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

>> matter of expediency: "everything is so dominated by the damnable shop-minded and commercial burgher of England. So in spite of the recognition [sic] of my work as the best it is difficult to sell except to collectors and a small public. I shall have to limit myself to certain things and produce them more cheaply in order to keep going."14

Here we see Leach the pragmatist not the romantic idealist who wants to produce things of unconscious beauty for everyday use, that would come later. With the fine arts world no longer financially viable, Leach looked for other ways to keep the pottery going. He began producing decorative tiles for fireplace surrounds and started to show his domestic ware in galleries that dealt in handmade artifacts and ethnic items. De Waal tells us that these exhibitions "...were not seeking to gain critical exposure: it was the genesis of a distinct 'craft world', and it was a world that Leach, feeling increasingly embattled, was warming to".15 Leach ultimately found the need to justify this activity intellectually and wrote a pamphlet entitled A Potter's Outlook that was published in 1928 by the New Handworker's Gallery. In his thesis he attacks factories as producing a kind of de-graded folk art which in his eyes had absolutely no redeeming qualities. De Waal writes:

"A Potteršs Outlook shows Leach to be keenly aware of the deficiencies of his position, both philosophically and materially, and desperate of resolution. He was forty years old, with a large family of five children, no financial security and a strong awareness of how well other, metropolitan, art-potters were doing. His desire to make what he vividly called 'necessary pots' was evangelical."16

Leach the idealist began creating philosophical arguments for these 'necessary pots', pots that would be made mostly by others to his designs and under his supervision. I cannot say that Leach was disingenuous in his analysis of the work being produced by industry at the time, it certainly could not have been any worse than the work now produced, yet Leach unlike us had a memory of better things. It is clear though, that his prescription for the cure of this ill was not as pure in its origins as we would like to have believed.

It was not his necessary pots though, that would deliver him from financial disaster. In 1931 Leonard and Dorothy (an American and heiress to the Whitney fortune) Elmhirst invited him to set up a pottery based on the ideas he was trying at St. Ives. He told the Elmhirsts that he needed to experiment with prototypes of domestic ware that could be manufactured at Dartington as a 'commercial unit'. In 1933 he received a grant from the Dartington Research Grants Board to return to Japan for this purpose. De Waal spends not quite two pages on this return to Japan, but adequately captures its effect on Leach. He had left England a somewhat marginal figure struggling to run a rural pottery on the verge of financial collapse and arrived in Japan to be greeted by friends who had published a new biography about him, full of illustrations, reminiscences by Japanese friends and reprints of his earlier articles. He was asked to lecture everywhere he went and was treated as a celebrity. Nationalism, however, was sweeping Japan and his group of friends from the old days with whom he had spent hours talking about Western philosophy and art were now involved in a new interest, the term for it, coined by Yanagi, was 'mingei' which meant 'art of the people'. During that year in Japan Leach and Yanagi traveled to Korea,
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