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

>>scape painting, and started work in earnest on his interpretation of English slipware. De Waal points out the problem that Leach and some of his students were having at the time, however, creating an audience for slipware. He quotes a review of a Guild of Potters' exhibition:

"It is a pity that if artists distinguish their work from the produce of a factory it should in the process become artificial and divorced from the the traditions of English pottery. One potter's work, a Leach student, was rough and would probably pass for peasant's work. But her pots are well shaped and boldly painted. It is a pity that they are too expensive to be used every day. Peasants do not make useless pottery if they can help it, and surely rough pottery should not be ornamental."10

At a major exhibition in Leipzig in which Leach exhibited alongside all the important potters of the day, de Waal quotes one reviewer who noted "the Germans frankly think our pots dull" and another who said "we do similar semi-peasant designs, but do not show it as our first-class work".11 On the other hand, Yanagi, who was arranging exhibitions and sales of Leach's work in Japan, which had become an important source of income for the pottery, asked Leach for more of the slipware and less tea bowls:

"It is awfully pity that you did not send us more of yellow galena of pure English quality. You must understand how much we like it. All the pieces, which you sent me this time, without a single exception, were sold. The reason is twofold. Firstly, yellow galena is of pure Western quality and suited for the psychology of modern Japanese who live in Western buildings, manners and styles...Secondly, it is beautiful in artistic quality. I, myself, prefer your well-digested English galenas to the pieces of Sung pattern because they are born-pottery, not made-pottery."12

Leach, however, had a deep emotional attachment to Sung pottery that would eclipse the slipware as his life's devotion. He used the Sung pots, de Waal says:

"...as a marker of seriousness, clarity and fitness of purpose. They would be used in this way by Modernist critics, most notably Herbert Read in Art and Industry illustrated alongside contemporary functionalist designs. The Sung pot seemed to be the clearest manifestation of a growing concern with 'Truth to Materials'."13

Just as Leach had used the slipware tradition to bridge the philosophical and aesthetic gap between East and West, he now used the Sung pot to bridge the gap between that existed between pottery as a rural handicraft and pottery as an artform inside the modernist fine art dialog of that period.

Leach, though, had a difficult time making ends meet while trying to sell his "serious" Sung pieces, whose prices were only within the range of collectors. De Waal gives us evidence of what lies behind another pivotal point in Leach's development.

"It was becoming clear that he couldn't survive in the manner to which he aspired as an art potter. Leach's movement, therefore, towards making a more extensive range of pottery began as a
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