In Weißwasser, a town 80 kilometres from Dresden, German electrical companies were modernising glass manufacture at their Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerken AG. In 1935, the Bauhausler Wilhelm Wagenfeld took up the position of the firm’s artistic director.

In Dresden, where the destroyed city was being rebuilt after the war and the two academies were being reorganised, Wagenfeld saw the opportunity for a project with the potential to transcend corporate particular interests. In July 1945, he received a letter from Dresden city council offering him an opportunity to ‘establish a workshop for industrial product design’ in an ‘academy of arts and crafts based on entirely new foundations’.[1]

In June 1946, Wagenfeld wrote a letter to the Amt für Betriebsneuordnung, the authority in charge of expropriating businesses, which was led by Otto Falkenberg. Like his supervisor Fritz Selbmann, Falkenberg ranked among the politicians who set about transforming Saxony’s economy into a state-run planned economy. In this letter, Wagenfeld outlined of a “reorganisation of the glass industry”, which ought to be of economic and cultural significance.[2] In a nationwide amalgamation of glass factories, ‘production in all factories and works under the control of the Amt für Betriebsneuordnung should be limited to a few essential product types of specified design and quality’.[3]

A final attempt to bring Wagenfeld to Dresden was undertaken by Will Grohmann, whom Selbmann had appointed as principal in order to unite the academy of art with the academy of applied art. His plan would see Wagenfeld head an industrial design department at the renowned company Deutsche Werkstätten in Hellerau, a district of Dresden.[4] During a talk at the Hochschule für Werkkunst (academy of applied art), Wagenfeld spoke of a cooperation between artists, technicians and craftsmen, from which would emerge ‘something completely anonymous’.[5] But Grohmann’s time was up; he resigned in early 1948.[6] Wagenfeld moved to Berlin in 1946 and was made a professor of industrial design at the University of Arts before relocating to Stuttgart in 1949. This paved the way for Mart Stam’s arrival on the scene in Dresden.

Mart Stam in Dresden