Edmund de Waal

Resources

Perdendosi is a collaborative work by photographer Norman McBeath with Edmund de Waal. It is a study of leaves at the stage of their transformation when they have lost all colour, and become more like parchment than plant, taking up the most extraordinary shapes, giving the leaves unique identities and character. Many of the photographs were taken at the start of the pandemic in a time of daily news of increasing deaths and infections. Although not a direct response, this time had a profound influence on how Norman McBeath saw the leaves. Edmund de Waal’s accompanying text ‘Twelve Leaves’, which he describes as both autobiography and a journal of reading, is his own unique and moving response to living with these images for several months during lockdown. With a heightened awareness and increased sensitivity towards the natural world, ​Perdendosi offers a fresh perspective on the familiar.

Published by The Cuckoo Press, based at John Sandoe Books, London, this book touches on shards, an unfortunate eighteenth century potter called Nicholas Crisp and the fragments that Robert Walser used to make his stories.

Letters to Camondo is a haunting sequence of imagined letters to the Count de Camondo – the owner of a Parisian palace filled with beautiful objects, turned into a memorial for his lost son.

wavespeech is an artist-signed and numbered publication in a limited edition of 200 that celebrates the collaboration between between Edmund de Waal and David Ward at the Pier Arts Centre, Orkney.

De Waal's second book, The White Road was published by Chatto & Windus in 2015 and was aired on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week. It follows de Waal's journey to discover the history of porcelain, from porcelain first made in the hills of Jingdezhen in China to the first makers of English porcelain, William Cookworthy and Josiah Wedgwood.

The most comprehensive survey of Edmund de Waal's career to date. Texts by Emma Crichton-Miller, Colm Toíbín, Peter Carey, A.S. Byatt, Alexandra Munroe, Deborah Saunt and Edmund de Waal.

This visual anthology of 300 ceramic vessels reveals this to be a magnificent truth. Pots are some of the very earliest artefacts created, and the span of our cultures can be traced through bowls and vases, dishes and beakers, made, glazed and decorated with lyricism and with vigour. They have been made to celebrate rituals of birth, marriage and death, and to be part of the rhythm of our solitary and our social times of eating and drinking. This book shows how inexhaustible the vessel has been for potters, sculptors, artists, designers and architects.

Edmund de Waal's family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes, has won many literary prizes including the RSL Ondaatje Prize and the Costa Biography Award and has been translated into 29 languages.

This essential introduction to one of the most popular and challenging art forms of our time charts the development of ceramics in the modern age, from Art Nouveau, Art Deco, the Bauhaus and Futurism, through Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Performance, to Land Art and Installation Art. There are clear introductions to pioneering techniques, glazes and approaches, in context and in practice, from orientalism and colour theory, to Modernism, Postmodernism and the profuse diversity of the end of the twentieth century. In it Edmund de Waal examines the increasing cross-fertilization between ceramics and other disciplines, such as painting, sculpture and architecture, and provides detailed and compelling analysis of individual pieces in context.

Bernard Leach was the pre-eminent artist-potter of the last century. This book by Edmund de Waal examining Leach's career includes full colour illustrations of all Leach’s best-known work.

Exhibition catalogue text for Edmund de Waal's curated exhibition, During the Night, at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna.

Exhibition text for de Waal's installation at Turner Contemporary, Margate.

Exhibition text to accompany Lichtzwang, a piece made by Edmund de Waal to hang in the Theseus Temple in Vienna as part of a series of contemporary installations. Exhibition text to accompany Lichtzwang, a piece made by Edmund de Waal to hang in the Theseus Temple in Vienna as part of a series of contemporary installations.

Edmund de Waal's essay from the monograph published by Phaidon in 2014.

Catalogue text to accompany the exhibition of the same name in which de Waal re-curated displays of the Fitzwilliam Museum's permanent collection with poetry, hidden letters, photographs and objects from his residency in Jingdezhen, China.

Text to accompany A local history, a permanent installation of three vitrines filled with porcelain, sunk below the paving outside the Alison Richard Building on the Sidgwick Site of Cambridge University.

Catalogue text to accompany Edmund de Waal's series of installations at Waddesdon Manor.

By Judith Mackerell and Lyndsey Winship.

By Grant Johnson. Writer and artist Edmund de Waal creates delicate porcelain vessels decisively arranged in meditative metal displays evocative of the conceptual intersection of Minimalist sculpture and modern craft.

By Giorgia Losio. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna – fino al 29 gennaio 2017. Abbiamo trascorso la notte nel museo austriaco in compagnia dell’artista britannico Edmund de Waal, che ha approfondito il tema della sua mostra, “During the night”, attraverso le reazioni di curatori, scrittori, storici e psicanalisti. Con un intermezzo musicale di Franz Bartolomey, primo violoncello dell’orchestra filarmonica di Vienna.

By Caroline de Gruyter. Voor het kunsthistorisch museum in Wenen stelde kunstenaar/schrijver Edmund de Waal een magnifieke tentoonstelling samen over angst.

By Christa Hager. "During the Night": Edmund de Waal presents an extraordinary exhibition on fear at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

By Almuth Spiegler. Edmund de Waal, Bestsellerautor und Keramikkünstler, erzählte der „Presse am Sonntag“, was er von Kritikern hält. Und warum sein „Hase“ als Talisman über seine KHM-Ausstellung wacht.

The artists and ceramicists hope their new show will re-establish the medium's rightful place within fine art.

By Tobias Timm. Der Bestsellerautor Edmund de Waal ist auch ein Künstler, jetzt werden seine Werke in Berlin gezeigt. Ein Gespräch über Porzellan und Walter Benjamin.

By Heidi Laura. Vi har mistet den fundamentale forbindelse til ting, som går gennem hænderne, mener keramikeren og forfatteren Edmund de Waal. Og derfor også forbindelsen til dem, som laver tingene, og til tingenes dybere historier, smukke som smertefulde.

By Javier Martín. Brillante, fina y traslúcida, la porcelana es sinónimo del lujo venido de Oriente. Desde los primeros comerciantes italianos hasta los intereses de los principales monarcas europeos en su fabricación, la historia del oro blanco puede también leerse como una historia obsesiva por poseerla y elaborarla.

By Jorge Morla. Los nazis destinaban leña a fabricarla aunque escaseara para los crematorios y obsesionó a los emperadores chinos. El escritor novela la historia de la porcelana.

By Antonio Lozano. Tras el éxito de La liebre con ojos de ámbar, el autor, que también es artesano, se acerca en El oro blanco a uno de los secretos mejor guardados de Oriente.

By Edward Goldman. This is the story of his encounters with many people and places that help deepen his understanding of the nature of the material.

By Michael Slenske. ‘It’s come out of a lengthy period of thinking about architecture and music and all kinds of other things, so it’s a really big show for me.’

Read more at http://www.wallpaper.com/art/b...

By David D'Arcy. Much writing is about witnessing. For Edmund de Waal, it is also about holding something in your hands. That something is porcelain, the translucent white pottery that’s obsessed de Waal for his entire life. As a substance, it radiates the purity of something delicate and nearly weightless, seemingly ageless.

By James McCauley. Edmund de Waal’s new book is an odyssey into an obsession with porcelain.

By Geoff Nicholson. This is a terrific book. If you read it, you'll never look at porcelain the same way again.

By Sam Anderson. Coming from a more orthodox mind, de Waal’s stories, and his pots, might have turned out to be dull, dry, obscure, conventional and neatly contained. Instead, they are poetic and sprawling. The White Road is a verbal extension of his lifelong work in ceramics. The writing and the porcelain are inseparable now; they lean on one another like the inside and outside of a pot.

By Ben Downing. Blending history, biography, autobiography, travel writing and multiple veins of meditation... it is a far cry from your grandmother’s coffee-table book on Lladró.

By Brian Thomas Gallagher. In The White Road, Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, chronicles humanity’s passion for porcelain, the fine pottery coveted through the ages by the wealthy and highborn, and his own life as a craftsman who works with the prized material.

By A.S. Byatt. De Waal's The White Road finds the history of porcelain manufacture shrouded in secrecy and littered with terrible disasters.

By Christina Patterson. The White Road is a cultural history of porcelain, but it's also, as it's subtitle says, "a pilgrimage of sorts"...to the places where porcelain was invented, or reinvented.

By Jennifer Hunter. De Waal’s book is poetic and has a stream-of-consciousness style as he considers the places and people around the world involved in the creation and use of porcelain.

By Thessaly La Force. The real story of how porcelain was invented—and then reinvented and reinvented again—is offered up in Edmund de Waal’s new book “The White Road: Journey into an Obsession,” a breathless pilgrimage to, and history of, three very famous white hills.

By Ruth Guilding. Deeply absorbing and profoundly instructive.

By Alex Clarke. The book is a great deal more than a history; in it de Waal examines the cost ... of the material so highly prized for its purity that it was thought to banish poison.

By Miriam Cosic. The book is immersive and slightly hallucinatory. The text is as incantatory as poetry, a concatenation of places, eras, people, historical writings, physical objects, moods, the present and the past.

By Brian Lynch. The White Road is not as accessible as The Hare with Amber Eyes, but the thinking that informs it is denser and even more illuminating.

By Anne Gerritsen. The point of this pilgrimage, this white journey, is surely not just to tell us how it is possible to make white things, but to let us hear some of the conversations which are part of the making of porcelain.

By Michael Walsh. I already have it marked down, should anyone ask come December, as my book of the year.

This allusive, complex book is a hybrid, neither a simple history, travelogue nor autobiography, but taking in elements of each as the author traces the stories of porcelain's development and his own fascination with those stories

By Charlotte Heathcote. You don't want to stop reading because de Waal, with his sharp curator's eye, has excellent judgement when it comes to showing readers things that they will find fascinating, funny or moving.

By Charles Darwent. This [book] tells not one story but two: that of other people... the inventors, makers and consumers of porcelain, and the author's own.

By Jack Kerridge. "You don't want to stop reading because de Waal, with his sharp curator's eye, has excellent judgement when it comes to showing readers things that they will find fascinating, funny or moving."

By A. S. Byatt. "A.S. Byatt on the dark deadly secrets lurking behind a cool, white surface"

By Tristram Hunt. This book is certainly the finest account of the many meanings of porcelain to the modern world that I have read.

By AN Wilson. ...an intensely personal history of porcelain.

By Ekow Eshun. A mesmerising and cautionary tale about the obsessive pursuit of white china.

By Olivia Laing. White is a dangerous colour – and de Waal's journey shows the human cost of porcelain.

The book transforms an otherwise esoteric subject into a truly remarkable story.

By Ysenda Maxtone Graham. Edmund de Waal has a way of making you care about handmade ceramics in a way no other writer does.

By Robert Bound. ...intriguing, unusual, heartfelt...

A lyrical melding of art history, memoir, and philosophical meditation.

By Xavi Ayen. El ceramista británico Edmund de Waal heredó de un tío suyo 264 netsukes, unas delicadas miniaturas japonesas. ¿Qué habrán visto desde que fueron creadas?, se preguntó.

By Thomas Schmid. Mit seiner Familiensaga "Der Hase mit den Bernsteinaugen" schrieb Edmund de Waal einen unverhofften Bestseller. Doch seine wahre Leidenschaft ist das Töpfern. Ein Portrait.

By Roger Cohen. The odyssey of 264 netsuke — Japanese carvings not much larger than cherry tomatoes — lies at the heart of Edmund de Waal’s extraordinary book The Hare with Amber Eyes.

By Ed Caesar. The Ephrussi family patronised Renoir and Proust, but lost everything in the war. Now their descendant has turned their story into a surprise bestseller.

By Walter Kaiser. In the unexpected book he has now written about his ancestors, The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal’s artistic sensibility and historical empathy are as animating as they are in his ceramic craft.

By Michael Dirda. The Hare With Amber Eyes belongs on the same shelf with Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory, André Aciman's Out of Egypt and Sybille Bedford's A Legacy. All four are wistful cantos of mutability, depictions of how even the lofty, beautiful and fabulously wealthy can crack and shatter as easily as Fabergé glass or Meissen porcelain -- or, sometimes, be as tough and enduring as netsuke, those little Japanese figurines carved out of ivory or boxwood.

By Richard Eder. At a deeper level, though, Hare is about something more, just as Marcel Proust’s masterpiece was about something more than the trappings of high society. As withRemembrance of Things Past, it uses the grandeur to light up interior matters: aspirations, passions, their passing; all in a duel, and a duet, of elegy and irony.

12 August 2010By Eve M. Kahn. The rows of netsuke have influenced his ceramic work; he often groups his pots by color and size on museum and gallery shelves, like minimalist repeating brushstrokes. Viewers who know about his inheritance, he said, have told him: “Diasporic objects! You’re keeping your objects together, aren’t you?”

By Brian Dillon. The ultimate message of his engrossing book is a profound one, however: that our lives are made and unmade in the company of things. “Touch tells you what you need to know – it tells you about yourself.”

By Veronica Horwell. De Waal has a mystical ability to so inhabit the long-gone moment as to seem to suspend inexorable history, personal and impersonal.