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

>> which was then occupied, by Japan and Leach had an exhibition in a gallery the Japanese military authorities had allowed Yanagi to establish. De Waal writes of Yanagi and Leach that:

"Their language when talking about Korea—isolation, sadness, loneliness—gave a sense of inevitability to the political situation. The Koreans as measured by their folk-art, were doomed to remain a subjugated people. Indeed this model of a pre-industrial society where inexpensive and simply made functional and decorated domestic objects were the norm seem predicated on a form of oppression."17

American potters who have found themselves enamored with Yanagi and 'mingei' need to read this section of de Waal's book before they are tempted to justify their work by quoting Yanagi again about the 'unconscious' beauty of Korean pottery. You hear over and over from these potters that the best pots are those created for daily use. And what they mean by "daily use" is, of course is cheap. This idea of the inexpensive pot having a certain moral cache that other more expensive work cannot aspire to has been remarkably tenacious. We have things that we use every day, however, like the computer I am using at this moment, the car I drive and the television I watch, that are expensive, not particularly beautiful but eminently functional and whose life span is significantly shorter that the pottery I own. While I am not suggesting that the work Leach and Yanagi found beautiful, isn't. We have to look at the context in which this paradigm was created and question its intellectual soundness.

Leach returned to England in 1935 and eventually settled not in St. Ives, but in Dartington where he began writing A Potter's Book. It is a book that has had, and I believe will continue to have, a tremendous influence on young potters. De Waal analyzes its appeal saying:

"Indeed its significance and popularity are due to the complex way in which Leach's technical descriptions are bound up in his values. It is a book that seems to encode the whole meaning of being a potter and working as a potter, not simply the making of pots."18

De Waal quotes for us some of the more negative reviews of the time, most of which take him to task for being too dogmatic and his view of ceramics as being too narrow. This book, however, put Leach on an intellectual course that he would maintain, publicly at least, for the rest of his life.

In Chapter 3, "The Need for Roots", de Waal covers Leach's life from 1940 until his death in 1979. He discusses his emergence as an important figure in the British crafts movement, his return to Japan after the war and his visits to the United States and a few reactions to that visit and his ideas from people like Marguerite Wildenhain. He also goes into some of the aspects behind Leach's book Kenzan and His Tradition and what became known as the Sano scandal that surrounded it. About which de Waal correctly concludes "...shows Leach adrift in a Japan outside the mingei world of friends and admirers, and in a world where his own knowledge of Japanese art was so mediated through translators and intermediaries that he was able to become implicated in a palpable fraud."19
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