Bernard Leach   1      2      3      4      5      6      7      -      PRINTER VERSION

Bernard Leach
by Edmund de Waal
Published by Tate Gallery Publishing

Ernst Gombrich wrote at the beginning of his book The Story of Art that, "There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists".1 Edmund de Waal, in his book on Bernard Leach, has given us the first critical examination of "the pre-eminent artist-potter of this century".2 Gombrich argues that art is a category that we create and that that category and its contents change throughout history. This is an important point because to understand Leach we have to see him in the context of an artist who struggled, especially, in the early part of his career to establish pottery (albeit pottery based on his beliefs) as an artform in its own right. As de Waal says in the last chapter of his book, "Leach's life up until the publication of A Potter's Book was a struggle to find ways of justifying and articulating what he did. Making pots and making definitions about making pots were intricately linked".3

There are few people in the crafts field whether in Britain or the United States, that do not have strong opinions one way or the other about Leach. People either view him in godlike terms or ridicule him as an arrogant and stuffy holdover from the Edwardian era. To find the truth about Leach without falling prey to either of these two extremes is a difficult task and one that de Waal has admirably managed. I think de Waal's own background is part of what makes his examination of Leach's life so credible. When de Waal was in his early teens he apprenticed to Geoffrey Whiting, who was one of Leach's earliest students. Like Leach, he traveled to Japan, made a life for himself as a potter (rather than a university instructor) and spends a proportional amount of his time writing about pottery and the ideas that influence its making. De Waal is, in other words, a direct product of Leach's influence on modern pottery.

In the first chapter, titled "Naive Power", de Waal looks at Leach's life from his birth in 1887 to the summer of 1920 when he returned from Japan with Shoji Hamada to establish a pottery in England. De Waal cautions us in his introduction that:

"Leach's ideas, as much as his pots, must be seen in the context of the times that shaped them. He was accustomed to using sweeping arguments and value-laden terms when scrutinizing the position of potters within society; of talking in general terms of the relationship between East and West. The sources of these arguments and these values are very particular indeed. If we consider the particular make-up of Leach's Japan and Leach's England, the paradoxes at the heart of his creating and thinking become much clearer, and his particular achievements can be better appreciated."4

This is something that must be kept in mind as one reads some of the contradictory elements de Waal gives us of the reality of Leach's life versus the way it has been portrayed by Leach and others over the years. He shows us in this first chapter, for example, how Leach's class put him into a position in Japan that allowed his tendency to make sweeping statements about the nature of art and beauty in both
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