TH: Again, it's amazing to be in actual direct contact with a pot. Again, you realise how useless photography is as a means of conveying a sense of... [video clip starts] I have seen a lot of the Staite-Murray pots at York City Art Gallery and been able to handle them, be close to them, but I think just my physical relationship with this pot demonstrates why Staite-Murray made such an impact on the art scene, much more of an impact I think it has to be said than Bernard Leach. These are comparatively massive, and all the debates in the 1920s and 1930s about pots as sculpture really seem to be embodied in Staite-Murray's work. It was something that critics liked to say, you know, Charles Marriott said, 'We may not have a Brancusi, but we have our British studio potters.' [video clip ends]
And that doesn't always make sense in the context of some of the more domestic looking objects, but this, I suppose, it was around about this time that Staite-Murray had made friends with Ben Nicholson and was moving into that. He had exhibited with Winifred and Ben Nicholson and he then went on to exhibit with the Seven and Five Society which by 1934 had declared itself abstract. You couldn't exhibit unless your work was abstract. This is a magnificent abstract shape, but if you look carefully you can see he's incised a rather Modigliani-like Madonna, and then this incredibly beautiful, casual series of little marks just plopping down give a sense of her robe, her dress, her cape or whatever. But it's really subtle and it doesn't interfere with this extraordinary shape.
Yes, [it's] after 1934, I think, because of this ruling dreamt up, I think by Ben Nicholson. Ben Nicholson could be very, very tough and authoritarian. I think after that Staite-Murray only puts abstract designs on his pots, doesn't fit in with the Seven and Five Society's requirements. But I've often thought that some of his figurative work, incised or painted on, has let the shape of the pot down, sometimes it was a little banal. And while there are, in the same way as his pupil Henry Hammond could paint wonderful things on pots, some wonderful fish, but the next day a rather banal duck would be painted onto a pot, but this... I don't know, you just feel he's breathing a certain air, that he was in contact with Vorticist groups when he started the ??? pottery. He'd probably seen Kandinsky painting. I think he'd probably seen a lot of European art, not just at various shows organised by Roger Fry, but the Allied Arts Association. Between 1910 and 1914 he could have seen an awful lot. And that stayed with him right into the 1930s.
MP: Can you turn it round slightly to the camera?
TH: Oh yes. It's a bit nerve-wracking.
MP: Do you think in this case the incised decoration and the painted decoration go with the shape of the pot? Do they work do you think?
TH: Yes, I think they work beautifully, actually, especially the way these marks delicately seem to be like falling drops of some kind. There's a lot of talk about the way he and Leach approached things differently, which I think might be a bit exaggerated. But certainly the fact that he always gave major pieces titles, I suppose suggests he saw these as works that should be seen in a context, a kind of odd amalgam of painting and sculpture.
MP: It's interesting that he exclusively chose to make vessels that ...
TH: Yes, I think at that date what else could he have made? Some sort of animals or abstract. I don't think the ceramic world was ready for abstract, I mean this is the nearest: these are vessels but they're so excessive and elongated and odd really. And the only other way to go would have been the kind of animal sculpture in ceramic area which I think would have... I think he's moving some sort of... abstraction and pure form are very much on his mind. And then again of course he did have this extraordinary respect for particularly Chinese ceramics, and he also had mystical ideas about the act of throwing, at least his writing suggests that. There are a lot of anecdotes of how he didn't actually teach much when he was at the Royal College of Art where he ran the ceramics department. And he taught by not teaching in a kind of Zen Buddhist way. But I think he would have felt that there was enough space in the, in the contemporary art world for these kind of thoughts.
MP: He did amazingly well to position himself in a way that allowed him to charge the prices he charged and to appear in the galleries that he appeared [in]? He was obviously very astute.
TH: I suppose so, or was he just very inspired? I don't think he went out of his way. I think we're looking at it from a rather 21st century perspective, he wasn't a spin doctor and didn't have a PR company. I think he had a vision and a kind of ability to... I mean, making a friendship with somebody like Ben Nicholson I don't think was anything other than shared interests, and I think on the other hand that the fact that Bernard Leach actually didn't seem to make friends with any leading sculptors or painters is rather revealing. He was perhaps a bit too locked up in his own memories of Japan, and perhaps too self-important to have that kind of interaction with another major artist. So I think the fact that he lived in London as opposed to Cornwall and he was teaching in a major art school was probably helpful, but I think his eminence came from passion and enthusiasm. And he fell victim to changing tastes. That's somehow the impression I get.
By the end of the 1930s the tides were turning against that kind of early modern idealistic work. It's all innocence and roughness and this sort of boldness, and if one was making pots there was a kind of implication that you should be designing for industry. That was the mood of the 1930s. So this is made on the cusp [of] changing critical reception and changing expectations of ceramics. And then, well, tragically after 1938 I don't think he ever made another pot. He found himself in Rhodesia in the war and only made a few fleeting visits back to Britain. I don't know when this pot was actually acquired?
MP: 1976.
TH: Right, so that was a retrospective purchase. That's interesting. Because there's another magnificent pot in the Museum collection called 'The Wheel of Life'. That was bought in 1958. There was a show of left over work which made quite a big impression in post-war Britain. No, I think this is an absolutely wonderful pot. And there's often a sense you've got of the Leach ??? Staite-Murray. This does make you feel there's a great ambitiousness and boldness about the man. And that not having visited the Far East was perhaps an advantage. You know, there were things he admired, but he was able to take the scale right up, by the standards of the time.
MP: There's just a feeling of Staite-Murray about it and a personal feeling about it, whereas with the Leach you're always thinking of where it came from and what it was derived from, [but] with Staite-Murray they tend to be individual and...
TH: Yes, no it's easier, on the surface anyway, to sort out all the sources that Bernard Leach was drawing on. In a way figures like Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie and Nora Bradon had more in common with this kind of work, and interestingly their work was compared to music. Critics were a bit bemused about how they could write about this sort of stuff, and so the music analogy is some other form of abstraction which applied to their work. In a way I hadn't thought of that before, they've got slightly more in common aesthetically because of the boldness and the simplicity.