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

>>Eastern and Western culture to go unchallenged. He wrote only a few months after his arrival an article (which was translated for a Japanese magazine) about his views on the characteristics of Japanese art and why etching ­ which he had come to Japan to teach at the age of 22 ­ "is particularly suitable for young Japanese artists to learn".5 It was at a lecture he was giving during this period that he met a young aristocratic critic named Yanagi Soetsu. It was Yanagi who introduced Leach to a group called Shirakaba, made up of affluent artists, intellectuals and poets. Shirakaba would, de Waal says, "mediate his awareness and circumscribe his knowledge of the country and provide him with the key friendships of his life".6 Another friend of Leach, Tomimoto Kenkichi who had lived in England and studied stained glass there and spoke good English was to be instrumental in Leach's development as a practicing artist. It was Tomimoto who accompanied Leach to the famous Raku party Leach wrote about in A Potter's Book and subsequently went with him when he sought out instruction from a potter named Urano Shigkichi who held the title of Kenzan VI. Both would become Kenzan VI's students and would jointly receive the title of Kenzan VII. De Waal remarks that: "Given the status as a Western artist and Kenzan's as a paid teacher, the significance of the transference of this title after only a year, to someone who could barely speak Japanese let alone fully comprehend or literally read the allusions implicit in the tradition arouses curiosity".7

To me, though, one of the most important observations de Waal makes in this chapter is how Leach is able to merge his ideas about the East and West using English slipware tradition which he first encountered in a book that Tomimoto bought in Tokyo.

"The appeal of the slipware dishes and jugs was manifold; it was a decorative tradition where a central image was privileged and the need for pattern making in the round was avoided. There seemed to be a good historical grounding here for pottery that crossed the boundaries for being either straightforwardly utilitarian or decorative. Crucially, it gave value to lettering on pots in a way that Leach had been struggling to comprehend within the complexity of the calligraphic Kenzan tradition. It allowed pots to be titled or signed in obvious ways, and above all it gave Leach, whose growth as a decorative artist had taken place completely in the East, some sense of famous Western potters."8

Leach must have sensed that in spite of how "right" his and Yanagi's thoughts about merging the best ideas of the East and West were, they could not be validated unless he as an artist was able to create some physical manifestation of them that was believable. This discovery of English slipware must have resolved any such questions and given him the push and the confidence he needed to leave the security, comfort and notoriety of Japan for an uncertain future in England.

When Leach returned to an England in 1920, the making of pots was a much less respected activity than the decorating of forms or blanks. De Waal says that at Camberwell School of Art, one of the only art schools at that time to teach ceramics, a local thrower was employed to produce pots to the designs of the students.9 There was little written on the technical side of pottery making, glazing and firing and no commercial kilns were available. It was in this atmosphere that Leach moved to St. Ives, which had become a fashionable art colony in the 1880s, but by 1920 was known for rather old-fashioned land-
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