Pot heads

A friend of mine once owned a vase by the potter Hans Coper — until, that is, her teenage son had his friends around for a party. It wasn’t clear who knocked it off the shelf, but it was an expensive accident; a similar Coper pot sold last month at auction for almost £400,000. But then the tricky thing about studio pottery is where to put it — in more senses than one.

It isn’t just whether it will be safer on the mantelpiece or in a cupboard. There is also the problem of how to categorise the stuff: is it art or is it craft, and what’s the difference? Such conundrums perplexed me as I walked around Things of Beauty Growing at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

This is billed as ‘British studio pottery’, but quite a few of the exhibits, including several of the most beautiful, were made in the Far East about 1,000 years ago. A Song dynasty vase near the beginning is as refined and elegant as an abstract sculpture by Brancusi. And indeed that was much how the aesthetes of London thought about their oriental ceramics. Roger Fry, the artistic guru of Bloomsbury, extolled a Song dynasty bowl for the ‘perfect sequence’ of its curves.

Some early 20th-century Britons began making similar objects themselves. Bernard Leach (1887–1979) spent more than a decade living and studying in Japan before returning to Britain in the 1920s and setting up a pottery in St Ives. He formed close friendships with Japanese potters, including Shoji Hamada who worked with him in Cornwall for three years (and thus features in this exhibition).

Another pioneering British student of Far Eastern ceramics was William Staite Murray (1881–1962). A convert to Buddhism, Staite Murray had an almost mystical approach to pottery.