Covered sugar bowl from a tea service c. 1930

This covered sugar bowl is part of a tea service made by Margarete Heymann-Marks Löbenstein. The forms feel Bauhaus-adjacent in their simplicity, but there's also an appealing strangeness in their assembly. Heymann-Marks's tea service really celebrates the material. It's matte, unglazed porcelain. These forms are so smooth they almost seem to anticipate the coming of plastic. I'm drawn to the handles, each made of a disc and a sphere, an exercise in pure geometry. They're kind of clunky and hard to hold! The impracticality makes them so charming and unexpected. It's not so much about drinking tea as it is about a kind of design purity. I love the reduction of form, not quite machine-made, not quite handmade, but something in between. It's as if she's having a conversation with Léger or Mondrian, a painterly language translated into three dimensions. Art is a continuum; each artist responds to what came before, pushing the conversation in new and unexpected directions.