Crafts
A giant among craftsmen
Tanya Harrod recalls the life and work of Michael Cardew
To my eternal regret I did not meet the late Michael Cardew. He was Bernard Leach's first pupil and, in Leach's view, his best. He came to the St Ives Pottery in 1923, just down from Oxford, tall with Apollonian profile and golden hair, so beautiful that Leach recalled: 'He focused every girl's eyes — it was embarrassing to walk with him.' The centenary of Leach's birth has just been celebrated by the Post Office with a special issue of stamps showing pots by Leach, Hans Coper, Lucie Rie and Elizabeth Fritsch. Of course Michael Cardew should have been of the Company. Typically he was not so hon- oured because like many a genius he is difficult to categorise and spent much of his life in pursuit of impossible dreams. For Cardew was not content merely to be a very great potter — everything which he made has a powerful strength and integrity about it — but he also agonised profoundly over the role of the handworker in an industrial society and acted bravely on his conclusions.
Some of his reflections are recorded in his Pioneer Pottery, a curious, painstaking textbook written by a man whose upbring- ing and intellectual training had left him ignorant of science and technology but who was determined to rectify this state of affairs. But above all we get the measure of the man in his unfinished autobiography which, happily, is going to be published by Collins this coming spring. A Potter's Progress is surely one of the vital docu- ments of arts and crafts history, far more practical and vivid than anything by Eric Gill, C.R. Ashbee or Leach himself and a worthy successor to the writings of Ruskin and Morris.
Cardew's passion in life was based on a childhood memory — of the old Devon slipware men at work making pOts which `looked as if they had occurred naturally, by a common consent between the potters and the environment in which they lived.' This dream pursued him throughout his schooldays and his time at Oxford. He was always keenly aware that for the son of an upper-middle-class civil servant his ambi- tions were bizarre in the extreme — a salutary thought today when art schools are full of `ceramicists' making pots with- out any serious self-doubt at all.
Cardew justified his desire to keep alive the country pottery tradition thus:
Where whole classes of useful things are made redundant by some new process or material, or when a particular form of religion loses its hold, we have a perfectly correct instinct to cling to our art, because it is all we have. So we produce art for art's sake. There is nothing in this to invalidate what we make, if what we make is good.
But Cardew did think his work to be invalid, and it is only when he arrived in West Africa in 1942 that he felt that his creative life had begun. Cardew hated the marginal role of the studio potter, making mainly for collectors and holding little exhibitions in select galleries. He was repelled by the Art Worker's Guild and by the whole 'careful, precious, enclosed world of post-Victorian craftwork'. But when in the 1930s he was hailed by fellow artists as a fauve, as a new Gauguin, he felt out of place too — 'I could not travel in the fine art bag.'
At Achimota, Gold Coast (now Ghana) his contribution to the war effort was to run a huge pottery and tileworks and to train Africans to use the potter's wheel, to glaze and to kiln-fire. He records:
I began to look back at my former life as if it had been spent in a kind of dream world, beautiful perhaps, but not quite real, and from then on, never really relevant. Even though I was already 41 when I first arrived, I could never afterwards take that previous life quite seriously. It seemed to have been filled with rather trivial and doctrinaire debates about things like 'handcraft versus machine production', about 'art in industry', or stupid snobbish questions like 'are you an artist or an craftsman?' Cardew was not alone in this feeling of liberation. In West Africa he was to meet like-minded spirits — above all the vision- ary Russian sculptor Herbert Meyerowitz, who was transforming art education there and attempting to found an institute at Achimota devoted to the study of African culture. For Cardew and Meyerowitz, Gold Coast appeared to be a tabula rasa for art training. It was a land where the arts and crafts were still united and whose peoples seemed to possess an effortless natural creativity.
The last quarter of Cardew's autobiogra- phy deals with his first years in West Africa. Ironically, Achimota turned out to be a paradise lost. It was, and still is, an elite boarding school with a plethora of public school customs and values. Cardew Michael Cardew at work.
swiftly realised how problematic his role was — part colonial educator, part arts and crafts idealist. His schoolboy apprentices saw no beauty in the artisanal work that studio potters value and Cardew noted ruefully that like many another colonial he found it easier to work with `uneducated' Africans. Not least of Cardew's problems was his own mandarin background: tech- nically he was ill equipped for such a large-scale enterprise. Within three years the pottery and tileworks were closed down.
This failure bit deep into Cardew's soul. Although the war had ended and his wife and children awaited his return to England Cardew felt determined to prove that he could make fine pots in Africa using only African materials. Battling with illness and unsuitable clays, Cardew set up a small pottery on the Volta River and there produced some of the loveliest stoneware of our century. It is at this point that his autobiography ends. He did not live to write of his return to West Africa in the 1950s or of the successful pottery he set up in Nigeria. He never ceased to question his role there too, or to brood about the impact of our civilisation on the arts of the region, or to study and praise the work of the women potters of Nigeria and to try to analyse and understand the raw materials available for pottery there.
Later, on his retirement, he travelled the world teaching and demonstrating — to the United States, to New Zealand and Au- stralia. Tall and haggard after his years in the tropics, he would officiate priestlike at the wheel, quoting Confucius and reciting Greek and Latin poetry as he threw — a striking, unforgettable and contradictory figure, a scholar artisan and a giant among craftsmen.
Michael Cardew's work is on display at the V & A, York City Art Gallery, the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth and the Holburne of Menstrie Museum at the University of Bath.
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