Emil Paul Börner

He was born on 12 February 1888 in Triebischtal, a valley district of Meissen, a few minutes' walk from the porcelain works that would define his life. His father built pianos and worked wood. At fourteen Börner went into a private Meissen workshop to learn porcelain painting — three years of putting tiny, exact images onto curved white surfaces.

That could have been the whole story. Instead he went to Dresden, and from 1905 to 1909 studied at the city's school of applied arts and then its art academy under the painters Richard Müller and Oskar Zwintscher. In 1909 he travelled to Florence and worked alongside the sculptor Sascha Schneider. Italy is where the flat painter became a modeller: he later described it as learning the third dimension.

On 1 December 1910 the State Porcelain Manufactory at Meissen hired him as a painter. Within two years he was a modeller — the person who sculpts the master form every piece is cast from. He served two years at the front in the First World War, and the harder, more expressive work he made afterwards is usually read as carrying that with it.

Then came the two decades that made his name. Under the manufactory's director Max Adolf Pfeiffer — the years 1918 to 1933 are still called the Pfeifferzeit in Meissen — Börner became its most prolific artist. He was given his own master studio in 1923, made a professor by the Saxon finance ministry in 1924, and from 1930 to 1937 ran the manufactory's artistic departments outright.

He joined the Nazi party on 1 April 1933 and belonged to the Reich chamber of fine arts; the record shows it plainly and so do we. He left Meissen in 1937 after Pfeiffer was forced out, taught at the Dresden academies until 1945, and then worked as an independent artist in his home town until his death there on 7 November 1970. He designed his own gravestone in 1956.

Börner's gift was relief — sculpture that stays attached to a flat background and reads by shadow rather than by shape. It is the discipline coins and medals live in, and it suited him exactly. Contemporaries praised his ability to carry a whole idea in a few millimetres of depth without crowding it.

The proving ground arrived in 1920. Germany's metal had gone into the war and the small change had followed it, so towns and states issued Notgeld — emergency money, made of whatever was to hand. Meissen's answer was to fire coins from Böttger stoneware, the dense red-brown ceramic the works had invented two centuries earlier. It was chosen over white porcelain for hard practical reasons: harder to counterfeit, less prone to staining in circulation, and tougher. Börner gave the pieces a thick rim and a stout cross-section so they would survive being dropped.

Saxony became the first German state to issue porcelain money, in early 1921, and the coins spread further than almost anything else Meissen ever made. Börner designed most of them, and kept designing ceramic coins, medals and plaques long after the emergency ended — the Saxon biographical record puts his lifetime total above a thousand designs. The formula he found was simple and repeatable: value, year and place, plus one honest local motif — a building, a trade, a product of the region.

He did not cut his own steel dies. That was Friedrich Wilhelm Hörnlein, the engraver at the Saxon state mint at Muldenhütten, near Freiberg, who was seconded to Meissen for stretches to cut dies on the spot from Börner's plaster models. Börner designed; Hörnlein carved. The two worked that way for years, and it is worth holding onto — it explains why their names appear together on more than porcelain.

The reach of a man who works in relief is not limited to what fits in a hand. In 1929, for Meissen's thousandth anniversary, Börner solved a problem the manufactory had failed at repeatedly and produced the first tunable, playable porcelain carillon — a set of bells cast in porcelain that actually holds pitch — working with his colleague Max Hermann Dietze, who knew music theory. It first rang at the Frauenkirche in Meissen at noon on 1 June 1929. Meissen went on to build porcelain carillons for Dresden, Görlitz, Bremen, Berlin and Halberstadt.

The same year he modelled the figures on two bronze bells for Meissen Cathedral, the larger of them weighing about 7,820 kg — and, in the Nikolaikirche, a war memorial whose porcelain figures stood roughly 2.5 metres tall and weighed some 300 kg each: the largest porcelain figures made anywhere to that point. A coin, a bell and a colossus, all in one career, all worked the same way.