ARTS AND CRAFTS POTTERY

Soetsu Yanagi, Bernard Leach and Shoji Hamada

William Morris, the founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, learned and practiced many crafts, but not pottery.  There was Arts and Crafts pottery (William de Morgan, Sir Edmund Elton, Della Robbia) but it was re-invented by Bernard Leach in the 20th century.  Although Leach was influenced by Japanese pottery, many of his Japanese colleagues, notably Soetstu Yanagi, were strongly influenced by Morris, so Arts and Crafts came full circle in the Leach Pottery.


Among studio potters there was a pottery ideology, sometimes called "the ethical pot", in which the idea was to make honest, beautiful pots that everyone could afford. They were supposed to be superior to factory-made pots, which were "soulless". The country was supposed to be superior to the town, so you should work in the country. But the ethical pot was nonsense. There is nothing soulless or dishonest about factory-made pottery because jugs and plates don't have souls. It's impossible to make things by hand at low prices without impoverishing the maker and eventually putting him out of business. The leading lights of this ideology, Bernard Leach and Michael Cardew, were hopelessly impractical and un-businesslike.  Leach was saved from bankruptcy only when his son imported Stoke-on-Trent management methods into his pottery, and Cardew only started to make a living when he gave up his pottery and took a job as a Colonial civil servant.

The ideology of the honest pot derives rather less from William Morris than from C.R.Ashbee, who set up a rural craft community in the Cotswolds.  Ashbee thought a craftsman should be self-taught and preferred to take on unskilled workers rather than apprenticed tradesman. This produced a cult of amateurism, whose more ridiculous pretensions were satirised by Richmal Crompton, the author of the "William" books, in the 1930s:

"The Pennymans were people with a mission, and their mission was to bring back the age of beauty and craftsmanship, and to get away from the ugliness of modern civilisation and back to the morning of the world. Their chief way of doing this seemed to consist in the wearing of hand-woven garments of curious design, the eating of strange food out of crockery that had been baked in a kiln by Mrs Pennyman, with metal implements that had been hand-beaten by Mr Pennyman, and the use of furniture made by Mr Pennyman. The patterns of their hand-woven garments were strangely erratic, the crockery was lumpy and misshapen, and the hand-beaten table cutlery was malleable and gave to any pressure, while the hand-made furniture had a disconcerting way of resolving itself into its component parts under the weight of the human body."

- William the Detective

This nonsense survived for a long time.  Something like it was satirised in Kingsey Amis's Lucky Jim, whose Professor Welch is a bit Arts and Crafts. It  still survives to some extent among ceramists who are are pre-occupied with materials and methods rather than design and context.