Edmund de Waal

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Edmund de Waal
File:Breathturn, I.jpg
breathturn, I, 2013
Born (1964-09-10) 10 September 1964 (age 60)
Nottingham
Nationality British
Education The King's School, Canterbury
University of Cambridge
University of Sheffield
Awards OBE
Windham-Campbell Literature Prize

Edmund Arthur Lowndes de Waal, OBE (born 10 September 1964) is a British artist, and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, published in 2010, and The White Road, published in 2015. He is most well known for his large scale installations of porcelain vessels and has received several awards and honours for his work.

Early life

De Waal was born in Nottingham, England,[1] the son of Esther Aline (née Lowndes-Moir) and Rev. Dr Victor de Waal, who became the Dean of Canterbury Cathedral. His grandfather was Hendrik de Waal, a Dutch businessman who moved to England. His grandmother Elisabeth[2] was a member of the Ephrussi family, whose history he chronicled in The Hare with Amber Eyes.[citation needed]. Elisabeth de Waal's first novel, The Exiles Return was published by Persephone Books in 2013. De Waal's siblings include barrister John de Waal, Alex de Waal who is director of the World Peace Foundation, and Caucasus expert Thomas de Waal.

De Waal's interest in pottery began at the age of five when he took an ceramics evening class[3] at the Lincoln School of Art.[4] He was educated at The King's School, Canterbury, where he was taught pottery by the potter Geoffrey Whiting, a student of Bernard Leach.[5]

Education and early career

File:Thrown Bottle by Edmund de Waal (YORYM-2004.1.2957).JPG
Thrown Bottle by de Waal from the W. A. Ismay Studio Ceramics Collection at York Art Gallery

When he was 17, de Waal began a two-year apprenticeship with Whiting, deferring his entry into University of Cambridge.[3][6] During the apprenticeship he made hundreds of pots, such as casseroles and honey pots.[3] 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.[7]

Following graduation, de Waal began to follow his dream to create inexpensive domestic pots with good earth-tone colours.[3] 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 successful.[3] In 1988, he moved to inner-city Sheffield and began experimenting with working in porcelain.[6]

In 1990 he obtained a Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation Scholarship, under which he spent a year obtaining a post-graduate diploma in Japanese language at Sheffield University[7] and continued an additional year's study.[8] Whilst studying in Japan at the Mejiro Ceramics studio he also worked on a monograph of Bernard Leach, researching his papers and journals in the archive room of the Japanese Folk Crafts Museum.[9] During this time he began to make series of porcelain jars with pushed-in, gestural sides, arranged in groups and sequences.

Career

On returning to Britain in 1993, de Waal began living in London[6] and made his distinctive ceramics, porcelain with a celadon glaze. Their shapes were essentially classical but with indentations or pinches and subtle variations in tone and texture. The pots became very fashionable, and in 1995 he had his first of many solo exhibitions.[10]

De Waal's book on Bernard Leach was published in 1998.[11] He described it as "the first 'de-mystifying' study of Leach."[12] "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."[3] He 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.

File:Tenebrae, No. 2, 2005.jpg
Tenebrae, No. 2, 2005, shown at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge in 2007

His work remained broadly within the Anglo-Oriental tradition but he also studied the modernists, and the Bauhaus movement in particular. In visits to Gothic cathedrals as a child de Waal had attended to small spaces within large buildings. While at university he began to consider how his work might help to re-order the interior space of the museums and art galleries he visited. In his current work he has moved away from making single objects to the production of groups of objects to be viewed in relation to openings and spaces. Most of his work consists of cylindrical porcelain pots with pale celadon glazes. He believes that the East and West may meet in porcelain; for example, that there the ethos of China's medieval Song dynasty may encounter the modernist ethos of the Bauhaus.[13]

File:Signs & Wonders 01.JPG
Signs & Wonders, 2009, an installation commissioned by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, for the re-opening of its ceramics gallery

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. In it he retraces the history of his Jewish relatives (from his paternal grandmother) – the wealthy and influential Ephrussi family – through stories about a collection of 264 Japanese netsuke that were handed down through the generations and eventually given to de Waal by his great-uncle Ignace "Iggie" Ephrussi, who settled in Tokyo in 1947. The book has received critical acclaim and has won many literary prizes, including the Costa Book Award, the Galaxy New Writer of the Year Book Award and the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize. It has sold over a million copies and been published in more than 30 languages. Felicity Bryan is de Waal's literary agent.

From 2004 to 2011, de Waal was Professor of Ceramics at the University of Westminster. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2011 Birthday Honours for services to art.[14] The same year de Waal wrote The Pot Book (Phaidon Press), a colour-illustrated anthology of 300 ceramic vessels.[15]

De Waal has made major installations for Chatsworth, Kettle's Yard, Tate Britain, Fitzwilliam Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 2012 de Waal received his first public art commission for the Alison Richard Building at the University of Cambridge where he created a local history, three vitrines filled with porcelain to sit beneath the pavement surrounding the building.[16] In 2014 de Waal made two further public commissions; a series of towers for the retrochoir at Southwark Cathedral called another hour and, Lichtzwang, a pair of 9 ft (2.7 m) tall vitrines containing 281 white and cream porcelain vessels, commissioned by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna for the Theseus Temple in the Volksgarten.[17]

File:Atmosphere, 2014.jpg
Atmosphere, 2014, shown in situ at the Sunley Gallery, Turner Contemporary, Margate

In 2013 he held his debut exhibition in New York at the Gagosian Gallery which he called Atemwende.[18] after a work by the German émigré poet, Paul Celan. This was followed by an exhibition opening at Turner Contemporary in Margate, where de Waal made a series of hanging vitrines filled with porcelain that he named Atmosphere.[19]

De Waal has spoken about the influence of music on his work, for example in 2010 on the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions.[20] In another interview about music that inspires him in his work, he has described how "you can get yourself into the loops of music... I did a huge porcelain wall – 500 porcelain vessels – and there are rhythms in that wall that completely come out of baroque music. More recently there's installations where things are in very minimalist, black lead-lined boxes, 12 of them in a row with the same number of vessels in each but they're arranged in different ways. That's the porcelain equivalent of Steve Reich's systems music! It's the same notes and the same tones repeated and just slightly different each time and it only makes sense if you've got all of it. One of them by itself is just a black box with a few pots in it."[21] The playlist includes Keith Jarrett, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Adams and Franz Schubert.

On 5 November 2013 BBC One broadcast an Imagine documentary following de Waal for a year as he prepared for his exhibition in New York. In 2014 Phaidon Press published a monograph on de Waal's life and work with contributions by A.S. Byatt, Colm Tóibín, Guggenheim curator, Alexandra Munroe and novelist, Peter Carey.[22]

His book The White Road was featured on BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week in September 2015.

From 28 September 2015 to 3 January 2016 de Waal's curated the exhibit 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"[23] and includes works by Ai Weiwei, Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematist Teapot, porcelain pots by de Waal himself and J. M. W. Turner's porcelain palette.

Art market

De Waal is represented by the Gagosian Gallery in London, New York and Los Angeles, the New Art Centre at Roche Court, East Winterslow, Wiltshire, and Galerie Max Hetzler in Berlin.

Major exhibitions and installations

Awards and honours

Bibliography

Books

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  • Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.[26] ISBN 978-1-849760430

Catalogues

  • ten thousand things. Beverly Hills, CA: Gagosian Gallery. 2016. ISBN 978-0-8478-4926-0[27]
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Critical studies and reviews

  • Danicke, Sandra. Mind the Gap, Art - Das Kunstmagazin, June 2015 [1]
  • Crichton-Miller, Emma, with contributions from A.S. Byatt, Colm Toibin, Alexandra Munroe, Peter Carey and Deborah Saunt. Edmund de Waal,, Phaidon Press, 2014 ISBN 978-0714867038 - a monograph on Edmund's life and career
  • Wullschläger, Jackie. Lunch with the FT: Edmund de Waal, Financial Times, 28 March 2014 [2]
  • Enright, Shane. A show that makes all the white noises, Crafts, January/February 2014 [3]
  • Kemske, Bonnie. Silence for the ceramic cylinders, The Art Newspaper, 19 December 2013 [4] - a review of de Waal's exhibition, On White at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
  • Saunders, Jon. Fragile Histories, Apollo, 6 December 2013 [5]
  • Zwick, Tracy. Porcelain Poetry: Edmund de Waal debuts at Gagosian tonight, Art in America, 12 September 2013 [6]
  • Vogel, Carol. Poetry Written in Porcelain, The New York Times, 29 August 2013 [7]
  • Smith, Roberta. Edmund de Waal: AtemwendeThe New York Times,10 October 2013 [8]
  • Calkin, Jessamy. Edmund de Waal on his new exhibition: a thousand hours, The Telegraph Magazine, 28 September 2012 [9]
  • Ayén, Xavi. De Waal, el hombre que habla con las miniaturas, La Vanguardia, 8 July 2012 [10]
  • Schmid, Thomas. Wie man den richtigen Ton Findet', Die Welt, 10 June 2012 [11]
  • Rocco, Fiammetta. Edmund de Waal's Unfinished Business, Intelligent Life, January/February 2012 [12]
  • Wagner, Erica. Potter's Delight, The Times, 5 November 2011
  • Kaiser, Walter. Searching for a Lost World, New York Review of Books, 14 October 2011 [13]
  • Cohen, Roger. The Netsuke Survived, The New York Times, 3 September 2011 [14]
  • Caeser, Ed. A Surprise Bestseller, The Sunday Times, 23 January 2011
  • Lesser, Wendy. Edmund de Waal's Hare, The Threepenny Review, 29 September 2010 [15]
  • Dirda, Michael. Edmund de Waal's The Hare with Amber Eyes, The Washington Post, 2 September 2010 [16]
  • Dillon, Brian. Inheritance of Loss, The Sunday Telegraph, 27 June 2010 [17]
  • Levy, Paul. Europe's Jews, as told by Miniature Japanese Art, The Wall Street Journal, 11 June 2010
  • Tusa, John. The John Tusa Interviews: Edmund de Waal, BBC Radio 3, 10 October 2004 [18]
  • Cooper, Emmanuel. Hidden Depth: The Ceramics of Edmund de Waal, Ceramic Art and Perception, vol.54, 2003

See also

References

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External links

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  1. British Council
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  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 Interview with John Tusa, BBC Radio 3.
  4. Interview on BBC Radio 4's Front Row, 19 May 2014.
  5. Ceramics: Art and Perception, No. 54, 2003.
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  8. de Waal, Edmund.The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance. Vintage, 2011, p. 1. ISBN 978-0-09-953955-1.
  9. de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes (2011), p. 3.
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  11. de Waal, Edmund. Bernard Leach. Tate Publishing, 1998. ISBN 978-1-85437-227-7.
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  13. Twentieth Century Ceramics, London, Thames and Hudson, 2003.
  14. The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 59808. p. 10. 11 June 2011.
  15. De Waal, Edmund. "The Pot Book". Retrieved 12 April 2014.
  16. De Waal, Edmund [19]". CRASSH, July 2015.
  17. De Waal, Edmund. "Theseus Temple". Retrieved 10 July 2015.
  18. de Waal, Edmund. Atemwende. Gagosian Gallery, 2013. ISBN 978-1935263852.
  19. De Waal, Edmund. "Turner Contemporary". Retrieved 10 July 2015.
  20. He chose music by Bach, Brian Eno, Britten, Gesualdo, John Adams, Moby, Mozart, Orlando Gibbons.
  21. "Edmund de Waal chooses the music that inspires him in his work". Phaidon.com, October 2011.
  22. "http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1561010.ece". TLS.co.uk, July 2015.
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