Bernard Leach

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Thrown Bowl by Bernard Leach
Hand-Built decorative tile by Bernard Leach

Bernard Howell Leach, CH, CBE (5 January 1887 – 6 May 1979), was a British studio potter and art teacher.[1] He is regarded as the "Father of British studio pottery".[2]

Biography

Early years (Japan)

Leach was born in Hong Kong, but spent his first years in Japan, until his father moved back to Hong Kong in 1890. Later, he attended Slade School of Fine Art, where he studied etching. Reading books of Lafcadio Hearn he became interested in Japan.

1909 he arrived in Japan for a second time. At Tokyo he taught etching, also talks about etching, also about the ideas of William Morris. The meetings were attended by Mushanokōji Saneatsu, Shiga Naoya, Yanagi Sōetsu and others from the "Shirakaba-Group",[Sub 1] who were trying to introduce western art to Japan after 250 years of seclusion. In etching, Satomi Ton, Kojima Kikuo, and later Ryūsei Kishida, became pupils of Leach.

About 1911 he became fascinated by pottery of Raku-yaki-style, and through introduction by Ishii Hakutei he began to study under Urano Shigekichi 浦野繁吉, 1851-1923), who stood as Kenzan 6th in the tradition of potter Ogata Kenzan (1663 -1743). Helping as interpreter for technical terms was the potter Tomimoto Kenkichi, whom he had met already earlier. From this time Leach wrote articles for the Shirakaba.

1913 he also drafted covers for Shirakaba and "Fyūzan"[Sub 2] Attracted by the in Peking living Prussian philosopher and art scholar Dr. Alfred Westharp he moved 1915 to Peking and took there the Name 李奇聞 (for "Leach"), but returned the following year to Japan. - It was the year 1919, when young Hamada Shōji visited Leach for the first time. Leach received a kiln from Kenzan and built it up in Yanai’s garden and called it Tōmon-gama. Now established as a potter, he decided to move to England.

In 1920, before leaving, he had an exhibition in Osaka, where he met the great potter Kawai Kanjirō. In Tokyo, a farewell exhibition was organized.

Back in England

Interior of the Leach Pottery

Leach had the ambition of establishing a kiln in England, but he had little experience in this aspect of ceramic production.[3] He was accompanied by the young Hamada Shoji and, after walking the Cornish landscape in search of a suitable site, the two established the Leach Pottery at St. Ives, Cornwall in 1920. They chose to build a traditional Japanese wood burning kiln, the first built in the West.[4] The two of them promoted pottery as a combination of Western and Eastern arts and philosophies. In their work they focused on traditional Korean, Japanese and Chinese pottery, in combination with traditional techniques from England and Germany, such as slipware and salt glaze ware. They saw pottery as a combination of art, philosophy, design and craft – even as a greater lifestyle. However, many in the West considered their pottery crude by the refined standards of the day. Publishing A Potter's Book in 1940 defined Leach's craft philosophy and techniques, and became his breakthrough to recognition.

In the 1930s Leach met Mark Tobey, a fellow artist and teacher at Faith. In 1934, Tobey and Leach traveled together through France and Italy, then sailed from Naples to Hong Kong and Shanghai, where they parted company, Leach heading on to Japan. Leach formally joined the Bahá'í Faith in 1940. A pilgrimage to the Bahá'í shrines in Haifa, Israel, during 1954 intensified his feeling that he should do more to unite the East and West by returning to the Orient "to try more honestly to do my work there as a Bahá'í and as an artist..."[5]

Midlife

Leach Pottery covered soup bowl
Leach advocated simple and utilitarian forms. His ethical pots stand in opposition to what he called fine art pots, which promoted aesthetic concerns rather than function. Popularized in the 1940s after the publication of A Potter's Book, his style had lasting influence on counter-culture and modern design in North America during the 1950s and 1960s. Leach's pottery produced a range of "standard ware" handmade pottery for the general public. He continued to produce pots which were exhibited as works of art.

Many potters from all over the world were apprenticed at the Leach Pottery, and spread Leach's style and beliefs. His British associates and trainees include Michael Cardew, Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie, Nora Braden, David Leach and Michael Leach (his sons), Janet Darnell (whom Leach married, 1956), William Marshall, Sylvia Hardaker, Kenneth Quick and Richard Batterham. His American apprentices include Warren MacKenzie (who likewise influenced many potters through his teaching at the University of Minnesota), Byron Temple, Clary Illian and Jeff Oestrich. He was a major influence on the leading New Zealand potter Len Castle who travelled to London to spend time working with him in the mid-1950s. Many of his Canadian apprentices made up the pottery scene of the Canadian west coast during the 1970s in Vancouver.[citation needed]

Leach was instrumental in organizing the only International Conference of Potters and Weavers in July 1952 at Dartington Hall, where he had been working and teaching. It included exhibitions of British pottery and textiles since 1920, Mexican folk art, and works by conference participants, among them Shoji Hamada and US-based Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain. Another important contributor was Japanese aesthetician Soetsu Yanagi, author of The Unknown Craftsman. According to Brent Johnson, "The most important outcome of the conference was that it helped organize the modern studio pottery movement by giving a voice to the people who became its leaders…it gave them [Leach, Hamada and Yanagi] celebrity status…[while] Marguerite Wildenhain emerged from Dartinghall Hall as the most important craft potter in America."[6]

Later years

He continued to produce work until 1972 and never ended his passion for travelling, which made him a precursor of today's artistic globalism. He continued to write about ceramics even after losing his eyesight. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London held a major exhibition of his art in 1977. The Leach Pottery still remains open today, accompanied by a museum displaying many pieces by Leach and his students.

Honours

Edmund de Waal's book

Edmund de Waal, British ceramic artist and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster, had been taught pottery by Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Leach, at the King's School, Canterbury.[11] Whilst in Japan de Waal worked on a monograph of Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum,[12]

De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998.[13] He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach."[14] "The great myth of Leach," he said, "is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsmen".

De Waal noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics. [Sub 3]

Writings (selected)

Subnotes

  1. ↑ Shirakaba ="The Birch" (白樺) was an influential cultural magazine at that time.
  2. ↑ A cultural magazine. Fyūzan = French fusain, charcoal pencil.
  3. ↑ (1) Truly, Leach was not fluent in Japanese language, but more important, he was an educated artist with a keen eye, working in Japan for ten years, much longer than any other western arts and crafts man. (2) When Leach came to Japan in 1909, the every days potter had already disappeared, due to industrial production of tableware. At that time, his friend Yanagi and others were trying to save expressively this heritage, starting the Mingei-(folklore)-movement. Later in his life, but much before de Waal's book appeared, Leach spent ten years, do adept Yanagi's book, "The Unknown Craftsman", together with Japanese friends, into English.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Cortazzi, Hugh. "Review of Emmanuel Cooper's Bernard Leach Life & Work. Japan Society (UK).
  2. ↑ British Council:Artist biography
  3. ↑ Leach, Bernard. (1990). Hamada, Potter. Foreword by Warren MacKenzie. Kodansha International 1990 [1975]
  4. ↑ Leach, Bernard. (1990). Hamada, Potter. Foreword by Warren MacKenzie. Kodansha International 1990 [1975]
  5. ↑ Weinberg, Robert. (1999). Spinning the Clay into Stars: Bernard Leach and the Bahá'í Faith, pp. 21, 29.
  6. ↑ Johnson, Brent, "A Matter of Tradition" in Marguerite Wildenhain and the Bauhaus: An Eyewitness Anthology, (Dean and Geraldine Schwarz, eds.), p. __.
  7. ↑ Japan Foundation: Awards
  8. ↑ Bernard Leach archive: bio notes
  9. ↑ Sims, Barbara R. (1998). Unfurling the Divine Flag in Tokyo, p. 66.
  10. ↑ Bahá'í Arts Dialogue: Biography notes
  11. ↑ Ceramics: Art and Perception, No. 54, 2003.
  12. ↑ de Waal, Edmund.The Hare with Amber Eyes: a hidden inheritance. Vintage, 2011, p. 3. ISBN 978-0-09-953955-1.
  13. ↑ de Waal, Edmund. Bernard Leach. Tate Publishing, 1998. ISBN 978-1-85437-227-7.
  14. ↑ Bernard Leach; University of Westminster

References

External links

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