The White Road

by Edmund de Waal

  There were very few visitors. Sometimes even the warders were asleep.

  The display was regimented by country or epoch. It came from a time before interpretation. You were given a vitrine of Sèvres, or medieval jugs or Lowestoft porcelain and expected to get on with it.

  ii

  I walked and walked these galleries. And I worked out what I wanted to do. I wanted to be present, but not obtrusive. I drew a red ring on the plans inside the dome. I wanted a red metal shelf of porcelain high up at the point where the curve of the dome sprang from the walls; it should float above the cornice, away from the dome, porcelain held in space.

  I wanted it to be a gesture, as easy as a hand on a shoulder.

  And if you stood aslant on one of the mosaic circles that make up the floor in the entrance hall – shaking your umbrella, shifting in that moment of coming into a museum, the adjustment to echoey spaces – and looked up at the square aperture in the coffered ceiling, you would see a red arc. And a white smudge of porcelain held 150 feet above you. I called it Signs & Wonders.

  iii

  The red shelf holds 425 vessels made out of porcelain.

  It is my memory palace. I thought of the porcelain in the collections of the museum that I have loved, looked at it again and walked away and sat at my wheel and made my memory of it. It was a kind of distillation, the intensity of the after-image you get from looking at anything hard.

  What is left of that garniture of seven porcelain jars when you have looked away?

  It feels a long time ago. Putting them so high up was, at one level, simply a way of putting things out of harm’s way. With a high shelf, things don’t get knocked. And I liked the idea of it as a kind of attic, with things in the shadows, as I did at the Geffrye Museum.

  But looking back, I was making these pots during the day in my last cramped studio with a small red maquette hanging above my wheel. There were boards of finished pots jumbled up with work ready for me to trim, buckets of porcelain ready for me to throw, and lists on the walls, a calendar with the day of the install ringed in red. That is the day they would close the galleries and board over the aperture and the scaffolding towers would be in place and the thirty-seven-metre powder-coated aluminium shelf brought down from its fabricators in Lancaster and lifted into the museum. All my porcelain had to be ready. There would be hard hats.

  And at night I was trying to finish my book about netsuke, about loss, about the way collections fall apart, how memory burns an image of such intensity that you can be 10,000 miles from where you grew up and reconstruct how one object stood next to another, trying to make the circle join up again.

  I didn’t know how to end the book. My advance had been spent long ago on research trips to Vienna, Odessa. I’d look at my lists of the places I hadn’t been, the graves that I felt might make something click into place if I went and stood and paced, the notes to check the postmarks on letters from a hundred years before. There must be a cultural history of dust, I wrote.

  I handed in my book late.

  And a week later at the opening of the Ceramics Galleries, a bemused royal glances up at my installation seventy feet above us and asks me how it will be dusted and have I come far?

  I don’t know, Ma’am, I reply to the first question.

  And yes, I think, I have.

  iv

  The red shelf holds three kinds of porcelain.

  There are my memories of Chinese pots. There is a whole episode of bowls on stands that have some kind of kinship with Jingdezhen. And secondly there is my conversation with the porcelain from all the factories that spilt out across Europe in the eighteenth century. There are my versions of a Meissen dinner service up there, and garnitures, parts of porcelain room arrangements.

  And thirdly there is industry. Because I throw my work on the wheel there are many kinds of vessel that I cannot make. As I wanted porcelain dishes to be part of the shelf I asked for a wide, generous meat dish to be moulded in a factory in Stoke-on-Trent.

  Industry which means modernity, seriality, perfection, the run of objects that don’t just approximate to each other, but are each other. It is standardisation, it’s the on and on and on of things in the world. It’s the polar opposite of everything that making pots by hand in a workshop strives for, the warmth and gesture, the judgement that changes from object to object. It is beauty and sublimity and disappearance.

  The polar opposite of the handmade. But polar too, in their coldness, their endlessness.

  ‘I tried to think a lonelier Thing / Than any I had seen – / Some Polar Expiation – An Omen in the Bone / Of Death’s Tremendous Nearness’, wrote Emily Dickinson, her poem sitting jaggedly on the empty white page.

  And it is closely allied to revolution. Up there are matt grey cylinders against a fiercely white dish, the graphic sparks of constructivist porcelain from Revolutionary Russia. And there are the graduated run of whites into greys of Bauhaus ceramics from Germany.

  This is where I need to go. It is the last part of my journey, revolution, Porcelain 1919.

  Chapter fifty-seven

  1919

  i

  ‘Lenin is seated at The Rotonde on a cane chair’, wrote Le Corbusier. ‘He has paid centimes for his coffee, with a tip of one sou. He has drunk out of a small white porcelain cup. He is wearing a bowler hat and a smooth white collar. He has been writing for several hours on sheets of typing paper. His inkpoint is smooth and round, made from bottle glass.’

  This is the revolution. It is perfect and smooth and white. It works with focus. It is strong. One sou suggests a slight lack of generosity. It is laconic. It is black espresso in a small white porcelain cup.

  Revolution is everywhere. I have a new notebook.

  Germany is strikes and disorder on the streets. There is no money. On 8 and 9 October 1919, duplicates from Augustus’ collection of porcelain held in Dresden are sold to fund the new republic by Rudolph Lepke’s auction house in Berlin.

  There is hyperinflation, decades of savings disappear. The film reels show pictures of wheelbarrows of banknotes. The zeros multiply by the hour. In Dresden, they resort to making coins out of red stoneware, the Jaspis-porzellan that Tschirnhaus and Böttger invented on their way to white. These keep value.

  English revolution 1919 is moderated by an anxiety to offend.

  Roger Fry, artist and curator, has just closed the Omega Workshops, created to revolutionise the decorative arts. He made wobbly white cups which were turned into wobbly white industrial cups. He upholds the supremacy of Sung Dynasty bowls, ‘we realise that the precise thickness of the walls is consistent with the particular kind of matter of which it is made’, which means fitness for purpose, icons of abstraction.

  I note, under money, that Cornwall in 1919 now produces half of the world’s kaolin, china clay, and the three major firms extracting it from those contested moors have become English China Clays.

  ii

  Russia is more dramatic. I hope that when I read Lenin’s speech delivered at the All Russia Congress of Glass and Porcelain Workers – from his Collected Writings Vol. 31 – that he is going to announce the dawn of a new history in porcelain. But it is dull stuff on grain production punctuated with applause and … prolonged applause.

  That is slightly the problem with revolutions. There are an awful lot of speeches to sit through.

  In Russia, everything is to be mobilised to create a new world. Anatoly Lunarcharsky, as the first Soviet People’s Commissar for Education and head of the People’s Committee for Public Enlightenment, organises a competition called ‘Crockery for All’. The question is asked What do we want from a plate?:

  The cultural revolution, like the bugler’s trumpet, is summoning for examination and revaluation everything which mobilises or poisons our consciousness, our will and our readiness for battle. In this ‘parade’ of objects there are no non-combatants.

  The Imperial Porcelain Factory in St Petersburg has been renamed the State Porcelain Factory and
reorganised to ‘serve and not alienate the state’. This is pragmatic as it allows artists and decorators to be workers and to stay on. And as there is a huge stock of blank porcelain to use up. Most of it has the mark of the double eagle of the tsar already printed on the back.

  What should this ‘porcelain nursery for a new nation’ do with these blanks? There are no non-combatants, so paint them with slogans and aphorisms, scatter the symbols of revolution in dynamic enthusiasm across this snowy porcelain ground, write Golod, Hunger, and leave it at that.

  A report from 1920 orders the representation of ‘modern life and ideas; daily life and cultures; story telling, epics and poetry’, so the parade ground gets mothers, soldiers and sailors and partisans, women sewing banners, a factory worker giving a speech.

  This is perfect. Porcelain is perfect for speeches.

  Its whiteness is like the clearing of the throat, a hushing of attention as the speaker looks down on us and shuffles his papers – the thickness of the pile tells us it is a man – and begins to occupy space.

  iii

  This whiteness is a revolution.

  Artists are invited to work at the factory in Petrograd. Kazimir Malevich, maker of manifestos, angry and anxious and competitive, takes a standard porcelain plate and places his hard red and black concretion of shapes off to the edge, takes a cup, does the same, unsettles it.

  He is making architectons in his studio, stacked and cantilevered geometric forms made out of plaster that look as if they are templates for cities, objects to start arguments with. They are white.

  The blue of the sky has been defeated by the suprematist system, has been broken through, and entered white, as the true, real conception of infinity, and thus liberated from the colour background of the sky … Sail forth! The white. Free chasm, infinity, is before us.

  These objects look as if they could go on and on replicating, until they take up infinity.

  Malevich makes a porcelain cup – a wide and open cappuccino kind of cup – and cuts it in half, makes it solid. He makes a solid of white porcelain. He makes a teapot into an architecton, angles tilting back, volumes repeating.

  These objects are both tough and beguiling. They make me think of ‘The Auroras of Autumn’, my favourite poem of Wallace Stevens where ‘being visible is being white, / Is being of the solid of white, the accomplishment / Of an extremist in an exercise…’

  Other revolutionary artists are making objects out of images and he makes images out of objects. You want a manifesto? Here it is. You take an idea of an object for use and you paint over it, whitewash it, so that you end up with a teapot that cannot be used. A simple cup as combatant, revolutionary porcelain.

  He has form. His Black Square is ‘painted over a variegated composition made up of geometric elements’. White Square on White Background was too. One of the picture’s corners looks like it has been crudely cut off. It isn’t that he hasn’t time to prepare a new canvas, stand back and ponder, it is that there is more pleasure in painting over something. White over black. Erasure is thrilling.

  Malevich writes about this: ‘But even the colour white is still white and, to / Show sign / Can be taken in. And so there must be a difference / Between them but only in the pure white form.’

  This drifts a little but this doesn’t matter much as he is painting, making, curating and writing revolutions. ‘The problem arises when Malevich stops painting and begins to write brochures,’ sighs Lunarcharsky.

  iv

  There are too many white objects. I need to concentrate.

  In the spring, after Signs & Wonders, I have my first exhibition in a London gallery. I make white squares of timber, lined with plaster, and then make vessels, glaze them in different kinds of white, arrange a few in each of the series of cabinets. I make a black square lined with charred oak and put a single black vessel, off centre. I show them along a long wall.

  ‘It is from zero, in zero, that the true movement of being starts,’ wrote Malevich.

  And I call my exhibition, From Zero.

  When I go early one morning to spend time alone with my work, I like this line of installations a lot. It is an idea unfolding.

  Opposite this line is my first vitrine, Word for Word. I have put porcelain behind glass and it is like a page from the Talmud, large vessels and smaller ones, words and commentary sitting in close proximity.

  I sit on the floor. The title works the more I think about it. It is from another poem by Wallace Stevens. His poems with their passionate abstractions are pretty much a constant in my life. I wonder if I should have stolen another line from him and called this show Farewell to an idea.

  A title is a letter of promise in a pocket. Sometimes a title brushes alongside a remembered view or is a conversation overheard, a line from an inventory, a favourite melody, a street. Sometimes it is a provocation; the claiming of a shared space with someone I care about. Sometimes it is a stone thrown in the opposite direction to distract attention. Giving a work a name is the start of letting it go, making a space to start again.

  I remember this hour. This is a rare hour, happy with work, ready to begin again.

  Chapter fifty-eight

  red labour

  China 1919 is chaos. When will there be a revolution?

  The Last Emperor, Puyi, is thirteen years old and stranded in the Forbidden City with his household, as the warlords ebb and flow.

  The court is chaotic. Objects disappear from the treasure houses and stores. Eunuchs are arrested. When the young emperor announces he is going to visit the Palace of Eternal Happiness to inspect the imperial treasures, it burns down overnight. He starts to move things out of the palace.

  Collectors circle. The English connoisseur Percival David is buying imperial porcelain that has been placed in banks as collateral for loans. ‘Those were days of unexampled opportunity to a buyer with knowledge, judgement, and an ample fortune.’ He buys a pair of very blue-and-white temple vases with interesting inscriptions and brings them back to London to study more closely.

  And Jingdezhen is in decline. There are strikes. Markets have disappeared, along with the emperor. Who is going to commission porcelain in the turmoil of the collapse of the Republic? Trade routes are disrupted. Merchants no longer visit the city to make orders or to buy. Banditry means that everything from mining clay to shipping wares out along the river is dangerous.

  Living conditions deteriorate quickly. ‘The whole town was as utterly crapulous as any I had seen in China; nothing could really be called clean,’ reports an American visitor. ‘The stench of human excrement, of never-washed people living in sty-like dens, the mangy scalps and ulcerated skins, and all the filth, diseases with which China, particularly its southern half, swarms, were everywhere.’

  Potter in Jingdezhen, 1920

  Bonded labour is prevalent here. ‘The few owners and master potters of the great potteries who remained in the town spoke freely,’ wrote the fearsome journalist Agnes Smedley in her travelogue Battle Hymn of China.

  They seemed utterly unconscious of the feudal nature of their industry. Little boys of seven or eight, they explained, were apprenticed to master potters, who housed and fed them. The owners paid the apprentices one dollar a month, through the master potter, who kept twenty cents of each dollar as ‘compensation for teaching the craft’.

  With the remaining eighty cents, the apprentice tried to meet all his needs.

  A master potter might have ten to fifteen apprentices, who remained jhay tso – ‘confined by a belt’ – until their families bought their freedom and they became master potters. To buy the freedom of an apprentice is beyond most families.

  With something like amused pride, a pottery owner explains that:

  apprentices had almost every kind of disease – tuberculosis, malaria, and a variety of interesting intestinal diseases. They had no money to buy medicine, he added. As if displaying a choice exhibit, he called a young boy of ten and asked us to note how green the boy was from malari
a. But even when sick, he concluded, the master potters, out of the goodness of their hearts, still fed them.

  In the early 1930s, Jingdezhen was on the periphery of the Northeastern Jiangxi Soviet, the first site of Communist government in China. It is not a large city, but it is an industrial city, a place where the organisation of labour is laid out before you. It is a difficult city. It is an early site for recruitment for Communists.

  Smedley, a devoted follower of Mao, was not an impartial observer. She was angry and engaged and wrote that during the early year of the civil wars, the Chinese Red Army had occupied Jingdezhen, but instead of

  destroying the kilns, it had allowed the owners to operate their kilns, but with many changes. The years of apprenticeship had been shortened and during them both apprentices and master potters received regular wages from the owners. Joint committees of owners and potters managed the industry, and inspectors enforced the reforms. This system continued until the Red Army was driven out. The feudal system was then reinstated.

  Revolution promises a future to Jingdezhen. How long do you have to wait?

  ‘Before and after the Red Army occupation, potters and their families had small family shrines in their dark, insanitary homes,’ wrote Smedley. ‘Painted on the wall above each shrine was a mystic drawing, representing the spirit of the Red Army. In front of this the potters bowed in worship and burned incense.’

  Chapter fifty-nine

  Bright Earth, Fired Earth