Kenzan VII

One of the world's best pottery-makers turned up in Washington last week to begin a lecture and demonstration tour that will take him to 15 cities in the U.S. and Canada. He was Bernard Leach, 63, a spare, tweedy, Hong Kong-born English man who described himself as "a sort of courier between East & West." Leach was certainly well equipped to acquaint U.S. potters with oriental standards and tricks of their trade. He had studied painting in London, gone to To kyo at 21 to teach it. "I had no idea of taking up pottery," he recalls, "but in Japan I fell in with people who had. I chased around until I got hold of this old man, Ogata Kenzan, who was sixth in succession of a great line of potters. I liked him at first go-off, and asked if I could be his student."

When the old master died, Leach became, in effect, Kenzan VII. "I exhibited a few pots with my paintings. All the pots were sold. So I said, 'What ho!' " After that he went completely to pots.

In 1921 Leach returned to England with a famous fellow potter named Shoji Hamada, and set up a kiln at St. Ives. The pottery still produced there by Leach and twelve students is much prized by his fans.

Lately Leach has become a leading member of the British Crafts Center, which passes on Britain's craft exports.

As a craftsman, he considers big-wheel potters like Spode and Wedgwood pathetically pachydermatous. They have "banalized the art," he says, by mass-producing a few popular designs.

"Pots, like all other forms of art," Leach once explained, "are human expressions . . . projections of the minds of their creators . . . Good hand craftsmanship is directly subject to the prime source of human activity, whereas machine crafts, even at their best, are activated at one remove--by the intellect."

Leach had brought 301 examples of his own hand craftsmanship with him to Washington. There were urns, vases, teacups, mugs and plates whose clean lines and subdued colors echoed the golden age of Chinese pottery. But none was slavishly Chinese and some were "modern." A first-class craftsman and connoisseur of oriental pottery, Leach is also an occidental, an artist, and his own man. The combination made for strength as well as refinement. His work argued even more forcefully for handcraft than his words.

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