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

>> In the final chapter, "Beyond East and West", de Waal examines what he feels are some of the major contradictions of Leach's life. Of his relationship with Yanagi, for example, de Waal looks beyond the obvious friendship to more pragmatic issues that have never been closely examined. He argues:

"Leach is anointed by Yanagi, Yanagi is anointed by Leach...For just as Leach's authority in the West was constructed around the mythic story of his knowledge and insight into Japan, of his apprenticeship into the Kenzan school, of his 'natural' absorption in Japanese life, so Yanagi's authority in the West was constructed through Leach's placing him as not only famous in Japan but amongst the most profound thinkers on Japan."20

And lastly he looks at the paradoxes between what Leach wrote and what he practiced in his art. In Leach's writing the stress, de Waal says:

"...was on that of integration; that at this particular moment in history the potter could and indeed should have control over all the processes of creation. This has been the great and powerful seduction of A Potter's Book: its sense of self-sufficiency. Leach's relationship with those he 'conducted', seems to stand in direct opposition to such rhetoric. Leach's relationship with those who worked for him in the studios, those whose 'orchestral playing' he 'conducted', seems to stand in direct opposition to such rhetoric."21

De Waal's book, from the parts I have quoted at least, may seem overly critical to some, but I came away with a different feeling. I must admit that Leach was a powerful force on my development and I probably would never have gone to Japan if I had not read A Potter's Book. Once there, however, I found few if any of the things he wrote about Japan to be true. At some point (I can't recall exactly when) I felt slightly betrayed because I had been lured into this predicament —this struggle to be a potter and find meaning for that occupation in modern culture—by the strength of his ideas, expressed so eloquently in his writing, only to find many of them to be a cul de sac. De Waal's book, however, allows us to see Leach not as someone who is in touch with some higher secret that the rest of us cannot access, but simply as one of us, an imperfect being who is subject to all the vicissitudes of life like the rest of us. That means potters can get on with the business of creating work that challenges and questions assumptions about the nature of beauty and pottery's role in culture and quit worrying about whether or not what they make fits a frozen standard that was never quite as real as we all somehow wanted it to be. Potters, in other words, have to grow up and take responsibility for their own work and quit falling back on Leach's ideas whenever they are forced to justify what they are making. They need instead to develop their own ideas and arguments for what they make and then be unrelenting in their efforts to convince culture of the importance of those ideas and the work that embodies them. That is what Leach did.
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