The 17th Triennial Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association
8th-15th August 2004, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Monday, August 9, 2:00pm-3:30pm, Special Topics 1, “Writers Who Were Considered to
Have ‘Gone Native’” (MC1)
“The Marriage of East and West”: Bernard Leach as a Cultural Pilgrim
SUZUKI Sadahiro (Ochanomizu University)
Bernard Leach (1887-1979) was an artist-potter who played a key role in the
history of the twentieth century British crafts. Born in Hong Kong, he received his
education in England, but he determined the course of his life in East Asia, encountering
pottery by chance in Tokyo in 1911 and choosing it as his lifelong profession in Peking in
1916. Returning to England in 1920, the Englishman began his professional career,
eventually making his name as the “Father of Studio Pottery”.
Leach’s life and art is notable due to his positive idea of cultural amalgamation.
He concludes his autobiography, Beyond East and West (1978) with the following passage:
I have seen a vision of the Marriage of East and West, and far off down the
Halls of Time I heard the echo of a childlike voice. How long? How long?1
The phrase “the Marriage of East and West” encapsulates one of the major themes Leach
explored during his lifetime. In the twentieth century, the development of transport and
communication systems made the world relatively small in scale, and artistic traditions in
the world necessarily changed as a result. Leach wrote in his autobiography that
“[m]odern art is inevitably eclectic. Abruptly in the unfolding tale of humanity, we have
become the inheritors of all history and geography”. 2 This statement reveals his
recognition of the way that globalization enabled artists of the twentieth century to source
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their inspiration in different regions and historical periods.
Bernard Leach was an artist who embraced this trend in art. As the word
“marriage” suggests, he approved of mixing arts and cultures from various places and
times. The Englishman explored innovative possibilities of expressing the new age in the
field of crafts, and considered the establishment of new standards to assess the results. He
expressed his views in his pottery as well as in writings and occasional lectures. In this
respect Leach's life and art is significant not only to art history but also to comparative
cultural studies.
Although the citation with which I opened this paper is worth careful examination
simply by virtue of its being the artist’s summation of his own career, there is another
interesting fact to consider: exactly the same passage can be found in an essay he wrote in
Tokyo in 1920.3 The fact that a sentence written in 1920 is found, without any alteration, at
the very end of an autobiography published in 1978, suggests that the future direction the
artist would pursue had already been defined in 1920, by his experiences in East Asia.
Therefore, to evaluate the whole of Leach's life and art, it is essential to consider the
meaning of his expression, “the Marriage of East and West”. In the first part of this paper, I
will trace the process by which this idea was formed in East Asia in the 1910s and consider
what Leach intended by the phrase. In the second part, I will offer a reading of one of his
works as an embodied expression of “the Marriage of East and West”. It will be seen that
his career as a potter was a continuous endeavor towards the understanding of “East”,
which for Leach usually meant Japan, China, and Korea, and “West” meaning Western
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Europe, and towards the exploring the possibility of a new mode of expression.
“The Marriage of East and West”
Before starting the discussion, it seems appropriate to take a brief look at the artist’s
early life. Bernard Leach was born in Hong Kong in 1887, as the first and only child of a
colonial judge. As his mother died soon after she gave birth to him, he was taken in by his
mother's parents who were then living in Japan. He returned to Hong Kong in 1890 when
his father remarried, and going on to live in several parts of South East Asia afterwards.
He first set foot in England in 1897, when his father decided to send his son to the
Beaumont Jesuit College in Windsor4. In this Roman Catholic school, Bernard found an
interest in art, and in 1903 went on to the Slade School of Art, continuing on, in 1907, to the
London School of Art. In these schools Leach learned the skill of drawing and etching, but
never studied pottery in England. Around 1907 or 1908, he became increasingly interested
in Japanese art. According to his autobiography, the paintings of J. A. Mc. Whistler
(1834-1903) and the books of Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904) fascinated him.
In April 1909, Bernard Leach arrived in Japan and remained there until 1920, with
several excursions to China and Korea. Leach studied Japanese arts in Tokyo while he
furthered his acquaintance with Japanese intellectuals and artists. With help from these
friends, the Englishman studied not only Japanese arts but also those of China, Korea, the
Ainu and Taiwan, including both painting and crafts. In February 1911, he encountered
“raku-yaki”, a form of pottery. He was fascinated with it, and began to study in earnest.
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Although his study was abandoned from 1914 to 1916, during which period he was in
Peking, he finally decided to choose pottery as his profession in September 1916. He
returned from China to Japan and devoted himself once more to the study of pottery.
Trying to emulate the Asian traditions of pottery, he gradually felt the need to study
European pottery as a next step. He returned to England in June 1920, and set up his new
kiln in St. Ives, Cornwall.
Let us, with Leach’s early life in mind, return to a close examination of his vision of
“the Marriage of East and West”. Although the text is too vague for us to interpret with
total clarity, the meaning becomes more apparent when it is considered in conjunction
with other essays that Leach wrote in the 1910s. I would like to quote three passages from
his writings to assist in an examination of the phrase.
The first quotation is from the essay “East and West” (1920), which contains the
relevant phrase, “the Marriage of East and West”. This article includes a list as below:
West:---
East:--Male
Body
Reason
Action
Outer
Violence
Personal Religion
Objective Art
Individualism
Female
Soul
Intuition
Rest
Inner
Restraint
Impersonal religion[sic]
Subjective Art
Communism5
For Leach, exposed to various cultures in his infancy, the two words “East” and “West”
always represented the diversity of cultures on the earth, and were constant subjects of his
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speculation. This table clearly shows that the artist regarded the “East” as feminine,
intuitive, spiritual, and passive while the “West” was masculine, rational, material and
active. Through this dualistic thinking, whereby two seemingly incompatible principles
are set against one another, Leach proposed an explanation of the phenomena of the
world: dualism is a keynote concept conditioning Leach’s views, out of which his art, and
views on art, naturally developed.6
It took Leach considerable time before he succeeded in formulating his
understanding of “East” and “West” into this table, and found a word, “marriage”.
Originally he accepted the Western values and supported openly the modernization of the
“East”, like all other European people did7. However, his attitude changed in the middle of
the 1910s. Please look at the next quotation:
In claiming that the meeting of East and West is the meeting of the two extremes of
human evolution, the spiritual and the practical: that the decadence of the East is
due to the exaggeration of spiritual life, of imagination and dreamy idealism
unsupported by reason and exact practical knowledge of things; that the perversion
of the West is due to the exaggeration of practical life, of reason and the exact
knowledge of things, not governed by spirit, by intuition by instinct, by
imagination, naturally I not only make an aesthetic claim, but one, which if it is
accepted, is of widespread importance . It means that the East has more to offer us
than we have to offer to the East. It means, to anyone who is not a sheer materialist,
that the failure of the East is not so great as that of the West, and that consequently
our traditional attitude of superiority towards the Yellow and the Brown races is
indefensible8.
This is from a lecture entitled “The Meeting of East and West in Pottery”, a paper he read
at a meeting in Tokyo in 1915, soon after his second trip to China. In this lecture he
criticized the “West” for not making a sufficient effort to understand the “East”, while the
“East” did much to understand the “West.” For him the relationship between “East” and
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“West” should be equal, and he insisted that the East and the West should “meet” and
collaborate so as to reciprocally offer their strong points and compensate for the other's
weak points. This text shows that not only the experience in Japan but also that in China
were necessary for the artist to gain the culturally relative viewpoint necessary to reflect on
his own background. His experiences in these countries convinced him that “East” and
“West” share a common history of communication and cultural values. Apparently Leach
uses the word “meeting” in the sense of compromise, mutual understanding and mutual
support. For him, “East” and “West” should try to overcome the distance between them,
and support each other without losing their own characteristics. When Leach writes of
“the Marriage of East and West”, he seems, in the first place, to insist on cultural relativism
against a Euro-centric view of the world. However, at this early stage it was the word
“meeting”, not “marriage”, that he used to discuss the paring of “East” and “West”.
It was in 1917 that Leach found the word “marriage” to regulate the relationship of
“East” and “West”. He had a sudden inspiration on the morning of March 16th, 1917.
Leach wrote as below:
Before getting out of bed this morning I was thinking about the real
meaning of the word “ai no ko” which is always used in a scornful sense.
This seems to me senseless, both if we examine the literal meaning of
the word，i.e. “Child of mutuality”, or if we ponder over the popular
meaning of the word, i.e. “Foreign plus Japanese mixture”, or any mixture
of extremes.
It became clear to me to-day for the first time that the real blending, or
mixing, of extremes, whether in life or in art, is the highest aim we can strive
after, and that the scorn which is contained in the manner or tone of every
Japanese when he uses the word “ai-no-ko” is at bottom a just scorn of that
miserable half-mixture, not only in marriage, but also in all other directions,
which is the inevitable result of the meeting of East and West. Till this
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morning I had always believed that the marriage of, say Japanese and
Americans or English, was an utter wrong to the children, even if it was not
a mistake for the parents, this morning I grasped that uniting of two
extremes into a new whole increases in difficulty and also value according
to the difference between the two.9
In this passage Leach discussed the mixing of two extremely different things. He put such
mixtures into two categories according to the degree to which the mixing was successful:
“the miserable half-mixture” and “a new whole”. He was critical of the former,
exemplified by new architecture in Tokyo and Japanese export wares produced in
contemporary Yokohama. On the other hand, he thought highly of the latter. In the beauty
of “ai no ko” he found the features of parents coexisting and achieving harmony. Certainly
he acknowledged that the more difference the two “extremes” had, the more difficulty
there was in their marriage, yet he claimed that the significance of the marriage would
increase all the more for such complication.
Importantly, the word “marriage” appears in the quotation above, while the phrase
“the meeting of East and West” is still retained. It is true that Leach discusses here an
international marriage between foreigners or “extremes” and he does not yet fully extend
the analogy to art or pottery. However, the word “marriage”, significantly, appears here
for the first time in his consideration of the problems of eclecticism in art, in terms of a
child of mixed parentage.
The expression of “ai no ko” i. e. “child of mutuality” shows that when Leach refers
to “the Marriage of East and West” later, he is imagining a child in his mind rather than
matrimony itself, and that his “marriage” lays stress on the act of “blending, or mixing”.
This approach to finding a positive meaning in cultural amalgamation in art was
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formulated into a phrase “the Marriage of East and West”, in 1920.
Regarding the way Leach attempted to “blend” or “mix” the different cultural
traditions, there is an interesting report of an interview with Leach written by a Japanese
art critic.10 In the report Leach refered to a letter written to a Japanese politician by Herbert
Spencer (1820-1903), a philosopher known for his theory of social evolution11. In this letter
Spencer mentioned an international marriage and approved it only on condition that it is
between parents from what he would term as “close” races. We have already seen that
Leach, who had originally been sympathetic to this view, changed his opinion on March
16th, 1917. After mentioning Spencer's letter as a starting point, Leach, in the interview,
discussed the condition of art in terms of an international marriage. He insisted that an
artist, the “parents” of an artwork, should be responsible for the works and the effect they
may cause. According to Leach, if the artist understands the strong points of both the
native culture and the foreign culture, he can perceive “a good harmony of beauty” and
avoid “the miserable half-mixture”. The context of social evolution explains what Leach
intended in the production of such a work. For him, to produce a work with a “beauty of
good harmony” and propagate it in the rapidly changing society of the modern age, was a
strategy to reduce the ugliness of daily life. It should be noted here that what concerned
Leach were events in the present and the future, not the past. In this sense we should say
that Leach applied Social Evolutionism, rather than Darwinism, to art.
Leach seems to hold a basic belief that his present existence is regulated by the
notion of a better future, and that he is responsible for enabling this future to be realized.
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Adapting this to the interpretation of the text quoted at the beginning of this paper, we can
theorize that “the echo of a childlike voice” heard “far off down the Halls of Time” is
coming from the future toward “I” in the present, and that “I”, who heard the voice asking
“How long? How long?”, realizes his responsibility for the child to be born in the future.
And it seems Leach’s later activity after his return to England in 1920 is conditioned by this
vision of a child destined to be born.
Practice of “the Marriage of East and West”
I would like now to consider Leach's works in terms of his idea of “the Marriage of
East and West”. As we have already seen, this idea took sharper form in the latter half of
the 1910s, the period in which Leach developed his skill as a professional potter. For the
artist, the process of learning pottery meant an exploration of East Asian cultures on the
one hand, and the rediscovery of European cultures on the other. Pottery not only offered
Leach a useful foothold to deepen his understanding of the various art traditions of the
world, but in addition, led him to a field beyond the difference of cultures, where he
conceived his vision of cultural concoction.
The work we shall analyze is <Tile Panel, Consisting of Nine Tiles with Tree of Life
Painted Decoration> owned by the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan. Tiles
were Leach's favorite and specialty. As he originally trained as a painter at art school, the
surface of a tile was a good space for him to satisfy his desire for painting. The “Tree of
Life” is one of the most important motifs employed by Leach in his works.
The motif, “Tree of Life” has dense symbolism in terms of history, culture, and
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religion. It is a symbol of life in the universe. Its roots, trunk, and branches connect the
three worlds: the Underworld, Earth, and Heaven. It signifies endless rebirth and victory
over death. In Christianity, it is first a tree in Eden in Genesis, but its religious significance
can be extended to the cross in the New Testament. In the system of symbolism, the roots,
trunk, and branches of the tree have associations with animals: serpent and dragon for the
roots; lion, unicorn, hart, ox, and ram for the trunk; and peacock, dove and eagle for the
branches. The three parts also have their own significant colours: black for the roots, white
for the trunk, and red for the branches12.
Leach's version of the “Tree of Life” does not seem to follow the symbolism
described above. There are birds among the branches and at the edge of the tile; under the
branches, there is a man and a horse on the right side and a woman on the left; above the
tree, there is a zodiac sign, the Plough; and beneath the tree, there are three fish swimming
in a stream. Although Leach's choice and distribution of the animal imagery does not
correspond directly to the received symbolism, the intentionally symmetrical composition
of these creatures suggests that he was conscious of his motifs. However, it is still difficult
for us to understand with complete clarity the meaning that the motifs were intended to
convey.
There is an interesting source concerning the interpretation of the tree: in an article
from a newspaper Leach contributed to in 1955, he wrote about his friend, Ryusei Kishida
(1891-1929), one of the most important painters in the modern Japanese art. Leach
regarded Kishida as his comrade in seeking a balance between “the East” and “the West”.
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In praising the Japanese artist, Leach wrote as follows:
Kishida had an ability to perform the tense work of weaving a new cloth out
of the Eastern warp he originally possessed and the West European
weft…In order to bridge East and West, the two big branches of the human
culture, I think it an urgent necessity for an artist to have deep
comprehension of both of their cultures. This task is not only a problem of
an artist's mind, but also of his heart.13
When Leach mentions “the two big branches of the human culture”, he is probably
thinking of a genealogy which shows the process of biological evolution. In other words,
he understands that historically and geographically, human culture has been developing
in two directions: Eastward and Westward. Apparently, he regards it as a task of the
modern artist to bridge the gap between “East” and “West”.
Here we find an interesting overlap between the image of a cultural genealogy
conceived by Leach, and the motif of the “Tree of Life” depicted in his works. One of the
characteristics of his tree is its branches, which cross and weave repeatedly. Since a man is
on the right side and a woman on the left, we can ascertain that the right branch means
“the West” and the left, “the East”. The overlapping branches seem to imply the contact of
“East“ and “West”, which Leach thought was taking place with more frequency in the
modern age. Leach expresses his sense of the vivacity of creatures by composing the
animals, the zodiac, and a stream, implying the endless flow of time and the cycle of life. It
may be possible for us to conjecture that the birds among the branches represent an
idealised image of artists, who can move between “East” and “West” and bridge the two.
In this way, the artist generates a new symbolism by incorporating traditional motifs into
his own vocabulary.14
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Conclusion
In this paper we have considered the formation and meaning of Leach's idea, “the
Marriage of East and West” and its application in his pottery. Discussion has revealed that
the artist groped for cultural eclecticism in art, and hoped the various elements from the
world art traditions would coexist in his works. A dualistic way of thinking was an
effective tool and standpoint for the artist to explore and digest the arts of “East” and
“West”. He explained his ideal in terms of international marriage. It was important for him
that each of the elements in his works should combine to achieve harmony without losing
their original features, just as a child of mixed parentage inherits the features of his parents
whilst retaining uniqueness as an independent person. He thought the result of this
eclecticism should be judged by making reference to “the highest standards of the past
constantly checked by the present”.15 In his later years, he began to employ a motif of a
pilgrim. It seems this motif not only succeeds the birds bridging “East” and “West” in the
“Tree of Life” motif, but also his self-portrait. Leach did not stop shuttling between Britain
and Japan until he became blind and retired in 1973. Leach’s activity is characterized by his
aspiring to universal values through the continuous exploration of cultural diversity, and
in this sense his life and art is a remarkable case of dynamic cultural exchange in the
twentieth century.
1 Bernard Leach, Beyond East and West: Memoirs, Portraits and Essays, London and Boston: Faber and Faber,
1978, p. 310.
2 Leach, Beyond East and West, p. 238.
3 Bernard Leach, “East and West”, An English Artist in Japan, ed. Muneyoshi Yanagi, Tokyo: Matsutaro
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Tanaka, 1920, pp. 41-43.
4 Interview with David Leach on March 9th and 10th, 2000. This Jesuit school closed in 1967, and direct
research was impossible.
5 Leach, “East and West”, p. 42.
6 Simone Pétrement, “Dualism in Philosophy and Religion”, Philip P. Wiener et al. (ed.), Dictionary of the
History of Ideas, New York: Charles Scriber's Sons, 1973, vol. 2, pp. 38-44.
7 Leach, “Art and Commerce”, The Far East, 20 Dec. 1913: 491-5.
8 Bernard Leach, “The Meeting of East and West in Pottery”. The Far East 29 May 1915: 247-50; 5 June 1915:
288-91; 12 Jun 1915: 312-5, . 312.
9 Bernard Leach, Letter, Bijutsu, April 1917: 236.
10 Tari Moriguchi, “Geijutsu toshite-no kagu: Richi-shi sakuhin tenrankai hyo”, Wasedabungaku, no. 165
(August 1919), pp. 58-60, p. 59. The quotation is translated from Japanese into English by the author.
11 Herbert Spencer, “Herbert Spencer's Advice to Japan”, in Lafcadio Hearn, Japan: an Attempt at Interpretation.
12 “Tree: arbre”, Dictionnaire des Symboles, sous la direction de Jean Chevalier, avec la collaboration de Alain
Gheerbrant, Paris : R. Laffont, 1982. ”Tree”, Ad de Vries, Dcitionary of Symbols and Imagery, Amsterdam:
North-Holland Pub. Co., 1974. Jennifer Speake, The Dent Dictionary of Symbols in Christian Art, 1994. Roger
Cook, The Tree of Life: Symbol of the Center, London : Thames and Hudson, c1974. Reiko Nagata, “Seimei-no Ki”,
Sekai Shuykyo Dai-jiten, supervised by Tetsuo Yamaori, Tokyo: Heibon-sha, 1991.
13 Bernard Leach, “Kishida ryusei no koto” Sangyokeizai Shimbun, April 16th, 1955. The quotation was
translated from Japanese into English by the author.
14 As regards to Leach's personal symbolism, the artist interestingly describes two Chinese philosophers,
Confusius and Lao Tzi, as “Pole Star” in his autobiography. Leach, Beyond East and West, p. 103.
15 Leach,Beyond East and West, p. 238. See also: Bernard Leach, A Potter's Book, 2nd ed. 1945, London: Faber &
Faber, 1976, chap. 1 “Towards a Standard”.
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