Cocoa Pot

Like other original members of the Bauhaus pottery department, Otto Lindig based his designs on local craft traditions, producing handmade vessels on the potter’s wheel in which decoration was omitted to heighten the effect of form. By 1923 Lindig and others had introduced plaster casting techniques that permitted large-scale industrial production based on a unique handmade model and had developed new designs suited to industrial serial production. That year, Lindig premiered this lidded coffee pot, and it instantly became a symbol of progressive Bauhaus ceramic design. It was conceived as part of a line of baluster-shaped pots and vases in which a basic vessel design could be assembled in different ways with only a few variations in handles and spouts, thereby giving rise to a number of designs that could be used in different ways. After the basic form was cast from a mold, the piece was finished on the wheel, so that it is at once uniform in shape and size, yet still handcrafted in the details.