Edmund de Waal

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0:14Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which the world's leading creative figures reveal the formative influences and experiences that inspired their own work. I'm John Wilson, and my guest in this episode is the artist and writer Edmund Duval, one of the world's most acclaimed ceramicists. His work has been shown in museums and galleries, including the V &A, the British Museum, the Frick in New York and at the Venice Biennale. In 2010, Edmund de Waal became widely known as a best-selling author after the publication of his family memoir, The Hair with Amber Eyes, which retraced his Jewish European heritage.

0:50A dramatic and tragic story about art, exile and survival. It led him on a journey from Tokyo to Odessa via 19th century Paris and Nazi-occupied Vienna. Two, two, one, two. Okay. How's that? Do you want more level or is that okay? A bit more from Edmund, yeah. We'll probably be quiet and contemplative. I don't know. I might get rather excited and noisy. You know me.

1:20Edmund De Waal, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you very much. It's a huge pleasure to be here. Great to have you here. Edmund, you were born in Nottingham in 1964 and spent early years in Lincoln. Your mother was a historian. Your father was an Anglican cleric. So did you have a particularly religious upbringing? It was and it wasn't. We lived in a huge rambling medieval house of the chapel. We were next to the cathedral. So cathedral life was part of our daily life as well. It wasn't sort of orthodox religion in the sense of being forced to go to services. It just simply was a childhood full of church music and architecture and buildings and people coming through the house the whole time.

2:07So it didn't feel like a sort of a forced religious upbringing. It just felt like this rather bizarre, in retrospect, upbringing filled with this extraordinary history. So if your father was chancellor, what did that job entail? So he was a canon of the cathedral and it meant he was in charge of learning. So we had access to this great medieval library as part of our upbringing. And I remember sort of looking through illuminated manuscripts as a child. I mean, it was all very odd. You've written in several of your books, including The Hair with Amber Eyes, about your Jewish heritage. And your father's mother was Elizabeth Efrusi, part of a hugely wealthy European family.

2:48Growing up, how aware were you of your Jewish lineage? Not at all. I mean, I knew my grandmother and loved her. And she was this astonishing, fierce Jewish grandmother surrounded by books in every language possible and writing me letters and demanding letters back. But in terms of my father's life, in terms of sort of awareness of it being a kind of European Jewish heritage, that came much later in my life. And so there wasn't any sort of oddness about the fact that my father, half Jewish, should be the Chancellor of Lincoln and then become the Dean of Canterbury subsequently to that even more sort of grander position in the Anglican Church.

3:26But as a young man or as a child, you didn't know the journey that he had taken in the family? No, not at all, no. But that happens. I mean, talk to any child of refugees and they'll either say the family didn't talk about it at all. There was complete silence or they wouldn't shut up about it. You know, and we were in a silence family. You once wrote that your parents were thinkers, not makers. What sort of cultural upbringing did you have or creative upbringing did you have at home? Was it mostly about books and ideas? It was very, very much about books. You know, it was reading lunches, reading suppers.

4:00You're allowed to bring your book to table and read. and there was lots of writing going on. So that was absolutely part of it. But there was this evening class very early on in my childhood, this evening class that my dad took me to Lincoln Art College. I was five and there was clay. So, you know, there's this odd sort of eruption straight into my childhood of making things while being surrounded by books. So why did he take you? And this was to learn how to make a pot. It was the old days, you know, when there were family evening classes. This is the 60s for families to go. And my brothers went and did art.

4:42And my father very determinedly took me down to the ceramic studio, the pottery studio in the basement. And he threw a pot and I threw a pot. And that was it. That was five years old. That was absolutely my epiphany, my moment of kind of transformation. You say you threw a pot. You were five, but how easy was that? What did it feel like? Did it come naturally? No, it didn't. It was a struggle. I'm not a natural thrower. I mean, no one is a natural thrower at five, for God's sake. But, you know, I sat down with sort of a brown lump of clay and felt it move in my hands with an electric wheel. And this experience, this catalytic experience of something changing moment by moment by moment, every single breath, every single movement of your hands, of your body, changes this thing in front of you, was so exciting, so revelatory for me, that I absolutely insisted that I needed to go back, and I went back, and I went back, and I went back.

5:43What was that first pot like? Did it stand up? No, it was a sort of, I think in the spirit of the 60s, it was probably an ashtray. But I can remember it. I can absolutely remember it. And I went back the next week and it was fired and you have to glaze it. And there were all these extraordinary colours, iridescent colours that you could glaze the pots. And I glazed it white. I remember glazing my first pot white and then having it the following week and taking my white pot home with such pride. This heavy lumpen but still moving object in my hands. That's fascinating, isn't it? Because at five, you would expect, you know, you'd want sort of bright blue or green glaze.

6:24But white has been your trademark colour throughout your whole career. Yes, yes, it has. It has. It's a sort of adamantine sort of line through into my life. And I think, I mean, because I glazed all my early pots white, was so that I could look at them. I didn't want to draw flowers on them or, you know, put my name on them or anything. I wanted to see what I'd done. So it was the form. It's the form. And of course, if you glaze something white, you can't escape what it is. It sings in the world in a very kind of direct way. And you look at it and there's no hiding. And that right from the beginning was something that I found hugely exciting and interesting.

7:04It's like, what's going on with this vessel, this object, which has an inside and an outside? So you got the bug. I got the bug. You want to get back the next week and carry on making it. When did you start thinking, I want to always be making pots? I will be doing this for the rest of the time. Very, very early on. And then we moved to Canterbury and there was a wonderful elderly potter in Canterbury who was attached to the school I went to. And I just spent every afternoon with him. Who was he? Geoffrey Whiting. He was a wonderful man. He was a sort of acolyte of Bernard Leach, the great radical potter of the 20th century.

7:39a potter who brought Oriental ceramics and European ceramics together and made the studio pottery movement happen. And Geoffrey was an acolyte of his and I basically spent every afternoon at school just making pots with him and that turned through my teenage years into an... I left school early and I was apprenticed to him. I mean, it was a really significant part of my life. And you say Whiting was an acolyte of Leitch's. He hadn't actually trained with him, but he had read a potter's book, this great bible of the studio pottery movement and then started his own pottery and made and this is really important made functional pots so they were like all Leach school people it was very important that pots worked you could have casseroles you could have soup bowls you could have mugs but you couldn't have anything which any fripper is you couldn't have decorative things they had to have a stensible function and they had to be cheap they had to be cheap enough to drop in Geoffrey's wonderful phrase.

8:39This was the Leachian Manifesto. Yeah, and the Leachian Manifesto was in retrospect very dogmatic. It says that there are pots that you should approve of and there are things which are beyond the pale. So the pots you can approve of have this sort of inner life which comes from unselfconscious repetition that you make thousands of them and they come alive over decades of making them. The pots which are not allowed are the pots which are pots to do with art schools, with thinking too hard, with decoration, which are European in some kind of way. And those are off the map. They're not part of the proper canon of making pots.

9:20And I absolutely took this on. I mean, I made thousands and thousands of very, very bad honey pots. So did you see this at that time then as a vocation, that you would be making a living as a ceramicist from such an early age. Yes. I was going to be a potter. I was going to be up a lane in Herefordshire making casseroles. And my God, I did that. With a wheel and a kiln. With a wheel and a kiln and Radio 3 burbling away in the background. So 17, that was my life.

9:56On This Cultural Life, Edmund, And I asked my guests to discuss the formative influences and experiences that have inspired their own work. And your first choice for this programme is the Rowan-ji Temple in Kyoto, in Japan. So when did you first visit Japan and this temple in particular? I was 17. I went to America just when I was 17 and then straight on to Japan. I had almost five months there. And I went to Kyoto and I went to this particular temple. It's got a rock garden. You have to imagine a very beautiful ochre-coloured mud wall, about sort of eight feet tall, going round a sea of gravel, raked gravel.

10:42And in this sea of raked gravel are 15 stones placed in a seemingly random position, almost like sort of mountains coming up out of a sea of cloud. And there's a great beautiful platform, a cedar platform, which you can sit on. And it's a garden. It's a garden with no plants in it, but rocks and gravel. And I'd spent these months travelling from potter to potter to potter, sitting at different aged potters' feet, helping people pack kilns, digging clay, learning how to make pots, learning the tea ceremony. And I ended up in Kyoto in this temple. And it was a complete revelation for me. But what led you to Japan in the first place?

11:28Or was it the Bernard Leach link? Because I think he had also studied in Japan, hadn't he? Japan is the potter's country. It's known as the place where traditions and continuities in pottery are seemingly unbroken. So that you can go from town to town to town and see different kinds of traditions that have been there for 800 or 1000 years. and where potters are known. You know, you ask a taxi driver what kind of pottery he likes and he won't let you out of his cab because he's so interested and will tell you all the different kinds of pottery that go on. So it is a place that you have to go on pilgrimage.

12:06Leach went there, early part of the 20th century. I had to go to experience it myself. And I did my pilgrimage. I went from place to place to place, you know, in a sort of incredibly earnest, 17-year-old way. filling notebook after notebook. Given that we've asked you to choose the formative influences on your work, I might have expected a particular potter who taught you, but you've chosen this temple. So why has this become such, in your mind, such a key formative place? Because it is totally exacting. It resists explanation. You can project ideas about what it might mean into it, but it keeps pushing back at you because it's not one thing or another or another.

12:53It's a place that you can spend a huge amount of time and then more time and then more time. So the reason it's so significant for me is because it has profound austerity. It has a kind of paring back to an essential idea of putting a few things down in the world and seeing what will happen. And so I could have chosen any number of potters or pots, but that idea of placing things in the world in a particular configuration, in a particular structure, which is what this garden is, and looking at them, it changed my life, John. It really genuinely changed my life because I looked at these rocks, like looking at them now in my head, and I'm thinking, why do these few rocks in a raked sand garden in this structure, why is it so compelling?

13:47What's going on? What does it mean? And of course, you know, I've spent the last, I'm, God, I'm old, 45 years since then. I can't count. A long time putting objects down in the world and holding them within structures. So, you know, which is what I do now. So that was the beginning of thinking about how objects could be in the world. That's one particular aspect of your work, isn't it? Anybody who's seen your work will know that you create these vessels, very often pots, which are then arranged together in groupings, almost in formations that have a sort of energy by their arrangement. So are you every time that you are arranging those pots, evoking those stones in the temple?

14:30It's become one of the touchstones, become one of the places, the deep reference for me in my life. and there are many others because of course the other hugely significant thing for me about Roanji about this this particular Zen temple is it's about silence. So it's a Zen experience for you was it was it a spiritual experience the first time you went there? Absolutely yes my god yes it's spiritual because it what it did for me and what it still does for me is it asks very very fundamental questions about who we are and why we're here. So you sit there in silence with just these simple rocks, which have been there since 1450, John, you know, raked every day by Zen monks.

15:16And, you know, you are confronted by time, by time passing and how you're spending your time and what time means. And you talked earlier about the influence of Bernard Leach and that sort of sense of rugged practicality and every pot had to serve a purpose. Would you say that your work now and the work that you're known for is more related to everything that you saw and learnt in Japan and part of that sort of Zen experience as well? I think it holds that Zen experience to a certain degree. I mean, I think that I'm still trying to see what is necessary and what is gratuitous, what's extra in my work.

15:56If you hadn't gone to Japan, how different do you think your work would be now? And would you still be working as a ceramicist? There were a couple of things that happened in that very early time. The first was the experience of pottery and going through my leech experience, which then I sort of took apart later in my life. The second was that I had a month at the end of my trip in Tokyo with a very ancient, my great-uncle, grandmother Elizabeth's youngest brother. This is Ignatius Sefrussi. Yeah. Your uncle Iggy, or great-uncle. My great-uncle Iggy. And so I had a month with this extremely charming, well-dressed Austrian emigre in his unbelievably beautiful apartment in Tokyo.

16:47I arrived there in jeans with very long hair, very grubby from my experiences. And I'm met at the door by this extremely elegant Austrian baron in a beautiful suit and a beautiful moustache who gives me a kiss on both cheeks and gives me a whiskey sour, jazz playing in the background. And in this beautiful apartment is this collection of objects which would then also change my life in another way. So Japan, that early experience, It was catalytic in terms of pots, and then there was this long, long, slow detonation of another thing that happened as well. You've alluded to it there, but it was your uncle Iggy who introduced you for the first time to this collection, extraordinary collection of Japanese figurines, small objects, the netsuke.

17:37Oh, you're passing across the desk. This is one of your collection. This is a mouse? No, it's a rat, isn't it? It's a rat. It's a rat with its tail coiled around. It's like a conch shell, is that? It's actually a decaying bean pod. And what is that carved from? It looks like. It's ivory. It is ivory. It's about 1750. So this is a netscape. And what was the practical purpose? Because they're not just artistic objects. They served a purpose. Yeah, they were used as a sort of clasp. When you're wearing a kimono and you can't have pockets, so you had a little bag which would hang from your sash if you were a well-off gentleman.

18:10And these were the extraordinary little carvings that would be the clasp for that bag. They're basically small, incredibly tactile sculptures of all kinds of things. This is a series of eight ginkgo nuts. I mean, they are absolutely extraordinary. They are very, very pleasing to touch. It feels like almost they've been worn by constant touch over time. Well, that's it, John. They have been in people's hands, these ones, for 300 years. And your uncle Iggy had inherited these. And this was the beginning of the story which you told in The Hair with Amber Eyes. The Hair with Amber Eyes is another Netsuki, another little figurine which you have as part of the collection.

18:53So you knew nothing until you met your uncle Iggy about this collection and the lineage. Yes. At that moment, he just waved an arm and said, you know, there's a story. I'll tell you later. And in fact, it was actually only 15 years later when I went back to Japan that I spent another year in Tokyo. that this whole collection sort of came alive to me. But that was the beginning of this relationship. We became fast friends. What was he doing in Tokyo anyway? I mean, how had he ended up there? It was after the war he was posted there, was he? Iggy had grown up in Vienna. He'd grown up in this palace in Vienna, the Palais of Rysi, on the Ringstrasse, this vast, vast house.

19:41It takes up a block of Vienna. in a house full of art and music. And then it's an extraordinary and incredibly painful story of what happens and happened to the whole Jewish, to Jewish Vienna, to the vast interesting community of Jews that lived in Vienna, lived in Austria, my goodness, lived all across Central Europe, but in Vienna were integral as well to that city. and our family was part of that and he grew up in that house along with my grandmother of course and then in 1938 when Hitler comes the family is completely dispossessed and exiled and Iggy during the war joins the American army and fights all across Europe and after the war has no idea where he can live he's in exile, he's sort of a rootless he's a wandering Jew in many, many ways He sees the Netsuke collection, this extraordinary collection, and that's what takes him back to Japan.

20:46He says, I'm going to take this collection back to Japan. And he goes in 1946 and builds a house in Japan and becomes this emigre Austrian man in Japan. Anybody who's read the book will know that the Netsuke themselves are survivors. Yes. When everything was lost, when people were driven out into exile or killed and art, possessions, books, everything confiscated, stolen. And the fact is that these were so small, they could be hidden. They were hidden and they survived and they were passed down. I mean, it really is quite an extraordinary story. It's an extraordinary story. And it took him to Japan.

21:30And so when I'm 17, I'm in Japan. I meet him, I see them and it's the beginning of a deeply significant relationship in my life.

21:45Your next choice for this programme, Edmund de Waal, is the potter Lucy Rhee. Who was she? Lucy Rhee Gompertz was born in Vienna in a Jewish family and she starts making pots in this metropolitan way. She becomes very famous in Austria before the Second World War for her very beautiful and pared-down pots. And then, during the Anschluss, she escapes in 1938, and she comes to London, and she starts again. And during the war, she's not allowed to make pots, but she is allowed to do war work, and so she starts making buttons rather wonderfully. throughout the war she and various other stray friends of hers emigres work in her tiny muse albion muse in bayswater make ceramic buttons for the war effort and then after the war she she resumes making pots and and her pots are really extraordinary because they owe nothing to to this ruralist aesthetic of Leach.

22:52They are absolutely about the city. They feel like they've imbibed the colours of pavements and asphalt. They're black with lines engraved in them, scraffito. Or they're beautiful different kinds of white with pitted white glazes. So she makes coffee pots and espresso cups and tea sets. and the objects she begins to make are absolutely about contemporary living. You can imagine them in a sort of Bauhaus drawing room somewhere or on a dining room table. There's no one like her. She's terribly fierce. She gets up at five in the morning to make her pots. She's incredibly charming, as she was to me.

23:37If people, visitors come, give some coffee and Viennese chocolate cake and sends them away again and goes back to her work. And throughout her long life, she pioneers an aesthetic of, I want to say, passionate minimalism. Of looking at vases and bowls and cups and trying to find a kind of inner precision to what vessels might mean. How many ingredients may you put in one glaze? As many as necessary. There's no limit. Really? Most of my glazes are quite simple. It is very big, so the glaze sticks to the unfired clay. But when you first came here, what kind of pottery were you making then? Mostly cups and saucers, tableware, salad boards, soup boards.

24:29Did you make much that was purely decorative? In these days, very little. Was that because... Flower vases, yes. And were they eagerly sought after? No, not very. No. So how did you make ends meet? I really don't know, by having an overdraft. It was as hard as that, yes. This fierce, independent powerhouse of making and thinking. Why does she appeal? Why is she so significant? Because it's a completely different pathway, Rachel. It's about being in touch with the city. It's about being contemporary. It's about looking deeply into the past, but thinking about architecture, how pots can live in buildings, how they can talk to spaces.

25:17Did she encourage you? I mean, she must have known that you were a ceramicist and that you were trying to make a living and this was going to be your world. She wasn't an encouraging kind of person. I mean, I wouldn't have dared to show her my pots. I think she knew them. But I didn't look to her for encouragement and I wouldn't have got it. I think she used to make her students at Camberwell make teapots for discipline. Teapots are very difficult to make. and you can hear her kind of strong Viennese accent. Concentrate, do it again, make them better. Why is this so heavy? It can be thinner. I'm sure you have your own archive.

25:52And if you look back at the work that you were making at a very early age and then working through that time, that influence of Leach and then into Lucy Reed, do you see a change in your work? Does it become more like hers? It does because I started after 20 years of using stoneware clay, this browny, grey clay, I started to use porcelain. And I went to porcelain because it offered a different route for me. It offered me a different pathway into history. I could look deeply into Chinese pots in a different way, not a Lychian way, but a different way. It took me to European pots for the first time, Meissen and Cervo.

26:34I could try and understand why these kinds of objects mattered. And it talked to me about lucerie. So as soon as I started using porcelain, I had to rethink how and why I was making pots. It was very exciting for me. And the porcelain itself is more refined. It's more delicate than the clay that you have been using. Yes, so porcelain is white in itself. It's a refined clay, so it has no iron in it or impurities. And it's absolutely impossible to use. It's kind of unforgiving, intractable. What it does is when you're throwing it, here I'm waving my arms around in front of you, John, like a madman.

27:13It's a good mine. If I'm making a stoneware pot, I can go on and on and on. I can change it. I can make this jug and then I can make it larger or smaller because there's enough plasticity in it, enough grit in it. It's quite resilient. It's resilient. But with porcelain, you think your way into this lump of white clay and then you make it. You make it in one breath, you know, one exacting series of movements because otherwise it will fold on you. It will run away or fold. It will hold up its hands and give up. So what it made me do was to take me more deeply into what I wanted to make. You had read English at Cambridge and still making ceramics through that time at university.

28:06What is the relationship between words? I mean, given that you are author and ceramicist, and has there always been a very close relationship between the words and the work? and are you responding very often to literature in the work? Yes. So I don't quite understand it even after all these years, but for me, objects, I'm arranging these two white paper cuts full of water on the table. So objects have a sound for me. They make a noise for me in the world and they become words. So there's a very strong relationship for me between the objects themselves and words. They are not interchangeable, but they talk profoundly to each other.