Bernard Leach - Edmund de Waal Book

Edmund De Waal Book

Edmund de Waal, British ceramic artist and Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster, had been taught pottery by Geoffrey Whiting, a disciple of Leach, at the King's School, Canterbury. Whilst in Japan de Waal worked on a monograph of Leach, researching Leach’s papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum,

De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998. He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach." "The great myth of Leach," he said, "is that Leach is the great interlocutor for Japan and the East, the person who understood the East, who explained it to us all, brought out the mystery of the East. But in fact the people he was spending time with, and talking to, were very few, highly educated, often Western educated Japanese people, who in themselves had no particular contact with rural, unlettered Japan of peasant craftsman".

De Waal noted that Leach did not speak Japanese and had looked at only a narrow range of Japanese ceramics. These opinions attracted criticism from some of Leach's followers.