A Manufacturing Renaissance – German Porcelain Blazes New Trails
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Anyone currently looking for porcelain will not be able to avoid him: Karl Lagerfeld. The fashion designer has left the medium of textiles, at least temporarily, to sign on with Rosenthal AG in Selb. EGO is the name of the line which Lagerfeld did not design, but which he curated for a photo-shooting session. On Karl Lagerfeld’s pictures, a young man lolls lasciviously between cups and plates. There is no doubt about it: porcelain from Germany is blazing new trails. In 2010, the German porcelain industry will be celebrating a special anniversary. It will be 300 years since so-called white gold was first produced in Meissen, Saxony. The history of porcelain manufacturing in Germany is associated with such famous names as Fürstenberg, Rosenthal and Nymphenburg because after the discovery in Meissen, nearly all the rulers of the German Reich’s many small states wanted to set up their own porcelain works based on the Saxon model. A heritage worthy of protection
Höchst, Berlin, Ludwigsburg, to name but a few, followed the example, but already at the turn of the 18th to the 19th century, many manufacturers had to cease operations on account of their lack of profitability. And only after 1850 was there a second wave of start-ups of manufacturers and factories. These largely still influence the industry today. The area around Selb in northern Bavaria became the centre of the porcelain industry on account of the large deposits of kaolin, the whitish clay used for porcelain production. Until the 1970s, up to 90 per cent of German porcelain was produced in this region at times.
The companies established during the two waves of start-ups that still survive today are outstanding in that they have taken consistently different approaches to their product designs. The Meissen company’s products are still orientated to the formal language of Dresden baroque and the chinoiserie so popular at that time, while KPM and Fürstenberg draw their design quality from the period of Schinkel’s classicism. Thus, each manufacturer manifests its own distinctive qualities. They not only appear to have preserved the production techniques of their respective golden ages, but also their form of expression, in spite of the fact that the contemporary context disappeared centuries ago. Thus it is not surprising that the companies, some of which receive large subsidies, are extremely difficult to place in economic categories. Rather, first and foremost, they are part of our national heritage that is worthy of protection. The discovery of the modern age
Modernising porcelain design and adapting it to the tastes of commoners was the task of the companies during the second wave of start-ups after 1850 and it remains their task today. Porcelain manufacturers continued to imitate the styles of the nobility at first, but finally, if belatedly, they discovered the modern age.
Hermann Gretsch’s Arzberg Service 1382 of 1931 may be seen as a prototype modern service. The only décor the architect proposed, a fine red line running around the edge of the cups and plates, has to be seen as a masterly achievement of modern décor. After the war, Philipp Rosenthal inherited the firm his father had founded, by chance rather than design. He consistently promoted the idea of modern service designs. What was remarkable was that Rosenthal managed to unite the most diverse ideas about modern design under the umbrella of its studio-line brand. Rosenthal brought together such different characters as Raymond Loewy, Walter Gropius and Björn Windblatt. Yet the disputes in the 1950s and 1960s between artists, architects and designers about what should characterise good design did not really interest Philipp Rosenthal. His aim was to set standards regarding design quality and to act as a kind of publisher of original contemporary design. Economic crisis
Although Rosenthal still remains the brand of diverse design concepts and of unmistakable signatures – the international avant-garde is united under the brand’s umbrella, with names such as Jasper Morrisson, Ron Arad, Konstantin Grcic and Patricia Urquiola – an essential problem of the company and of the industry as a whole cannot be overlooked. Porcelain has lost much of its appeal.
While in the 1950s and 1960s, people still had a genuine material need for porcelain, at some point every cupboard was full to the brim. With the creeping decline of traditional table habits, the change in people’s shared lifestyles and the resulting lack of social occasions to present porcelain, the product has largely disappeared as a focus of consumer interest. As a consequence, the porcelain industry has been in an ongoing economic crisis since the 1970s, leading to many companies’ loss of independence and to the loss of thousands of jobs. The name of the concept is transformation
Yet in this situation, it is precisely the industry’s fossils that are blazing new trails. Some manufacturers have plucked up the courage to translate their idiosyncratic characteristics into a contemporary context and to communicate them. And even avant-garde design is discovering the charm of a traditional world of objects. Hella Jongerius, Konstantin Grcic and Clemens Weisshaar/Reed Kram, for example, work for Nymphenburg, and Paola Navone works for the Reichenbach company. Finally, Patricia Urquiola is developing the Landscape service for Rosenthal, stretching the company’s technological competence to its limits. She is integrating Moorish-inspired ornamentation directly with the porcelain body. Through creating interplay between translucent and opaque parts of a single form, she shows what porcelain can achieve.
Transformation is the name of the concept through which many designers are currently broaching venerable forms and production methods. Different period features are combined, commented on and integrated to create an unusual look by means of an assemblage technique. Craft manufacturing is what is required for this kind of transformation – the form of production that relies on craftsmanship, on the personal relationship between the artistan/craftsman and the object to be created. Before the advent of today’s luxury industry, Louis Vuitton was also a craft manufacturer. And it cannot be ruled out that the manufacturing companies that have survived industrialisation and the modern era or which have had new life breathed into them, as happened to the Theresienthal glass manufacturing company recently, will give birth to a new concept of luxury. Taking on the radiant and omnipresent Karl Lagerfeld to sponsor a dusty industry is the right way to go to integrate porcelain into modern lifestyles. That is because if today’s luxury brands become increasingly anonymous and take on industrial dimensions as they have done in the past, porcelain manufacturing can indeed fill a gap as a small, autonomous organism that bears the hallmark of an individual’s idea and has a material, but above all an immaterial quality. Like the luxury article manufacturers of the past, the attraction of these manufacturers would stem from their rarity, and this is the key, from their regional identity. Porcelain is a material that is linked to its region like no other. Something that we can get in just one place in the world by expending a great deal of effort and time could be the nucleus of a renaissance of porcelain manufacturing in Germany.
Andrej Kupetz
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