Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal, CBE (born 10 September 1964) is an English contemporary artist, potter and author. He is known for his large-scale installations of porcelain vessels often created in response to collections and archives or the history of a particular place.[1] De Waal's book The Hare with Amber Eyes[2] was awarded the Costa Book Award for Biography, Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize in 2011 and Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for Non-Fiction in 2015.[3][4] De Waal's second book, The White Road, tracing his journey to discover the history of porcelain, was released in 2015.[5]
De Waal's interest in ceramics began aged five when he took an evening class at the Lincoln School of Art,[9] this early introduction to pottery influenced de Waal's later enthusiasm for pursuing an art practice based in ceramics.[10][11][12]
De Waal was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, where he was taught pottery by the potter Geoffrey Whiting (1919-1988), a student of Bernard Leach.[13] At 17, de Waal began a two-year apprenticeship with Whiting, deferring his entry into University of Cambridge.[11][14] During the apprenticeship de Waal made hundreds of earthenware and stoneware pots, such as casseroles and honey pots.[11] In 1983, de Waal took up his place at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to read English. He was awarded a scholarship in 1983 and graduated with first class honours in 1986.[15]
Following graduation, de Waal began to follow the discipline of British studio pottery, to create inexpensive domestic pots with good earth-tone colours.[11] He moved to Herefordshire where he built a kiln and set up a pottery making functional stoneware pots in the Leach tradition, but the enterprise was not financially successful.[11][5] In 1988, de Waal moved to inner-city Sheffield and began experimenting with working in porcelain.[14][2][5]
In 1990 de Waal obtained a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship, under which he spent a year obtaining a post-graduate diploma in Japanese language at Sheffield University[15] and continued an additional year's study.[2] Whilst studying in Japan at the Mejiro Ceramics studio de Waal also worked on a monograph of Bernard Leach, researching his papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum.[16] During this time de Waal began to make series of porcelain jars with pushed-in, gestural sides, arranged in groups and sequences.
Art and ceramics
Teapot, 1997 – an early work in porcelain by de Waal
On returning to Britain in 1993, de Waal settled in London[14] and began making his distinctive ceramics, porcelain with a celadon glaze. Focusing on essentially classical vessel shapes but with the inclusion of indentations or pinches and subtle variations in tone and texture in the style de Waal began while in Japan, these pots slowly gained the attention of the British craft industry leading to his first exhibition at Egg London in 1995.[17]
black milk, 2015, in situ at Edmund de Waal's London Studio
Throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s de Waal's ceramic practice became heavily influenced by modernism, the Bauhaus movement in particular. This led to de Waal's belief that the East and West may meet in the materiality of porcelain; for example, the ethos of China's Song dynasty may encounter the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus.[18]
In the years since 2000 de Waal has moved away from making and exhibiting single domestic use vessels to the production of groups of vessels and objects to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces, later moving into predominately wall-mounted and freestanding vitrines filled with varying multitudes of his porcelain vessels, and most recently the addition of different kinds of metals, metallic gilding, porcelain shards and sheets of porcelain with embossed handwriting.[19] In a 2017 interview conducted in preparation for de Waal's exhibition at Artipelag, Sweden, de Waal explained his artistic process and attraction to porcelain as a material:
when I need to make something I'm often mesmerised or haunted by an idea or by a piece of poetry. A line from poetry, a word sometimes, or a piece of music, or a space that I've been thinking about, a particular place that I want to kind of question by making something for it. So, there are all these different possibilities when I begin. I am grounded in history, the history and culture of the materials I use, this extraordinary two-thousand-year history of porcelain. I don't use this material lightly. It’s not a light material. It's got incredible resonance, incredible power.[20]
Lichtzwang, 2014. Installed in the Theseus Temple, Vienna.
In 2013 BBC One broadcast an Imagine documentary following de Waal for a year as he prepared for his debut New York exhibition, Atemwende at Gagosian Gallery; titled and inspired by a poetry collection from the German émigré poet Paul Celan.[21][22]
De Waal discussed the influence of music and sound on his art practice in various interviews, including the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions,[23] BBC Desert Island Discs[24] and in a 2017 interview, de Waal mentioned, "I am obviously on some spectrum where for me objects do actually have very powerful sound. I do literally hear them when I put them out."[20] In addition, de Waal plays recorded music aloud in his studio while making and assembling his work, that this provides "a landscape for [him] to be in" when working.[25][20] De Waal has collaborated with musicians on various projects, including Psalm, in 2015 by the Scottish composer Martin Suckling with the Aurora Orchestra; and an atmospheric sound piece by Simon Fisher Turner as a part of the 2017 Schindler House exhibition.[26][27]
on the properties of fire, 2012. Installed at Waddesdon Manor, Buckinghamshire.
In 2012 he received his first outdoor public art commission, for the Alison Richard Building at the Sidgwick Site of the University of Cambridge, where he created A Local History, consisting of three vitrines filled with porcelain to sit beneath the pavement surrounding the building.[28] In 2015 de Waal curated the exhibition White in the Royal Academy of Arts Library and Print Room. The "project ... sets objects in dialogue with one another and with the spaces around them"[29] and included works by Ai Weiwei, Kazimir Malevich's Suprematist Teapot and J. M. W. Turner's porcelain palette. In September 2016 de Waal collaborated with the artist Ai Weiwei to co-curate an exhibition, Kneaded Knowledge: The Language of Ceramics at the National Gallery in Prague and Kunsthaus Graz exploring the history of clay. The exhibition featured works by both artists and from other prominent artists working in ceramics, including Pablo Picasso, Lucio Fontana, Isamu Noguchi, Lucie Rie and Peter Voulkos.[30]
Since 2016 de Waal has continued his interest in working with arts and cultural institutions in installing his work in relationship and dialogue with existing museum collections such as the Frick Collection, historical architectural spaces such as Schindler House and the Ateneo Veneto; and engagement with Jewish museums in both Venice and Vienna.[31][32] De Waal make his Royal Ballet debut in the 2017–18 Season designing Wayne McGregor’s new ballet, Yugen, at the Royal Opera House. Set to The Chichester Psalms, the production formed part of a programme celebrating the centenary of Leonard Bernstein's birth.[33][34][35]
De Waal is a patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity providing art for health and social care in England, Wales and Northern Ireland,[36] and from 2015 to 2020 de Waal was a trustee of the National Saturday Club, an educational charity for young people.[37] In 2018, de Waal was re-appointed to the Royal Mint Advisory Committee for another term of five years.[38] From 2004 to 2011, de Waal was professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster; and a trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London from 2011 to 2019.[7][39][40] De Waal has been a trustee of the Gilbert Trust since 2013 and in 2020 became a co-opted member of the V&A Museum of Childhood.[41][42]
Writing
The Hare with Amber Eyes. Netsuke. Masatoshi, Osaka, c. 1880, signed. Ivory, amber buffalo horn. Former Ephrussi Collection, today descendant Edmund de Waal. Shown at a special exhibition in November 2016 with De Waal at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
In 1998, De Waal published a monograph on Bernard Leach, with research collected while studying in Japan.[43] The book challenges the public understanding of Leach as the great and original interlocutor for Japan and the East as the 20th-century potter who translated the mystery of the East to audiences in the West. De Waal's research into Leach in Japan revealed that he predominantly associated himself with Western-educated Japanese people, did not speak Japanese and studied only a narrow range of traditional Japanese ceramics. Due to Leach's status in the West as the "Father of British studio ceramics" and the influence of his Eastern techniques and philosophy, De Waal's views attracted criticism from some of Leach's followers.[44]
In 2010, de Waal's family memoir, The Hare with Amber Eyes: a Hidden Inheritance, was published, first by Chatto & Windus in the UK and later by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in New York City. The book traces the history of de Waal's Jewish relatives (from his paternal grandmother, Elisabeth), the wealthy and influential Ephrussi family, by telling stories surrounding a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke – miniature ivory and wood sculptures traditionally used as toggles on men's kimono, to attach carrying pouches. The collection of netsuke were originally purchased by Charles Ephrussi in Paris in the 1870s, and were handed down through the generations and eventually given to de Waal by his great-uncle Ignace "Iggie" Ephrussi, who settled in Tokyo after the Second World War.[45] The book received critical acclaim, and brought de Waal the Costa Book Award for biography in 2010, as well as the Galaxy New Writer of the Year Book Award[46] and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize.[45] It has sold over a million copies and has been published in more than 25 languages.[47]
The Ephrussis. Travel in Time, an exhibition surrounding the story of the Ephrussi family told by de Waal in his family memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, tracing their history from Odessa to Paris and Vienna; then to their migration as refugees as the Second World War forced them to seek asylum in the United Kingdom, the US and Mexico, and onto Japan and other countries, opened at the Jewish Museum Vienna in November 2019.[48][49]
Waddesdon Manor is a country house in the village of Waddesdon, in Buckinghamshire, England. Owned by the National Trust and managed by the Rothschild Foundation, it is one of the National Trust's most visited properties, with over 463,000 visitors in 2019.
Pottery and porcelain is one of the oldest Japanese crafts and art forms, dating back to the Neolithic period. Types have included earthenware, pottery, stoneware, porcelain, and blue-and-white ware. Japan has an exceptionally long and successful history of ceramic production. Earthenwares were made as early as the Jōmon period, giving Japan one of the oldest ceramic traditions in the world. Japan is further distinguished by the unusual esteem that ceramics hold within its artistic tradition, owing to the enduring popularity of the tea ceremony. During the Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573–1603), kilns throughout Japan produced ceramics with unconventional designs. In the early Edo period, the production of porcelain commenced in the Hizen-Arita region of Kyushu, employing techniques imported from Korea. These porcelain works became known as Imari wares, named after the port of Imari from which they were exported to various markets, including Europe.
Bernard Howell Leach was a British studio potter and art teacher. He is regarded as the "Father of British studio pottery".
Studio pottery is pottery made by professional and amateur artists or artisans working alone or in small groups, making unique items or short runs. Typically, all stages of manufacture are carried out by the artists themselves. Studio pottery includes functional wares such as tableware and cookware, and non-functional wares such as sculpture, with vases and bowls covering the middle ground, often being used only for display. Studio potters can be referred to as ceramic artists, ceramists, ceramicists or as an artist who uses clay as a medium.
Dame Lucie Rie, was an Austrian-born, independent, British studio potter. She is known for her extensive technical knowledge, her meticulously detailed experimentation with glazes and with firing and her unusual decorative techniques.
Palais Ephrussi is a former Ringstraßenpalais in Vienna. It was built for the Ephrussi family of financiers by Theophil Freiherr von Hansen, the architect of the Austrian Parliament Building. It is on the Ringstrasse, specifically the Universitätsring, opposite the Votivkirche.
The Ephrussi family is a wealthy Ashkenazi Jewish noble banking family. The family's bank and properties were seized by the Nazi authorities after the 1938 "Anschluss", the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany.
Gwyn Hanssen Pigott OAM (1935–2013) was an Australian ceramic artist. She was recognized as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists. By the time she died she was regarded as "one of the world's greatest contemporary potters". She worked in Australia, England, Europe, the US, New Zealand, Japan and Korea. In a career spanning nearly 60 years, influences from her apprenticeships to English potters were still apparent in her later work. But in the 1980s she turned away from production pottery to making porcelain still-life groups largely influenced by the Italian painter Giorgio Morandi.
Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers is an oil painting by French impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Produced in Paris in 1881, the painting depicts the sisters Alice and Elisabeth, daughters of Louise Cahen d'Anvers and her husband the Jewish banker Louis Raphaël Cahen d'Anvers. It is considered one of the most popular works in the collection of the São Paulo Museum of Art, where it has been conserved since 1952.
Victor Alexander de Waal is a British Anglican priest. He was the Dean of Canterbury from 1976 to 1986.
Elizabeth Fritsch CBE is a British studio potter and ceramic artist born into a Welsh family in Whitchurch on the Shropshire border. Her innovative hand built and painted pots are often influenced by ideas from music, painting, literature, landscape and architecture.
Charles Ephrussi was a French art critic, art historian, and art collector. He also was a part-owner and then editor as well as a contributor to the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, the most important art historical periodical in France.
The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) is a family memoir by British ceramicist Edmund de Waal. De Waal tells the story of his family, the Ephrussi, once a very wealthy European Jewish banking dynasty, centred in Odessa, Vienna and Paris, and peers of the Rothschild family. The Ephrussis lost almost everything in 1938 when the Nazis confiscated their property, and were unable to recover most of their property after the war, including priceless artwork; an easily hidden collection of 264 Japanese netsuke miniature sculptures was saved, tucked away inside a mattress by Anna, a loyal maid at Palais Ephrussi in Vienna during the war years. The collection has been passed down through five generations of the Ephrussi family, providing a common thread for the story of its fortunes from 1871 to 2009.
Jack Doherty is a Northern Irish studio potter and author. He is perhaps best known for his vessels made of soda-fired porcelain. He has been featured in a number of books, and his work has been exhibited widely in both Europe and North America. Articles of his have appeared in various pottery journals and he has been Chair of the Craft Potters Association.
Kate Olivia Malone is a British ceramic artist known for her large sculptural vessels and rich, bright glazes. Malone was previously a judge, along with Keith Brymer Jones, on BBC2's The Great Pottery Throw Down (2015–2017), then presented by Sara Cox.
Baron Ignace von Ephrussi (1829–1899) was a Russian-born Austrian banker and diplomat. He was the head of Ephrussi & Co. in Vienna, Austria.
Jennifer Elizabeth Lee is a Scottish ceramic artist with an international reputation. Lee's distinctive pots are hand built using traditional pinch and coil methods. She has developed a method of colouring the pots by mixing metallic oxides into the clay before making. Her work is held in over forty museums and public collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2018 Lee won the Loewe Craft Prize, an award initiated by Jonathan Anderson in 2017. The prize was presented to her at an awards ceremony at The Design Museum in London.
Viktor, Ritter von Ephrussi was an Austrian banker.
Mike Tooby is an independent curator and researcher based in Cardiff, Wales. His interests lie in integrating the practices often separated in curating in the arts and heritage settings: research, display, promotion, participation and learning. His own practice centres on curating in collaborative or site-specific contexts, where negotiating and celebrating relationships with audiences are at the core of projects.
Claudia Clare is a British ceramicist and writer known for her large painted earthenware jars depicting the impact of big events in the lives of ordinary women.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
