Hakuyu 白釉

In Yagi style I would simply call these 白釉徳利 Hakuyu Tokkuri, He then would have given them a name like 春の嘆き "Haru no Nageki" (mournful Spring). [Robert Mangold]

Poem: URAURANIウラウラに/TERERU照れる HARUBINI春日に HIBARI雲雀 AGARI上がり /KOKORO心 KANASHIMO悲しいも /HITORISHI一人し OMOEBA思うえば - The lark takes flight on a spring day/Inadvertently I am taken with sadness/left thinking alone...

Uraura ni –ウラウラに – gently and clearly shining (like the sun in springtime) onomatopoeic or mimetic word
Tereru – 照れる – to shine/illluminate
Harubi ni – 春日に – spring day; spring sunlight
Hibari – 雲雀 or 鷚 or 鸙 – skylark (Alauda arvensis)
Agari – 上がり – rise, increase, ascent
Kokoro – 心 – mind; heart; spirit
Kanashi mo – 悲しいも – sad; sorrowful
Hitorishi – 一人し – alone
Omoeba – 思うえば – to think; consider; believe; imagine; suppose; dream; recall; remember

Poem by Ōtomo Yakamochi (718-785)

In the ceramic world of early 20th-century Kyoto, Chinese ceramics were the rage of the day, surpassing even the popularity of Kyo-yaki (Kyoto-style pottery). Any potter worth a spin on the wheel strove to emulate them. In form and color, the ability to perfectly copy an ancient Sung dynasty vase was held up as the highest peak a Kyoto potter could climb. Kyoto was to remain bound in a Chinese spell for at least four decades, until World War II changed everything.

Against this backdrop, Yagi Kazuo (1918-1979), one of Japan's most influential ceramic artists of all time, was born and matured. Known as the father of modern Japanese ceramics, Yagi not only changed the way Japan thought about clay art with his groundbreaking ideas and creations, but he also brought about a revolution in the studios of Kyoto that has continued to this day.



Born the first son of traditional Kyoto potter Yagi Isso 八木一艸
(1894-1973) [As Louise Cort records in her account of the Kyoto ceramic world, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics, Yagi Isso moved from Osaka to Kyoto to study ceramics at the Ceramics Research Institute. He joined with five classmates in 1919 to found a group they called Akatsuchi or Red Clay. This was in defiant opposition to the refinement of the “white clay” ceramics displayed in government-sponsored exhibitions such as the Noten. The group “startled the staid Kyoto art world by giving poetic rather than descriptive titles to their works and charging admission to their exhibitions.” The Akatsuchi potters disbanded in 1923 and by the end of the decade were themselves participating in the crafts section of the government-sponsored Teiten (which was added to the fine art categories only in 1927). The Teiten (and its successors the Shin-Bunten and the Nitten) in some regards functioned like an official “salon,” (in Louise Cort’s words) and became the most highly sought after venue for public recognition in the arts.], one would naturally have assumed that the young Kazuo would apprentice under his father and continue in the chawan (tea bowl) tradition. Young Kazuo never traveled down that path though. His inquisitive young mind was constantly looking skyward to the boundless distance and unlimited opportunities that existed after Japan's surrender. 

Inspiration for his work came not from his father's work, or the work of his father's contemporaries, rather it appeared in the works of foreign painters Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Joan Miro, as well as the terra cotta sculptures of Noguchi Isamu and Tsuji Shindo. In "Futakuchi Tsubo (Jar with Two Mouths" (1950), an early work in the current exhibition, the influence of Miro is bursting out all over the pedestaled form.

What makes the piece so unique is how Yagi has taken the rounded form -- as a potter would on the wheel -- and manipulated the clay into a more sculptural shape by adding a soft indention and then the two mouths. He then painted, in a more Western color scheme than found on Kyoto ceramics, intersecting lines and dots that bring the piece into a painterly realm.

This was Yagi's genius: breaking through rigid barriers of long established views that a pot is simply a pot and must serve some functional duty. He brought together sculpture, poetry, painting and philosophy and pumped them through his being -- the two mouths on this piece literally resemble heart valves -- in a way that even today continues to positively confront us with the possibilities of clay.

His groundbreaking work, and possibly the most influential ceramic sculpture (or objet-yaki as Yagi preferred) Japan has ever-known, is his 1954 piece, "Walk of Mr. Samsa." It's not so much the piece itself that has caused so much talk all these years; it's more the concept and the liberation brought about by his method of forming it. 

Up until "Mr. Samsa," the potter's wheel was seen as the main shaping tool, which greatly influenced forms by the sheer centrifugal energy it produced. Mostly the results are round, cylindrical and symmetrical. Yagi liberated himself, and his imagination, by simply looking at the wheel as one of many tools, and not the sole force that dictated the resulting forms of the clay. For "Mr. Samsa" he chopped up his thrown tubes and attached them to the Ferris-wheel body in angular antennae-like appendages -- after all, protagonist Gregor Samsa did turn into a cockroach in Franz Kafka's 1915 novel "Metamorphosis."

The work is the marquee piece of any Yagi exhibition and greets the visitor in the first room at the museum. Few exhibition spaces can match the warmth, intimacy, and Art Deco atmosphere found at the Teien Art Museum, a former Imperial residence. "Hand," one piece from his famous latter series, is even, oddly enough, displayed in an upstairs bathroom.

The rebellious Yagi wasn't so much interested in breaking traditions, as much as he wished to expand on them. He felt the Kyoto clay world was contrived, stagnant and self-righteous. Understanding the beauty of classical Chinese, Korean and Japanese ceramics, he took ideas from all these respective pots, rather than merely copy them. This is apparent in "Open Open" box (1971), his remaking of Korean incised slipware with English graffiti, and in his award-winning "Annular Eclipse," a tall vase decorated in the style of Klee, that was displayed at the 1948 Kyoten (Kyoto Exhibition).

Yagi also made a revolutionary leap in naming his works -- for example, his main clay group is called "Sodeisha (Crawling through Mud)." Formerly, works had straightforward names such as "Flower Vase, Iron Glaze." Yagi was twisting minds with his naming, even making a "vase" that in no way can hold water (No. 21 in the lavish bilingual catalog). Other names that stick in the mind are "Village in the Bottom of a Lake," the eerie "A Cloud Remembered" and "Aspect of Budding."

In his latter years Yagi preferred working in black, as it allowed the forms of his work to speak the loudest. He also took to glass and bronze, and many works in these two mediums are also in the exhibition.

When asked to describe his art, Yagi replied like the "song and dance man" Bob Dylan -- "I'm just a tea-cup maker." Yagi's genius sings on.

In a book entitled: A Warbler's Song in the Dusk: The Life and Work of Ōtomo Yakamochi (718-785), by Paula Doe we find the following in Chapter 5: The Final Years: Alienation and Silence, pgs. 213-214; see also pg. 27:

Most interesting of Yakamochi's works from this period, however, are those which convey his own complex emotions in this difficult time, his unsettled sense of alienation and his growing awareness of the essential loneliness of the human condition. On hearing a plover cry mournfully in the distance one silent snowy day, he composed the following poem in sympathetic identification with the restless bird:
19.4288
Kawasu ni mo Snow falls along the river shallows too.
yuki wa furereshi
miya no uchi ni from here within the palace
chidori nakurashi I hear the plover's cry --
imu tokoro nami No place to come to rest

Most famous of all Yakamochi's poems are the following three masterful tanka, composed as he felt himself increasingly out of step even with his own group,

Two poems composed by inspiration on 1 April [753]
19.4290
Haru no no ni Mist trails
kasumi tanabiki Across the fields of spring
uraganashi Faintly sad
kono yūkage ni In the dusk
uguisu naku mo A warbler sings.

19.4291
Wa ga yado no The breeze rustles faintly
isasa muratake Through the bush bamboo
fuku kaze no In the garden
oto no kasokeki This evening
kono yūbe kamo

A poem composed on 3 April
19.4292
Uraura ni In the gentle light
tereru harubi ni Of the bright spring sun
hibari agari A lark soars off
kokoro kanashi mo While I am heavyhearted and aching
hitori shi omoeba Alone

The spring sun is slow to set; the songbirds sing true. It is hard to rid oneself of sorrow by any means but poetry. Therefore I composed this poem to express my gloom.

These subtle expressions of complex feeling are like little else in Man'yõshū poetry. Yakamochi indeed employs much that he had learned from Chinese literature in his attempt to bend the native tradition to new ends. A good deal here echoes the Six Dynasties Chinese poetry of the Yü-t'ai Hsin-yung -- the specific imagery of rustling bamboo, mist trailing across the fields, and birds calling in the dusk, and the general feeling of spring sadness (although in the Chinese sources the feeling is usually associated with unhappy love affairs). Yakamochi's new sensibility cultivated through his studies of Chinese poetry, and his new awareness of himself as an individual apart from other men and out of harmony with the natural world, enable him to achieve a moving expression of loneliness and indefinable sorrow, arising from a modern understanding of the essential nature of the human condition. These poems thus foreshadow not only the sensitive subjectivity of the best of later Japanese verse, but also the broader vision of man's situation that characterizes the later masters such as Saigyō and Bashō.

See also: Frederick Baekeland, ed., Modern Japanese Ceramics in American Collections, pgs. 181-183