Patrick Comerford
The German-born sculptor Fritz Steller (1941-2015) produced some of the most dramatic and innovative post-war architectural ceramics in post-war Britain in 1969-1975. including 10 massive stoneware panels for Queensgate Markert in Huddersfield (1970-1972).
The ceramics historian and conservation campaigner Christopher Marsden says Steller’s work was innovative but was unappreciated for 30 years and much of it has been lost or is threatened. His surviving few sculptures include his mural at the entrance to Tamworth Library, ‘Communication and Documentation.’ It was completed over half a century ago, in 1973, when the new library was designed by the architects John Tetlow and Partners of Tamworth and Lichfield.
Fritz Steller was a German-born refugee architect who was working from Stratford-upon-Avon when he designed the sculpture in Tamworth Library. He was born in Dresden in 1941, and while was still in his childhood, his family moved from East Germany to West Germany. He arrived in England as a student in 1959, and he studied sculpture and architecture at Birmingham College of Art in 1959-1964, specialising in sculpture.
Steller was the head of art at Sebright School, Wolverley, near Kidderminster, Worcestershire, until 1969, when he established and led the Square One Design Workshop and Transform Ceramic Company in Snitterfield, near Stratford-Upon-Avon.
He moved from the English Midlands in 1977 to South Africa, where he established and led ceramic production in Isithebe-Mandini in KwaZulu-Natal. But he left South Africa in 1980 because of his opposition to the apartheid regime, and moved to Swaziland (now Eswatini), where he and set up and led an art centre and gallery in Ewzulwini Valley near Mbabane.
His art centre and gallery was destroyed in 1992, and he moved to Germany. But he returned to South Africa the following year and in 1993 he set up a new business in Empangeni, KwaZulu-Natal. He continued to live between in South Africa and Germany, working as an internationally recognised artist. He died in 2015.
One of Steller’s most acclaimed works in England was his panels for Queensgate Markert, Huddersfield (1970-1972). Clifford Stephenson, an enthusiast for public art, was then a borough councillor in Huddersfield with a particular interest in modern ceramic sculpture. At the time, Steller was pioneering the production of large-scale ceramic art, and he was interested in the use of a wide variety of materials in sculpture.
This combination led to Steller’s commission to produce designs for the new Market Hall in Huddersfield. The development company Murrayfield had a policy of incorporating public art into their schemes, and Gwyn Roberts, the project manager of J Seymour Harris, the architects for the Huddersfield development, was a friend of Steller.
Steller produced a number of ceramic and other artworks between 1969 to 1975, including his now-lost ‘People of God’ surrounding the altar in Saint John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Cathedral in Portsmouth, with the ‘Crown of Light’ above. He also worked on the now-lost interior of the Trustee Savings Bank in Wigan and other private commissions. However, very little of his work survives.
His outstanding, surviving works include his panels in Queensgate Markert, Huddersfield, and his mural in Tamworth Library on Corporation Street. Christopher Marsden started a study of the Huddersfield ceramics in 2004, and this led to him uncovering works by Steller across the country, including Birmingham, Bromsgrove, Leeds, Luton, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Southend, Tamworth, Wigan and Wokingham.
The library in Tamworth was opened and Steller’s tableaux was unveiled on 8 June 1973 by Margaret Thatcher, then the Secretary of State for of Education and Science. The library was designed for Tamworth Borough Council by John Tetlow and Partners of Lichfield and Tamworth, and built by A&R Astbury of Cannock.
Tamworth Borough Council also commissioned Steller to design his mural in the library. It includes 200 cm figures in ciment fondu and free-standing ceramic. Steller intended his pairs of naked figures to outline ‘the art of writing and the development of a phonetic alphabet.’
Steller’s explanatory plaque says: ‘This work outlines the most decisive achievement ever to affect mankind – the art of writing and the development of a phonetic alphabet.
‘One of the first forms of communication was by means of handsigns as indicated by the figures. The tableaux show different types of record keeping and finally the phonetic stages are indicated in the background of the books.’
Christopher Marsden’s research has identified two other works by Steller in the Tamworth, completed shortly after his library sculptures.’ He has published his research as ‘The Architectural Ceramics of Fritz Steller’ in the Journal of the Tiles & Architectural Ceramics Society (Vol 13, 2007, pp 3-14).
When the architects John Tetlow designed the council offices in Tamworth a year later in 1974, Steller was invited to design external and internal door handles and an internal ceramic partition wall, measuring 260 cm X 520 cm X 18 cm. Marsden presumes this has since been lost.
When Tetlow designed the Kerria Centre in Amington, Tamworth, in 1977, Steller was commissioned to design a 1.5 times life-size bronze figure of a nude girl on a concrete anvil. Nearby, a relief, reminiscent of Steller’s Commerce in Huddersfield, was incised into a brickwork wall. It was Steller’s last major work in England before moving to South Africa.
Steller’s bronze figure and anvil were moved to a brick plinth in 1990, according to Marsden. In 2004, the bronze, damaged anvil and plinth were surrounded by a 1.8 metre high steel spiked cage, and the bronze and anvil were coated in black – perhaps as an anti-graffiti measure.
Tamworth Library celebrated its 50th anniversary last year (2023) with a series of special events, a ‘Tamworth Then and Now’ photography exhibition, including photographs from the Tamworth Castle Archives alongside recent photographs of Tamworth by members of the public.
The library has also had a significant refurbishment with new shelving and furniture. However, Steller’s sculpture is partly damaged and partly obscured behind a couple of screens at the entrance to the Library in Tamworth.
While Steller described himself as a sculptor, he denied he was a ceramicist or potter, yet he was responsible for what was described as ‘the largest ceramic sculpture in the world.’
As Marsden points out, only one of Steller’s public art installations, his mural Communication and Documentation in Tamworth Library, has received any academic interpretation, ‘and even then the materials, ceramic and ciment fondu, were incorrectly identified as fibreglass.’
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