Edmund de Waal

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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.

Text by Edmund de Waal
Cambridge, UK. Hazel Press
English.
Photography by Norman McBeath.
Paperback
ISBN: 9781739760939

Pottery is a central art, said Gauguin. 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.

Here are objects of the most refined minimalism from over a thousand years ago with profiles of breathtaking clarity and a poise that seems to belong to our contemporary world. And here are pots in which the potter has just gone on- and on. The dish of Palissy with its teeming visual life has kinship with the the pots of George Ohr three hundred years later, or with Grayson Perry today. They all celebrate the art of brinkmanship, of pushing clay and decoration near to the point of collapse.

There are pots in this book that show the movement of clay, where markings into the surface when it was still wet reveal the traces of the hand of the potter.There are others where you can see the marks of the violence of flames in the firing in the kiln. These ceramics seem to explore the elemental nature of clay and fire.

There are wine-cups made for emperors and porcelain palaces made for despots. But there are also fierce revolutionary trophies for Bolsheviks, propoganda plates for Chinese Communists and cheap stacking dishes for the Swedish working poor. There are ceramic vessels that challenge the status quo, and pots made for the tea table. Pots have been co-opted to be part of radical design movements from Biedermier in the nineteenth century, to the Bauhaus in the twentieth century and Hella Jongerius now.

You will also find pots here that have been decorated by artists and poets. Pottery has been irresistable for painters from the great Exesias of Greece through the Renaissance to the Cobra movement of the 1960s: with a vessel you can tell stories in three dimensions. And there is a delicate thread of writing running through this book too. Look at the bowls from Iraq and the dish of Ogata Kenzan from seventeenth-century Japan.

The Pot Book does not pretend to be comprehensive. The vessels have been selected because they are beautiful and intriguing, not because they are representative. Each entry is sequenced in alphabetical order by the name of the artist/potter, the school, or the style. This allows for some wonderful serendipitous juxtapositions.

If we cannot pick these vessels up and turn them in our hands, feel their weight and balance and texture, at least we can take this grand tour of the very finest examples of this central artform.

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. In both the West and in Japan his influence on the construction and growth of a studio pottery movement has been profound. Through his indefatigable writing and lecturing on the making and meaning of pottery and his tuition of some of the foremost artist-potters, as much as through his actual making of pots, Leach was at the centre of the question of how pots are valued and appreciated critically.

He was deeply involved in shaping the canon of historical pottery on which much of current pottery still draws.

Leach’s knowledge of Oriental pottery and aesthetics, demonstrated in both his pots and books, was instrumental in placing key ideas and images of a meeting of East and West at the heart of the movement. It was an ethos of ‘truth to materials’ that was grounded not only in his experiences of Oriental pottery, but also in contemporary concerns of artists and sculptors who worked around him for a significant period in St Ives. Leach’s advocacy for pots that could be used as part of everyday life has entered the mainstream of perceptions about his pottery. How these pots were made and for whom, reveals his social values as well as his ideas of roles within the organisation of a workshop.