Contemporary Ceramics: Porcelain by ‘Hare with Amber Eyes’ Author, Edmund de Waal
A confession: I “read” text and images, but less frequently objects. My last experience with ceramics was a very poor pot I threw in high school, though I came to know Steuben glass about that time through a first girlfriend’s engineer father.
Pottery is pretty old stuff. Legions of archeologists have reconstructed the pre-Homeric world from large and small shards of crockery and crude and elegant drawings on jars I’ve seen. Pottery is craft, a complex mix of ideational design and its physical execution on wheels, “throwing” and then glazing, temperamental kilns and their mysterious temperature swings, and an amalgam of material, equipment, knowledge, experience, and luck. artes fine arts magazine
More than one knowing critic has commented on the distinguished British ceramicist Edmund de Waal’s extraordinary transition from craft to art. In Hare With the Amber Eyes (2010), de Waal’s recent international best seller and richly textured memoir of his Central European Jewish, Ephrussi family’s odyssey—from 19th century Odessa rags to late 19th century Paris and Vienna banking riches to Holocaust evisceration, the “potter” refers frequently to the sheer and subtle kinesthetic knowledge and pleasure of things. The Ephurussi bankers were second only to the Rothschilds in wealth.
His objects’ shapes, textures, weight and mass, de Waal asserts, remind us every waking hour, however conscious or unconscious we are in their presence, of their influence and power. Which is to say that the busy closing of de Waal’s NYC Gagosian Gallery exhibition on October 19, 2013, was for this untutored spectator less a show or exhibition than an installation of interlocking, multidimensional puzzles over which the Hare memoir hovers.
Less a display of utilitarian or artistic ceramic objects, meant to be seen and touched, than an invitation to complex and contradictory intellectual speculation put into play by almost two and a half thousand pieces, in two large rooms, on two floors, more than two dozen cases, 16 shelves high at some points, eye level at others. Speculation, about what?
First puzzle, the basic set. Just how many containers or “cabinets” is the viewer asked to engage? There are eleven cases or vitrines on the 6th floor, eight on the fifth. Very plain, undecorated, toplit from multiple small, ceiling spots. OK, nineteen total? But three actually are formally subdivided, not into one, but three sections.
Two more cases are internally subdivided, so the careful viewer’s uncertainty is deepened. The experience of these objects must in some way be conditioned therefore, by the context and presentation of the visual experience. Everything appears ambiguous and puzzling.
The vitrines’ sizes range enormously. From a single shadow box-like case to a unit almost floor-to-ceiling within the same room. The viewer is constantly scaling from one extreme to another.
Edmund deWaal no longer handles humble clay it seems, but strictly porcelain, and there is plenty of it. The 2474 pieces, plus several plates which might be considered backing, do not look like the graceful, boldly glazed cups I was given twenty years ago by my late Kyoto friend, Ken Akiyama—who praised the work of a unknown young potter—nor the softly luminous pictures I’ve seen of de Waal’s previous gracefully minimalist work.
These are almost all small, each between 2 ½ inches – 4 inches high and about 3 inches in diameter, the many narrow ones, almost tubular, diameters maybe an inch or less. Unornamented, all are without handles, and many exhibit exterior surfaces that are often irregular, deckled, rippled, pock-marked, serrated, scored; some lips with flaps, others almost grotesque.
Glaze varies along a minimalist palette, creamy bone white or chalky pearl, dark browns and deep blacks; a few with what seems flecks of gold or narrow gold rings around the lips or bases. What one sees is less attractive or pleasant, in a conventional sense, than interesting. And one’s puzzled interest is guided in what feels increasingly as a kind of consumerist tent show by de Waal’s intention;an intent scattered in clues on the two floors and extrapolated from that other, very determining text, his The Hare With the Amber Eyes.
For de Waal is a smart guy, well read, knowing about art, artists and poets, as well as the contrary and often conflicted way art works. He invites, he occasions a “close reading” and like billiards, rather than pinball, moves you by slight touches. So the arts and literature are foreground, not background.
Edmund de Waal’s favorite Ephrussi family forebearer, mid-19th century Charles, constantly referenced in the memoir, was not only a friend of Proust, but said to be the model of Baron de Charlus, in Swann’s Way.
The show took its title, “Breathturn,” from a 1967 poetry collection by that violent anti-Semite, Paul Celan (another puzzle, given a family vandalized by the Nazis), but alludes to Wallace Stevens, as the memoir also rings the changes on Titian and Vermeer, Rilke and Isaac Babel, Dreyfus and Eichmann.
With a sensibility as informed and inclusive as de Waal’s, there is something contradictory behind all this contextual body language in the placement of pieces. As one moves here and there to view, several thousand “vessels” were not immobile in their containers.
About these works de Waal states he was, in part, exploring “silences,” how so? Certainly apparent in how pieces are placed, in seemingly casual configuration. Why 302 vessels in one place? Why not 301 or 303? A lone piece on this shelf here, on its right three in a group, five a few inches away, then two still farther right. Why did de Waal place them thus? Visual poetry or arbitrary arrangements?
The bulk of the pieces, particularly those in the multiple-shelved large cases, remind this viewer of old sawed-off garden hose– thick hose; small interior diameters and thick walls. Was de Waal after an “industrial strength” look? How does that bulkiness mesh or conflict with earlier notions of a more nuanced minimalist craft?
Edmund de Waal answers the question in Hare With the Amber Eyes. Tomokazu, the early 19th century Japanese carver whose life and work de Waal admiringly describes as “gifted” was a craftsman “who excelled in making netsuke animal figures.” He put time, not just skill, into his work, “It was not rare,” de Waal writes, “that a month or two months were spent in making a single figure.” Single? But then netsuke must be different than pots.
There is no touching, like de Waal’s Great Uncle Iggie did, fondling the netsuke in Vienna, or Tokyo, or de Waal’s three children placing and repositioning them in the old/new vitrine in London. It is often unclear just what you are seeing. Most of the cases are unenclosed; if you want to touch, you have to buy them.
One of the two large displays actually has a frosted plexiglass front, and pieces in several appear “ghostly” in their indistinctness, because the case backing is false with the vessels only dimly seen through its dark translucence.
Far along with researching The Hare With the Amber Eyes, de Waal says he nevertheless “stumbled to a halt.” His initial curiosity upon receiving the 264 netsuke figures after Iggie’s death at 84, the small intricate Japanese wood and ivory carvings created decades, even hundreds of years earlier, had consumed years of de Waal’s life, in archives and interviews across Europe, written and phone exchanges from his father in the south of England to Paris, Vienna and Odessa.
Ultimately, those pieces led de Waal away from his workshop and back into a colorful and troubled past he had hardly known, the great weight of European history, the collision of empires, fortunes, wars, cultures, racial hatreds and fascist brutalities, as well as the interplay of national and personal suffering and tragedy that he could hardly comprehend.
In exasperation de Waal wrote, “I no longer know if this book is about my family, or memory, or myself, or is still a book about small Japanese things.” Some 350 pages into it, any fair-minded reader must conclude: now it’s about ‘all of the above’…and much more.
If books could speak, and speak with one another (which they often do), walking around the bland Gagosian Gallery floors, Daniel Mendelsohn’s epic search for what happened to his family during the Holocaust, Finding the Lost, might begin the conversation. And Martin Gilbert’s harrowing travel narrative from one Central European “crime scene” to another, Holocaust Journey, adding not merely horrific details, but an historic frame.
Having lost virtually all their vast banking fortune and grand residences, their winter and summer “retreats,” each collecting immensely valuable “stuff” (de Waal’s characterization), de Waal’s immediate, not all by any means, family were fortunate to finally let go of that “stuff,” barely escaping the Nazi cattle cars and industrial death camps, though with little more than the clothes they were wearing.
Growing up modestly, in a rented house in Kent, UK, de Waal nevertheless attended Cambridge, though Anglican priests like his Dutch father did not amass much wealth. And his grandmother Elizabeth’s postwar attempts at “restitution,” Austrian-style, were reflexively, cleverly, callously and humiliatingly deflected. Still, de Waal was encouraged to find his own way, making pots if that was his heart’s true desire. A concluding contradiction.
Humble beginnings, particularly those engineered by men rather than the gods, are a not uncommon spur to imagination, certainly not with writers and artists. The greater the loss, the greater the spur?
A recent Artnet post remarked that early on, de Waal made “inexpensive pots” on the Welsh borders. More recently, however, the Financial Times named de Waal as not only “one of our leading contemporary potters” but, it’s the Financial Times after all, “highly collectable,” with each of his vessels fetching “between 2500 and 50,000 pounds.”
More than once in his memoir, de Waal criticizes the Ephrussi family’s overly ostentatious “extravagance.” Also, or simultaneously we might argue, the family patronized the art of a Renoir or a Degas, financially supported the cause of a Captain Dreyfus, and blew some fresh wind into the sails of a Rilke.
While de Waal was visiting Vienna’s imposing Palais Ephrussi on the Ringstrasse, tastefully restored and now world headquarters for Casinos Austria, an eager young staffer gives him a tour, in the course of which de Waal discovers that the servants’ quarters in this enormous five story structure, occupied a hidden floor-between-floors. It was reached only by a hidden staircase which was, regrettably, windowless and airless.
Except for the faithless Ephrussi doorman “who leaves the gates unlocked” for post-Anschluss Gestapo entry, the other servants (including the faithful Anna who rescues and then returns the collection of netsuke) remain nameless, aptly echoing Brecht’s excoriating poem, “A Worker Reads History.”
De Waal’s Great Uncle Iggie, who left the Palais before the 1938 occupation of the mythical “first victim,” Austria, luckily made his way to New York City, then California, before World War II. This was followed by an Army stint through Normandy, to Germany as translator and intelligence officer, allowing him to re-invent himself as a slowly successful grain importer, in General MacArthur’s postwar Japan.
Bringing the rescued netsuke collection, Iggie begins a decades-long relationship with a young and aesthetically resourceful Japanese companion, Jiro Sugiyama. Tokyo, like Vienna, Paris, Odessa and England, rebuilds. Iggie and Jiro live well, travel and, as de Waal notes, prosper, a hundred years “after his grandfather opened the bank in Vienna.” The family always felt that Iggie was not cut out to be a banker. Yet, somehow, Uncle Iggie became the representative of Swiss Bank, in Tokyo. He was, de Waal ironically notes, “an Ephrussi after all.”
Of course, great nephew Edmund inherited the netsukes and the narrative, as well as the pottery, seemed to flow from them.
With so many variables playing with the viewer, and the interventions of the craftsman/artist a little like Pascal’s characterization of God, everywhere present but nowhere obvious, it might be reasonable to consider this latest presentation of de Waal’s “self” a parody and, also, a critique on the state of his art and the context of its reception, valuing and commodification.
His ceramic pieces feature non-utilitarian shapes, uneven, seemingly unfinished lips and small bits and pieces of material here and there. Their uninviting glazes, save for a few lustrous bone-white and very pale green and dark purple finishes, were addressed by one reviewer as “naive.” If by “naive,” one means “childish,” that is certainly one possibility; though the more Romantic reading of “child-like”–simple, stripped, without artifice–might be more to de Waal’s point.
One suspects fewer pots, and another book, as there is much more story, not only in Paris, Vienna, Tokyo and Odessa, but in the family origins in the City of Berdichev, as well for this potter who has discovered that he, too, is ‘an Ephrussi after all.’
Yet puzzles still abound. After 70 some years, wouldn’t it be nice, no, fitting, to have a last name for the loyal “Anna,” who set this all in motion?
By George Abbott White, Contributing Writer