Untitled

In 1963, Frans Wildenhain completed an enormous ceramic mural for the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland. More than 200 feet long, the artwork includes over 900 individual clay elements. Abstract, curvilinear forms link up and break away from neighboring sculpture groups, which are marked by a wild variety of ceramic glazes, patterns, inclusions, and textures.

This mural and Wildenhain’s overall style of artmaking are the products of decades spent honing his skill in ceramic production and his interest in applying to clay the two-dimensional techniques of painting and drawing. The artist first trained as a draftsman before attending the famed Bauhaus School in Weimar, Germany, where he began his career as a ceramicist. That career was interrupted by World War II. Wildenhain’s wife, the well-known potter Marguerite Wildenhain, fled Germany after being dismissed from her job for being Jewish. When he tried to follow her, he was caught and conscripted into the German Army. After the war, he immigrated to America and, in 1950, became a founding member of the School for American Craftsmen at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York, where he taught for two decades.