Crafts
David Garland: Pottery (Crafts Council, till 7 June)
The potter's dilemma
Tanya Harrod
the 1930s and 1940s studio ceramics were regularly reviewed in the Times and Morning Post. Herbert Read hailed pot- tery as 'pure art' and it was continually compared with abstract sculpturo. In a limited way potters and fine artists exhi- bited together. Today, however, a rigid hierarchy of the arts is observed.
Perhaps pottery has been the victim of 'Oceanie le Ciel', wall-hanging by Henri Matisse its own success. After the war, inspired by the ideals more than by the actual achieve- ments of Bernard Leach, countless little potteries sprang up. 'Craft shops' prolifer- ated and even the ceramics industry began to mass-produce imitations of honest thrown pottery. All this had a devastating effect. Today few art critics have any idea of the history of studio ceramics or know where to see examples of it. (Perhaps it is symptomatic that one of the greatest col- lections of British studio pottery is to be found behind drawn curtains in a small terraced house in Wakefield.) Critics approach ceramics, and indeed all the so-called crafts (the very word is like a knell) in search of certainties and reassur- ance — on, as it were, a holiday from the stresses of high art. The poor Crafts Council must be frustrated by this. Most of its exhibitions are overlooked, but their exhibition of the painter Eric Ravilious's modest designs for Wedgwood was praised and discussed in every quality newspaper. So with an understandable desire to woo the public the Crafts Council Gallery (12 Waterloo Place, SW1) is currently showing tableware by David Garland. His jugs, bowls, plates, etc. are immediately attrac- tive — generous shapes boldly decorated in white and cobalt. The effect is veiled figurative, Matisse anglicised with a dash of Hilton and Vaughan. His ceramic roots are Greek, Italian and Spanish country pottery which at the start of his career he simply reproduced. But he is a painter turned potter and perhaps for that reason his large bowls can cost over £1,000. Garland's high prices pinpoint what Michael Cardew called the 'dreary dilem- ma' of the craftsman. Should he design cheap ware for industry or make functional pottery by hand at prices that virtually rule out their everyday use? Cardew tried to resolve the problem by fleeing to Africa and recreating the country pottery ideal there. Bernard Leach kept his prices down and starved.
But there is another sort of ambitious- ness in ceramics, which is implicit in Cardew and Leach's best work (and in Garland's) and that is to make, as Gillian Lowndes does, one-off sculptural pieces. A good selection, modestly priced, may be seen at the Paul Rice Gallery (60 Blenheim Crescent, W11, open Saturday 1-6 or by appointment: 229-8241). Rice has put together recent work by tutors and stu- dents who were at Camberwell in the late Seventies. Happily this includes some of our best potters. Most make no pretence at usefulness though Janice Tchalenko and Jim Malone are exceptions: she is a fine decorator of simple forms and he is poss- ibly the best potter now working in the Leach tradition. Colin Pearson alters and sculpts his pots after throwing while Ewen Henderson, master of the towering elegant pot, and Angus Suttie, whose wayward containers glow with painterly colour, re- veal the beauties of handbuilding. Gillian Lowndes shows a pair of striking small sculptures. Dan Kelly, Sara Radstone, Henry Pim and Julian Stair all show fine characteristic pieces. (They and Suttie exhibit regularly at Anatole Orient, 318 Portobello Road W10, and work by many of these potters may be found at Contem- porary Applied Art, 43 Earlham Street, WC2.) Pots like these are sculpture on a domestic scale — they make a reality of the egalitarian dream (pioneered by the AIA and the Arts Council in the Fifties) of affordable sculpture for the home.
Perhaps a desire to reach a wider audi- ence explains why so many painters have recently turned to ceramics. Bruce McLean and Ivor Abrahams have done some fine things but most artists are frustrated by the technical complexities of the craft and take refuge in arrogance. As David Smith said of his experiences in a ceramic workshop in 1964: 'It wasn't until I forgot that ceramic crap that I could make something I liked.' Usually they fail, and proper potters are naturally irritated by the publicity and prices accorded amateurish efforts. Textiles are another matter, and the excellent Ascher: Fabric, Art, Fashion documents an impressive list of painters and sculptors whose designs were trans- lated on to fabric by the dazzling Ascher team during and after the war.
Repetition on lengths of material does strange things to an artist's characteristic style — Gerald Wilde's designs look surpri- singly pretty and decorative while Henry Moore's popular Barbed Wire motif now has a very dated air. In fact Lida Ascher's own fabric designs have best survived the test of time and nothing could have been more daring than Zika Ascher's reckless inventiveness with tweeds and mohairs. But the Aschers were committed to involv- ing artists and their most straightforward application of art to fashion were their famous limited-edition headscarves. From 1945 until about 1950 women everywhere faced a dilemma less serious than Cardew's — whether to wear their Graham Suther- land or Henry Moore headscarf or to frame it. 'How little man knows about the multi- tudinous uses to which a woman puts a scarf,' observed The Lady. Pevsner urged caution. He felt that the Moore Family Group was 'so grand that one might feel it almost a sacrilege to walk out wearing it'. The headscarves were a financial flop for Ascher. At that date curators had not realised that people are happiest in the museum shop and retail stores were unable to train their staff to differentiate between a Colquhoun and a Derain. In the late Forties the Aschers collaborated with Matisse and Moore on a more ambitious scheme — a magnificent series of wall hangings. This might be thought a relative- ly cheap way of bringing high art into the home and it would be nice to think that that was the Aschers' original intention. But screen-printing the designs proved complex and expensive and the hangings were produced in limited editions of 30. The few that survive give an idea of the possibilities of a project which surely ought to be revived.
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