1970s LUISE DUNCKER FLENSBURG STUDIO VASE (17.5 cm)

A nicely proportioned, hand-thrown teardrop vase from the Flensburg studio of West German master art potter Luise Duncker.  Hand-decorated with dyed slip in a color way very typical of her work.  Suitable for use as a bud vase.  The studio mark is impressed on the base.

LUISE DUNCKER is an internationally recognized German studio potter who produced consumer ceramics—vases, bowls, wall plates—in a very individual style.  She was born in the Mecklenburg region of northern Germany in 1928.  She showed an early talent for drawing and modeling; unfortunately, securing education in the wake of WWII in Germany was hit-and-miss for much of the populace, and the high school Duncker attended was shut down when the financial resources of the parents ran out.  "Sometimes I regret that I did not graduate from high school," she has reported, "but I've always been happy with my job."  Duncker finally completed training as a potter in the the university town of Göttingen in Lower Saxony, and in 1961 she passed her master's examination before the Chamber of Skilled Crafts in Flensburg—a town near the German-Danish border where she had settled.  She established a good reputation and was able to rent a small shop and a studio on Rote Straße (Red Street), the town's famous pedestrian shopping mecca, in 1982.  She managed to live comfortably off sales of her work, thanks in large measure to orders received at the biannual trade fairs in Frankfurt.

Now retired, Duncker remained an institution in Flensburg for many years.  In 2015, she moved from her home on Waitzstraße, where she had had a second workshop, into an Assisted Living facility in the deconsecrated Monastery of the Holy Spirit, having abandoned the potter's wheel some years prior.  Duncker trained many apprentices during her career, some who went on to become successful potters in their own rights.

Duncker's hallmarks were a unique scribing technique and the special slip method she used to apply dyed clay to leather-hard pieces before moving them to the kiln.  The most commonly found Duncker items are brown-on-brown, a particularly popular look in the 1970s.  She bristles somewhat at the term "art," but her ceramics as well as numerous drawings—mainly nudes and portraits—attest to a great talent.