Janet Leach by Joanna Wason

 Janet Leach - potter -  by Joanna Wason 2024

Joanna Wason knew and worked with Janet Leach for many years and has written this vivid account of the American potter’s life, well illustrated with personal photos and showing us her distinctive pots.

Janet Darnell Leach grew up in Texas but left to become an artist in New York 1937.
As her sculpture did not sell she changed to pottery and was an occupational therapist in a mental hospital for three years.

The first pot she bought was an unglazed, burnished black Pueblo  pot by Maria Martinez,
which she kept all her life.

In 1950 she heard Bernard Leach speak and later she attended a two week seminar on which he taught at Black Mountain college, where she was much influenced by Hamada’s freedom of technique and wrote to B Leach asking to study with him in Japan.

Janet thrived in Japan but after she and Bernard agreed to marry she came to St Ives to be the third wife of a man 30 years older than herself  who was a less than ideal husband.
She unwillingly took his name and managed the pottery, her own work suffering. After eight years they were living apart.
After Bernard died Janet made changes at the Leach and in her last 16 years made more work in her distinctive style.
Janet  had a relationship with a woman - Boots Redgrave to whom she left everything.
She was also friendly with Kathy Watkins who ran the Penwith gallery and with Barbara Hepworth.
 
The book gives a marvellous picture of Janet Leach, her personality and her accomplishments, with the economy, style and judgment of one who is herself an excellent potter.

[Its available at the Leach Pottery]

Judy Chicago 'Revelations'

 Judy Chicago ‘Revelations’ 2024  published by The Serpentine Gallery and Thames and Hudson to accompany her exhibition, which runs in London May 23-September 1st.

Judy Chicago has been a famous feminist artist since the exhibitions in the 1970’s of her ‘Dinner Party’ which commemorated women’s achievements through history. Controversially most were represented by vaginal imagery on plates around a triangular table.

This book gives us her writings which, ‘challenge the myth of a male god’ through her own fantasy narration using many myths and historical figures. She wanted it to be like an illuminated  manuscript with her own illustrative colourful flourishes, saying ‘drawing is like breathing for me.’

I respect her tremendous efforts, her tackling of new subjects for art such as birth and the holocaust and the topic of the use of many trees to make breast cancer treating tamoxifen.
She has thought big but now acknowledges the small, she admits her early work lacked inclusion of black women, and her hopes for a future of equality of the sexes are admirable.

Judy Chicago tells us , ‘I’m a very direct, honest,vulnerable and fragile person, which comes across in my work’, and she insists she early on developed  ‘an egalitarian and empowering studio environment, unusual at the time’.

She is certainly a phenomenon. She tries to counter early criticism of herself as exploiting her collaborators and gives credit now to her longtime helper Diane Gelon and husband Donald Woodman.

However I remember vividly how critical an audience of her attitude to her embroiderers and ceramicists was at her lecture in London in 1971 as she strode about on stage proclaiming that she had to help these women carry out her great ideas and that she was the genius and they the craftswomen. At the time she seemed to many of us overconfident and strident, egotistical just like any male master with his assistants.

Then there is her style - to me her use of form and colour is over decorative and stuck in a stylised ombré  pastel insipid sweetness reminiscent of illustrations in a magazine proclaiming the faith of Jehovah Witnesses.
Her philosophical tales have old fashioned biblical cadences and her beloved cursive handwriting is bland and characterless.
Her Revelations are inspired by Blake although opposed to his visions but lack his subtleties of poetry and expressive art.
Hers is an essentialist view - a feminism of women exalted in a sort of uncritical religious way.

I’m left torn between wishing Judy Chicago were more wonderful than she is and being glad she has done what she has.

 

'Female Rejection drawing from Quintet'