through the harbor, avoiding mines, Wildenhain sketched the ship, the deck, and all that she saw. In the 1930s, Wildenhain had met the architect Gordon Herr and his wife Jane Herr, who asked her if she’d ever wanted to start an artist’s colony in California. When she agreed, she never knew she was agreeing to what would be her future. When she arrived in the U.S., Wildenhain traveled to the Bay Area, where she worked for two years at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. However, how art was taught in the United States didn’t make sense to her. How could she teach an art form to students in just a couple of hours twice a week? In the Bauhaus workshops, students worked on their craft for the entire day, five days a week. So when the Herrs invited her to join them on the 140-acre ranch they’d purchased in the North Bay, where they hoped to create an artistic community, Wildenhain happily left her job and relocated.
To get to Pond Farm, you must travel along the Russian River Valley, where the Russian River flows to the sea. You have to drive away from the town of Guerneville toward the tree-covered hills and the towering redwoods that make up Armstrong Woods. You have to make your way through a forest of old growth redwoods and then follow a steep road at the end of the valley up to a valley ridge. And there, on a sunny ridge, you’ll find the site of Pond Farm.
When Wildenhain arrived at the Herr’s place, she instantly found solace in its isolation and the immersion she felt once again in the natural world. What she had once sought on long hikes when she was studying art in Berlin now surrounded her daily. After all of the trauma she had experienced, the place brought her back to herself. Here, she could teach an immersive art workshop that would be more like how she had learned to become an artist. She not only wanted to teach the craft of creating pottery, she wanted to teach how to live as an artist every day.
In 1949, The Pond Farm Workshops began. They were run by Gordon Herr, Wildenhain (and her husband Franz whom she was able to bring over once she became an American citizen in 1945), Trude Guermonprez (whose craft was Textiles) and Victor Ries (whose craft was Metals). Wildenhain taught pottery on a kick wheel (a potter's wheel worked by kicking a heavy disk at the foot of the vertical shaft.) Students would have to make a series of ceramic shapes repeatedly all day, day after day until their form was perfected. Until they could make the shape without even thinking about it. The idea was for the school to not only teach how to make ceramics, but it also taught how to live an artistic and meaningful life.
In 1952, when the other artists disbanded for disparate reasons, Wildenhain stayed on at the property. She began teaching her own workshops following the same model during the summer months. These workshops would continue until 1980. The rest of the year, Wildenhain lived simply and alone in the small cabin she’d built on the property. After all of the disruption caused by war, she’d finally found a place where she could live the artistic life she wanted. A life she not only lived, but she taught to her students. The daily practice of making art, allows one to see the world through one’s artistic practice.
Wildenhain published three books (Pottery: Form and Expression; The Invisible Core: A Potter's Life and Thoughts; and That We Look and See: An Admirer Looks at the Indians), she lectured at schools throughout the U.S., and she traveled to South and Central America, Europe, and the Middle East.
Today, the property at Pond Farm still exists. You can walk in the barn where once twenty potters sat at their kick wheels throwing pots all day, thanks to the work of Stewards of the Coast and Redwoods and California Parks. You can see the terraced garden Wildenhain created and planted and look into the simple cabin where she once lived. If you are an artist, you can even apply to live here for three weeks during the summer as part of a residency program. While on the tour last weekend, I met the current artist in residence, the writer and multimedia artist Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, who graciously showed me around the property.
When I left Pond Farm last weekend, I left both haunted and inspired. Wildenhain’s life followed me like a shadow. Her art, her life, made me think about my own. About what it means to live as an artist in this world even when everything around you is on fire. About what does it mean to sit with a form so long that it is a part of you. About how when you have that form you have a container in which to process the world. In a few weeks, on July 27, from 1-3 PM, I’ll be joined by a group of amazing writers: Jan Beatty, Forrest Gander, Dana Gioia, Brian Martens, and Katie Peterson, for Poets in Parks at the gorgeous Armstrong Redwoods Forest Theater in the middle of the old growth forest just below Pond Farm. I hope you’ll join me as we celebrate the forms we write into to make sense of this world.
Visit the Pond Farm website to watch a 30-minute documentary on Marguerite Wildenhain and to schedule a tour like the one I took.
Upcoming Events
July 27, 1 - 3 PM PST - Poets in Parks featuring Jan Beatty, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Forrest Gander, Dana Gioia, Brian Martens, and Katie Peterson
Armstrong Redwoods Forest Theater
17000 Armstrong Woods Road
GUERNEVILLE, CA 95446
Now Available for pre-order: Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb
Called, "heartbreaking and heroic." by Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan