Lili Márkus was born in Eszek, Austria-Hungary (now Osijek, Croatia) in 1900. After moving to Hungary in 1923 she became an internationally successful ceramic artist, but fled to England at the beginning of the Second World War. Márkus exhibited regularly with the Red Rose Guild of Craftsmen in Manchester.
Ceramicist Lili Márkus was born Helene Elek in Eszek, Austria-Hungary (now Osijek, Croatia) in 1900. Her father was a forest manager, and having received little formal education or training, she married Victor Márkus in 1923 and moved to Budapest. There she became part of a ‘sophisticated modern artistic environment’ which included architect Lajos Kozma, who redesigned the apartment where she and her husband lived (Waterhouse, 2018). Their two sons, Robert and Thomas, were born in the mid-1920s, and it was not until 1932 that Márkus had specialist training in use of the potter’s wheel. Around this time, she converted to Catholicism, expressed in a variety of later religious works. Her most successful period was from 1932–39 and she obtained major awards in international exhibitions in Brussels (1935), Milan (1936), Paris (1937), and Berlin (1938). With the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939, the family escaped to London (they travelled via Rome, pretending to go on holiday). During the war much of her work was destroyed or dispersed; exhibits parcelled up for Warsaw in 1939 were destroyed in the Nazi blitzkrieg, and the contents of her home and studio were later bombed and looted during the siege of Budapest in 1944 (Waterhouse, 2018; Kinchin, 2009). For a short time she attended Manchester School of Art, but due to the war effort had to discontinue her practice there (Forsyth, 1946).
Given that interest in crafts in Britain at this time was marginal compared to Hungary, Márkus found commissions and high-profile exhibitions hard to obtain (Kinchin, 2009). She had, however, appeared in journals The Studio and Studio International on several occasions, and in Scottish ceramic designer Gordon Forsyth’s international survey of 20th-Century Ceramics, published in 1936. As principal of Stoke School of Art and a prominent member of the Society for Designers in Industry, Forsyth’s admiration was important in the face of hostility towards immigrant artists and ceramicists arriving from Europe. Along with Grete Marks, he saw Márkus’ arrival as ‘one of the good things that has come out of the war to the British pottery industry [...] a distinct asset and a powerful credit to the country of their adoption’ (Kinchin, 2009). Forsyth arranged for Márkus to use the kilns at Manchester School of Art and Grimwade’s.
Márkus began working through an agent to sell models and designs to firms including Miott, Carter Stabler Adams, Poole Pottery and Pilkington Tiles, ‘but, when reproduced, these were often not credited to her name and she had to relinquish control over the colouring and the quality of the slip-casting and glazing’. In 1946 Forsyth wrote a three-page article on Márkus for Pottery and Glass, soon after which she had a solo exhibition, Lily Markus: Pottery and Hand-woven Tapestry, at the Batsford Gallery, London. The show gave her work an ‘aura of genteel conservatism’, selling to clients ‘consisting predominantly of women from well-heeled addresses in London’s West End, Hampstead and Surrey’ (Kinchin, 2009). She also exhibited at Heal's and Kendall Milne stores. The same year, Márkus began exhibiting annually with the Red Rose Guild of Craftsmen in Manchester alongside noted ceramicists, Bernard Leach, Michael Cardew, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie and fellow immigrant, Tibor Reich. Leach visited Márkus on several occasions and presented her with a copy of A Potter’s Book. Despite her admiration for traditional slipware and oriental ceramics, as shared with Leach, the resistance of many British studio potters to the figurative tradition, in which Márkus excelled, presented many barriers. Her ‘folky’ themes of apple-picking and grape harvests ‘appeared vaguely exotic and colourful, rather than ideologically loaded as they were in Stalinist Hungary’ (Kinchin, 2009). In 1950 she and her family moved to Ariel, the purpose-built home in Glossop in which Márkus’ ‘creativity came once more into its own, unfettered by commercial pressures or the need self-consciously to address English tastes’ (Waterhouse, 2018). There she carved, painted, and decorated profusely.
Having contracted cancer in 1960, Lili Márkus died at home in Glossop, Derbyshire, England in February 1962, in a canopied bed she had herself carved and decorated. In the UK public domain her work is held in the collection of the V&A (Ceramic Tree (c. 1938), one of the works sold in the 1946 Batsford Gallery exhibition). ‘Her late-starting career had finished early’, but she will be remembered as one of ‘the most accomplished Hungarian ceramists of the 1930s’ and her ‘family’s contribution to Britain’s war victory, to industry in the North West and her sons’ academic careers at British universities make this immigrant story one where the host nation gained immeasurably’ (Waterhouse, 2018). In 2008, a major exhibition of her work, In the Eye of the Storm, was held at Collins Gallery, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow (where her son Thomas was Emeritus Professor of Architecture and Building Science), curated by Juliet Kinchin and Laura Hamilton.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Lili Márkus]
Publications related to [Lili Márkus] in the Ben Uri Library