The Clayness of Clay: Bernard Leach and Lucie Rie

[Music] hello take a look at this little milk jug I suppose in many ways it's quite unremarkable like something you might find in a country style kitchen certainly not in a luxury manor house or a fancy penthouse apartment in Manhattan it's something from an ordinary kitchen the most remarkable thing about it is the fact is was made by the godfather of studio ceramics Bernhard leech and of course that's the point for leech the important thing about ceramic pieces like this was their order meanness there is a kind of morality in its everyday quality it's not meant for a prince or a city banker to show off their wealth or refined taste it's meant to be used by anyone of course now having a bernhard lead spot does share a kind of refined taste and even well within his guiding philosophy leach wanted to revive a kind of vernacular or folk pottery tradition that he believed had once existed in England before industrialization in which pottery was functional and to be used by the people who made it now that the leave seems to be embodied in the look of this jug itself we're left in little doubt that it's a handmade object made on the potter's wheel it shows the marks of its making and although it's glazed there was no attempt to use the glaze to hide the making process the places where the Potters hands once held the raw clay in fact leeches earth pigment glazes seem to emphasize and even add to the imperfections of the piece so that we can never imagine that this was produced by a machine in that it stands in stark contrast to what we might think of as typical of say Bauhaus ceramics here's a tea service designed by the founder of the Bauhaus Walter Gropius there is very little to even suggest that these objects are made of clay and smooth surface and high gloss white glaze not a suggest a machine production method but also dehumanizes the pottery taking in way any sense of the hand of the maker if leeches pottery revels in his own materiality the cleanness of the clay as it were the Gropius pieces seem to want to deny their own material nature the clay becomes incidental effectively leach fits into a broader artistic movement that came to the fore after the first world war in bed sculpture and ceramics led by figures such as Barbara Hepworth Henry Moore and Jacob Epstein for these artists if your sculpture was made of stone you shouldn't try to hide the stone with over refined carving or covering it in paint instead you should celebrate its own stone eNOS so that when you look at ahead whether more from this period you are never in any doubt as to what the sculpture is made of and the same is true of a burner to each pot unlike his contemporary Walter Gropius there is no attempt to hide the clay and unlike some Victorian pottery there is no attempt to make the clay look like other objects like real flowers or animals or fruit the clay always looks like clay and it always looks like handmade clay the material nature of the pot is paramount so how do we fit a ceramicist like illusory into this schemer issue more like Bernard leach or water Gropius looking at a bowl like this by new serie our immediate answer might be that she's more like Gropius although we don't see a high-gloss white finish the forms are regular almost geometric in places unlike anything we might expect to find in a leach the relative thinness of the clay suggests a refinement so that it has been suggested that these are very much urban pots perhaps even urban and urbane and we can contrast that again with the rustic forms of leach certainly there are key differences between beach and rhe so that we can point to leech basing himself in the rural setting of Sint Ives in Cornwall wari was based in the heart of West London we also came out of a very different arts and crafts tradition to neech in many ways one that was much closer to that of Gropius he was born into a sophisticated Viennese family her father was a doctor and she was trained in a middle European ceramic tradition that was far less wedded to the rough finish that we see in a niche her mentors were people like the architectures of Hoffmann but look again at this little bowl the glaze is not incidental to our appreciation of it and it moves Lucy read in a definite direction away from the aesthetic of Gropius the machine production method demands standardization and uniformity but in these work we often see the glazes run in unexpected directions so that we can say with some certainty that she left this aspect of her work to chance it's almost as though she embraced the surrealist concept of the happy accident in which she might have had some idea as to what the glaze would be like but the material nature of the glaze in combination with the material nature of the clay pot always threw up unexpected surprises in fact we know that Lucy re-embraced this element of the unexpected in her working method while most Potter's fire their pots twice first firing the clay pot without a glaze in what is called biscuit firing and then firing again in a glaze firing redid not do this she fired her pots only once cutting out the biscuit firing the consequence of this was that oxides and other impurities in the clay tended to bleed into the glaze so that if you look at a repot you'll often see a speckled or mottled effect this is a direct consequence of this way of working and you cannot predict what the modelling will look like so it's an unexpected element that is controlled in effect by the clay itself so miss UV may produce work that we might want to characterize as a vain when set against the rustic quality of Bernhard leach but that doesn't make a light Walter Gropius like leach she does not attempt it's a completely denature her pottery in both there is an embrace of the materiality of clay that cleanness of clay and a desire to allow that clay to express its own nature and in effect dictate at least part of its own artistic form [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Lockdown Art Historian with Michael Paraskos

Views: 6,311

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Id: HpbEmsorwtE

Length: 7min 5sec (425 seconds)

Published: Sun May 24 2020