Pottery: the Seventh Kenzan

Sixty-six years ago, a young English art student in Tokyo found himself at a gathering of Japanese sculptors, painters and poets. Their party game consisted of decorating unglazed raku (stoneware pottery), which could be painted, glazed and fired within an hour. The foreigner was handed a plate. He was nonplused. "What on earth does one put on a pot? . . . I made a drawing of a parrot. They plunged it into some glaze and it turned quite white; I thought they didn't like my drawing, but then I saw everyone's plate went through this process. The kiln was opened with tongs. The pots were put into a red-hot chamber and did not break. That made me gasp. When they had been in that charcoal half an hour they were taken out; one was plunged into water and did not burst. I saw it red-hot under the water, and I thought, good God, this is something fantastic. This is something I must do. I decided that afternoon that I must become a potter."

The student, who had been born in Hong Kong and urged by his father to become a banker, was named Bernard Leach. He is 90 now, and blind, but for at least 40 years Leach has been recognized as the greatest living Western potter, ranking with the Japanese masters Shoji Hamada, Kenkichi Tomimoto and Kanjiro Kawai as one of the four supreme masters of clay in modern times, East or West. All this month a retrospective exhibition, including some 200 Leach pots, has been on view at London's Victoria and Albert Museum. It spans his whole working life from that first raku plate, through the wares he made as a student of the "Sixth Kenzan" (Miura Kenya, Japan's leading potter, who built a kiln for his disciple at Abiko outside Tokyo), to his return to England in 1920 and on through five productive decades in his workshop in the Cornish village of St. Ives.

The pieces range in size from tiny pin boxes to giant platters, and in material from earthenware to porcelain. But it was as a maker of stoneware--that warm, quiet-colored material, lending itself to plain declarative shape--that Leach became best known. His lifelong fondness for it stems from the mingei (folk art) tradition of Japanese and Korean pottery. "We were artist potters," Leach says of his three-year partnership with Shoji Hamada, who helped him found the Leach pottery in St. Ives, "and we admired what is in folk art and nowhere else."

What the English then wanted in ceramics was "hardness, whiteness and translucency"; Leach's work opposed this taste. Its clear volumes and rigorous "drawing" are a legacy from Chinese Sung dynasty pottery. But the emblem of his style--and his favorite possession--is a Korean rice bowl, made by a 19th century village potter on an irregular wheel. "That is as it should be," he says, caressing the roughly glazed clay. "The plain and unagitated, the uncalculated, the harmless, the straightforward, the natural, the innocent, the humble, the modest: where does beauty lie if not in these qualities? More than anything else, this pot is healthy."

Seed on Good Earth. Leach's reputation as a bridge between Eastern and Western craft traditions--once a Zen Buddhist, he is now a devout member of the Baha'i faith--has helped to turn his St. Ives studio into a place of pilgrimage for hundreds of younger potters over the years. But the number of students working there remains limited to eleven. In an age of mechanical reproduction and mass production, the "Seventh Kenzan"--as some Japanese potters affectionately call him--has played a major part in preserving the old authority of the human hand. Above all, Leach is gratified by the growth of pottery among young people, especially in the U.S. He tells of one of his best students, Warren MacKenzie, for almost 25 years head of the ceramics department at the University of Minnesota, who wrote to him about the hundreds of young potters working within a 100-mile radius of the campus. "I said to myself, 'My goodness, the seed has fallen on good earth in my own lifetime--not me alone, but all of us together wanting good things.' "

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