A Ceramic History by Edmund de Waal

1. Clay and Process
2. Pioneering Definitions 1900-1940 The Studio Pot
3. European Influences: Lucie Rie and Hans Coper
4. Art Schools: A New Ceramics?
5. Teachers: Who Taught You Then?
6. Altogether Elsewhere: Cultural Diversity and the Studio Pot
7. Painterly Surfaces?
8. Does it Pour? Function in Studio Pottery
9. Necessary Pots? Unnecessary Pots?

2. Pioneering Definitions 1900-1940 The Studio Pot

'Studio Pottery', that is the making of pots by hand in a small studio rather than in a factory, has a peculiar history. It is a history that includes changes in artistic taste and in consumer taste, the broad sweep of art history and small and very particular, affecting stories of struggles to achieve notice and acceptance for this 'new art'. It is a complicated history in that many of the famous pioneer studio potters told their own stories whilst leaving out the achievements of their contemporaries. Before Bernard Leach and Staite Murray started making pots there were several other potters who had pioneered 'studio pottery'. The first 'studio pots' tell us a great deal about the people who made them, and the kinds of things that they cared about. They are still important because they defined many of the ways in which contemporary ceramics have evolved, indeed the kinds of pottery that they were reacting against is still being reacted against now.

The three most influential early 'pioneering' studio potters were:

William Staite Murray (1881-1962) Staite Murray was the Professor at the Royal College of Art in the 1920s and 1930s. He exhibited his pots alongside some of the foremost artists and sculptors of the time and gained much recognition for his powerful abstracted decoration.

Bernard Leach (1887-1979) Leach is often talked of as the 'Father' of studio pottery. He trained as a painter and spent eleven formative years in Japan where he started to make pots. He established a pottery in St Ives. His strong and persuasive views, coupled with his training of many potters, have made him a figure of great significance. Leach's book A Potters' Book is still the key text on the creation and values of studio pottery. The first chapter of this, entitled 'Towards a Standard' begins with this clarion call:

'Very few people in this country think of the making of pottery as an art, and amongst those few the great majority have no criterion of aesthetic values which would enable them to distinguish between the genuinely good and the meritricious. Even more unfortunate is the position of the average potter, who without some standard of fitness and beauty derived from tradition cannot be expected to produce, not necessarily masterpieces, but even intrinsically sound work.'

The 'standards' that Leach talks of in his book are best seen in the pots that he looked to: the three kinds of 'canonical pot' discussed below.

Michael Cardew (1901-1983) Cardew was Leach's first student. He was passionate about slipware and established a workshop in Winchcombe in the Cotswolds where he made functional pots decorated with great verve. Cardew spent much time in Africa. He was also an influential teacher.

Cardew described the pots that he disliked most as 'nasty, thin and white'. All three of these pioneer potters were reacting against particular kinds of pottery, and reacting to particular kinds of pottery. In general terms they were all in some kind of opposition to the industrial ceramics that had become so common by the turn of this century. What they objected to in it was its' standardisation: when you looked at a piece of cheaply made crockery there was little or no sense of who had made it or of the materials from which it had been fabricated. The individual voice of the maker, the way that they held the clay in making, glazed the pot or decorated it had become lost in the anonymity of the industrial process. What they all responded to was a belief that there was more to pots than this washed-out and bland simulcram. The Arts and Crafts Movement at the end of the Nineteenth Century had provided a context for radical dissent from such industrial manufacture: one of the central beliefs of John Ruskin, the Victorian art critic and social theorist, was that such work 'imprisoned' the worker and that the object made reflected this. There was an ethical dimension behind the art. One of the great impetus behind these early studio potters, then, was to find the sorts of people who would agree with them, believe in their work and collect them. Where would they find these people? How would they persuade them there was merit in their work? Where could they show their pots? And what kind of pots were they to make - were they to be domestic pots for using in everyday life or special pieces for display?

Staite Murray never made pots that could be used in overtly domestic ways. He saw his pots as having the same value as sculpture, they were named and priced as such, and thus removed from the demands of the everyday. Bernard Leach, however, from a combination of both financial need as well as conviction, made pots that could be used, and encouraged his students and apprentices to make functional pots based on his forms. His feelings on utility and function went through many gradual shifts of emphasis over his long life, but his belief that well-made domestic pots could enrich the lives of those who encountered them lies at the heart of the debate around the 'ethical pot.' He argued that there was a quality of vitality that only revealed itself through daily use. This has proved to be one of the most abiding core ideas of the studio pottery movement: many people who read his books or encountered his domestic pots (his 'Standard Ware') were moved to follow his example. Many apprentices were trained by Bernard Leach at St Ives and went on to start their own workshops. For instance the work of Harry and May Davis, (1910-1986) and of Richard Batterham (1936-)was inspired by Leach's ideas: their pots carry the same preoccupations with quiet and understated glazes that work with the colours and textures of the fired clay, and finely judged handles and lids that would work well in daily use. Other potters read Leach's books and were inspired to make pots that could integrate both Western and Oriental kinds of pottery: Geoffrey Whiting (1919-88) was one of those who started in this way.

The three kinds of pottery that these pioneers looked to as precedents for their kind of 'real pot' were local vernacular English traditions (medieval jugs and slipware in particular) and the early Chinese wares of the Twelfth Century Sung Dynasty. These are very different pots but there are some common denominators between them. Medieval pottery with its strong articulations of form and lack of fussiness in surface gave them a sense of being part of a long tradition of making clear, pure forms. Critics of the 1920s compared these medieval jugs to trees or to the human form: they were seen as very natural and unstudied. Some of William Staite Murrays’ vase forms have the characteristic splayed out base and undulating lines of these jugs. Bernard Leach found the way in which the handles seemed to be an almost organic part of the pot to be important for his understanding of how to make coherent forms.

English slipware was the last remaining tradition of country pottery continuing to be made in quantity. From this pottery the colour and the vivid gestural decoration that are such a strong part of slipware was seen as most intriguing. Leach and Cardew both made slipware pots early on at the start of the 1920s at Leach's pottery in St Ives. Leach made two distinctly different kinds of slipware pot: tankards and lidded jars with lettered inscriptions on them for the passing summer tourist trade , and very large platters or 'chargers'. These were decorated with stylised border patterns of crosshatching and often with Leach's name in the manner of famous Seventeenth Century potters. The central area then had an image of either Western heraldic or mythological feeling or an Eastern image. These large pots were not for tourists but for 'small country houses'. Cardew, after he left Leach made a huge array of slipware pots for everyday use. Unlike Leach they were extremely cheap: Cardew even tried to compete with the prices of factories.

The pots of the Sung Dynasty, austere in colour with muted earth tones of greys, celadon greens or iron blacks, appealed to these potters because they seemed both modern in their simplicity and also strange and exotic. These pots were seemingly stripped of extraneous decoration. They appeared to be wonderful models for studio potters in that they also seemed to be 'natural', with the bases of the pots often left unglazed and the qualities of the clay apparent. Staite Murray used Sung pots as inspiration for many of his bowls. For Leach the Sung became a metaphor for all that was of most value in pottery: the epitome of his values of direct, unself-conscious making.

Several of the great collectors of Chinese pots started to collect the pioneer potters' work too. Their work 'fitted' into an Oriental context: When Leach's pots were exhibited in London galleries they were shown on carved wooden Chinese stands.

Looking at the work of studio potters working today it is possible to see these three strands of historical pottery still alive as influences. Particular forms (the medieval jug shape) and glazes (the Chinese celadon and tenmoku glazes) are still being used and reinterpreted. In the work of Jim Malone (1946-) and Phil Rogers (19XX-) the medieval jug is a form that they return to as a point of inspiration. In the work of David Leach, (1911-) particularly his celadon glazed fluted bowls and covered jars, the images of Sung pots are still alive. This raises interesting questions for us. Are the kinds of impact and meaning that these forms and glazes had in the 1920s different from today? What is the relationship between the modern potters using these ideas and the pioneer potters?