Tower and Town, May 2020

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A Dragon In St Ives

You would have been witnessing the magic of working together of the legendary East-West soulmates: the younger Sh?ji Hamada (1894-1978) and the taller, Bernard Leach (1887-1979). They were to become giant figures within the pottery tradition.

This is a brief account of the lives, friendship and works of the two who forged their legends within the crucible of the East-West exchange.

Where hearts are fused
The son of a colonial judge, Bernard Leach was born in the East (Hong Kong) and educated in the West (England), He perceived himself as a courier between the disparate cultures. He lost his mother during birth and was taken to Kyoto in Japan by his maternal grandparents, but was taken back later to Hong Kong and then to Singapore following his father’s re-appointment and re-marriage. Leach was eventually sent to England in 1897 when he was 10, and later (1903–08) studied etching at the Slade School of Art in London.

Leach travelled back to Japan in 1909 in order to practise etching and found himself associated with the Shirakaba Art Group which advocated opening up of Japan. He also found himself drawn to eastern philosophy and pottery, which he took up by 1911 after being inspired by the beautiful simplicity of the tea ceremony ware. He exhibited ceramics in Tokyo and studied under the renowned potter Urano Shigekichi, (Kenzan VI), before the end of the decade. Leach was then working in the tradition of Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743), who was a noted maker of raku ware; and in the process of doing so he earned the shared title of Kanzan VII, denoting the seventh generation of Kazan raku potters. (Raku ware is Japanese hand-moulded lead-glazed earthenware, originally invented in 16th-century Kȳoto by the potter Ch̄ojir̄o.)

A younger Japanese ceramics technologist with aspirations to become a ceramic artist was much impressed with Leach’s Tokyo exhibition that he wrote to him in order to arrange a meeting. The young Japanese was Sh̄oji Hamada, who subsequently became his lifetime friend and collaborator. Hamada in fact accompanied Leach on his return to England in 1920 in order to help him set up Leach Pottery in St Ives, Cornwall, and build the climbing kiln (dragon) which formed the beginning of this article. Leach and Hamada inspired loyalty within the teams they formed over the years and drew inspirations from each other and their teams.

The Hamada effect
Hamada returned to Japan in 1923 to become a major figure in the Mingei folk art movement of the 1920s and '30s. He set up his studio in Mashiko, which is situated about 100 km north-east of Tokyo, and led turning the town into a major centre of ceramics, famous for its thick and rustic pottery. He also spent time in Britain where he taught Bernard Leach the art of Japanese pottery. Thanks to Hamada, Mashiko is now an international centre where potters from around the world could go to work. This is unique for Japan because the art of pottery, as other refined crafts like Samurai sword making, is normally handed down through the family line. Hamada was in 1955 designated a "Living National Treasure" in Japan, and he was revered in the West as the archetypal "Oriental" potter. His contributions to Japanese culture and preservation of its traditional architecture are well documented.

The Leach effect
It was towards the end of the nineteenth century that artists and thinkers like William Morris and John Ruskin began to speak against what they considered to be the decadent taste of the day. Some artists like William de Morgan responded and the radical thinking did bear fruit and, by the end of the century, the Arts and Crafts Movement had emerged in Britain and Art Nouveau was an international art style. In response the pottery industry introduced “Art-Ware” and the monochrome tradition, inspired by Chinese wares, also found favour with artist-potters at the start of the 20th century. This, unfortunately, resulted in a division of labour style of work by the early studio potters. In hindsight this unsuitable system required a real that could only come from a new source of inspiration, from someone outside the industrialized system. Such a person was Bernard Leach.

In fact many potters today work in the way he propounded in “The Potter’s Book”, which he wrote in Dartington in 1939 setting out his belief in the potter as a craftsman concerned in every aspect of the making, including the design and making of his own kilns. Leach’s work also fitted admirably into certain aspects of the Arts and Crafts Movement, especially the quietist and more anonymous-seeking ideals of those British potters that preceded him; although, ironically, he knew of William Morris through the Japanese philosopher Yanagi. Moreover, his lifelong fascination with the Far-East, and his recognition of the beauty and simplicity of the lifestyle and philosophy of its people, reflected in their crafts, made him a major contributor to the revival of pottery as a craft in the West. This was reflected in his aspiring to marry certain Far Eastern traditions with the mediaeval English style making him father of British Studio Pottery and a leader of the avant-garde movement of his day – a revolt by cultured people against the garishness of factory-made pottery.

Bernard Leach also gave St Ives its international reputation, and consolidated the status of the artist potter through international lecturing and publishing; including A Potter’s Book (1940) and the biographies Kenzan and His Tradition (1966) and Hamada, Potter (1975). You might be also interested to learn that an annotated edition of his 1978 “Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits and Essays” is due to be published in August 2020 by Unicorn.

Where hearts are buried
As a young man I was once told by an older Mancunian friend named Eric Banner that “the years gallop once you are 18”. I presume we have all experienced this one way or another and resorted to visiting our yesterdays to pursue unfinished business and say few tender words to loved ones swept away by the torrent of time.

And when you finally get overtaken by the galloping years and you begin telling stories of foolish times and loved ones, and of 1920 and its fire breathing dragon, a day might arrive when you would surprisingly find yourself actually in the pottery town of Mashiko in Japan. Some thick black smoke would be bellowing high in the sky and a person in the know would be animatingly pointing out that its source is the Mingie Pottery. So you would head there to find a not slumbering large dragon venting its heat and fire.

Some squeaking noise however soon would distract you to look into a room within a nearby outbuilding where two very old men would be sitting facing each other next to a window. They would have been sitting on an elevated wooden platform with their legs dangling within two rectangular openings containing foot-operated potter’s wheels. This would have set you wondering: it must have been few years……but there is something rather familiar! Suddenly the older and taller of the two, seated on your right at the larger platform opening, would have read your mind, nodded tenderly to his friend and turned smilingly to you and said:

“And if you my old story teller wandered again atop the Stennack in St Ives, remember to tread carefully over where our hearts are buried”.

Raik Jarjis