Potted history

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Janet Koplos

20th Century Ceramics, by Edmund de Waal, London, Thames & Hudson, 2003; 224 pages, $14.95 paper. Bernard Leach: Life & Work, by Emmanuel Cooper, New Haven, Yale University Press, 2004; 420 pages, $55 cloth.

Clay Talks: Reflections by American Master Ceramists, edited by Emily Galusha and Mary Ann Nord, Minneapolis, Northern Clay Center, 2004; 136 pages, $30 paper.

Shards: Garth Clark on Ceramic Art, edited by John Pagliaro, foreword by Peter Schjeldahl, preface by Ed Lebow, New York, Ceramic Arts Foundation & Distributed Art Publishers, 2003; 516 pages, $45 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Sex Pots: Eroticism in Ceramics, by Paul Mathieu, New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 2003; 224 pages, $45 cloth.

A rash of contemporary-ceramics books published within the last year suggests that something is happening in the field. The question is whether it's a new spurt of creativity, a reflective pause or a search for art-world credibility that motivates this outpouring. In any event, the five books under review here are different in kind from most previous nontechnical ceramics books, which have been either hagiographic or reportorial and in either case little inclined to ask hard questions. These new books are sophisticated and mature; they address philosophical and psychological issues of art-making that are specific to this medium yet understandable to anyone interested in contemporary art.

Thames & Hudson last fall published a new title in its "World of hat" series, 20th Century Ceramics. Its author is Edmund de Waal, a British ceramist and scholar whose national and European perspective has been broadened by exposure to the East. The frontispiece of the book is Kazuo Yagi's Mr. Samsa's Walk, an avant-garde sculpture from the 1950s that consists of a standing ring with multiple protrusions, which has recently been on American tour along with the ceramics of Isamu Noguchi, and throughout the book de Waal treats Japanese ceramics with as much care and familiarity as he does European and American work.

De Waal covers a spectrum of work from turn-of-the-19th century china-painting and art pottery to late 20th-century art "visitors" such as Tony Crag. Interim considerations include the Bauhaus and other sites where "quotidian objects were shown to be radical in their role in the 'organization of a new life.'" De Waal is quite good at brief summaries, at formal characterizations and at shifting gears, always maintaining his emphasis on the meanings of ceramics. He calls Picasso's ceramics "a full-blooded taking on of artistic forebears," observes that Lucie Rie's sgraffito articulates transition points in her forms and also makes a powerful connection between archaic vessels and modern ones, and notes that the several Japanese potters who did workshops in America in the '50s were demonstrating pottery "as an exploratory, improvisational art." This is not a long book for one of global scope, so its treatment of some traditions is thin to nonexistent. But for what it does, it is a lively, engaging and earnest achievement.

Several years ago de Waal published a short monograph on Bernard Leach, who through his pots and his writing spread the influence of Japanese and Chinese ceramics in the West. He excoriated Leach for narrowness, as well as for a false emphasis on utility and a foolish attempt to make inexpensive wares, both of which derailed pottery from the art track in Britain. In this new book, de Waal's treatment of Leach is more temperate, if necessarily briefer. He credits Leach--whose A Poller's Book of 1940 introduced Eastern approaches to ceramics, provided a modicum of technical information and hinted at how one might live as a potter--as an evangelist for craft values, an advocate of the pot as a means of tactile expressiveness and a carrier of tradition and of the potter as "symbolically independent of contemporary society" (an image that was powerfully appealing alter World War II).

Leach gets his first full-scale autobiography in Emmanuel Cooper's book. Leach was such a skillful and prolific writer himself that I wondered why someone else would want to tell his story. The advantage of Cooper, another British potter and writer, is that he tells what Leach wouldn't, notably Leach's sexual peccadilloes and his lifelong religious search, which stretched froth boyhood Catholicism to following a mysterious China-based but Caucasian guru, through his long evangelism

for ceramics and his eventual devotion to the Baha'i faith (shared with his close friend Mark Tobey). Cooper has drawn from Leach's extensive writings and lectures as well as his private journals. While his focus is not the esthetic analysis of Leach's work, Cooper conveys an overall sympathy and admiration despite Leach's known failings: he was never as gifted a thrower as his Japanese friends, and he didn't know enough about kiln building or about managing a business. Moreover, he was a cad to his first and second wives and let his third, an American who cheated on him with other women, take over the pottery, to its detriment. Yet his books live on, and many important potters emerged from apprenticeship with him.