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"Modernist art also tends to spring from the collision between tradition and modernity. It is typically the work of literal or internal émigrés, men and women caught on the hop between different cultures and languages."2
In the past 25 years and more, consigned to the condescensions of postmodernism, the reputation of Bernard Leach gathered only Int praise.3Leach's support for the authenticity of the Sano ceramics of Ogata Kenzan, discovered in 1962, (elsewhere held to be fakes) became a touchstone for the burial of Leach's aesthetic judgement. Professor Richard L Wilson4 considered Leach to be implicated in a fraud, a view repeated by Edmund de Waal in characterising Leach's relationship to Japan as arcane, mystical, condescending and out of touch.5
More careful consideration of Wilson's research, however, demonstrates that his most recent reference considered the matter "still unresolved",6 that Leach's supporters are respected scholars and writers who continued to support the authenticity of the pieces,7 offers no details for the scientific tests he claims as evidence, appears to have examined few if any of the objects in dispute8 and neglects to directly address the arguments that Leach presented in support of the authenticity of the works.9
De Waal further charged Leach with "orientalism", a term originating with Edward Said's critique of Anglo-French imperial expansion in the Middle East, an assumption of superiority by its agents in an extension of occidental cultural hegemony, despite the fact that Said's work offers only a passing reference to Japan and is explicitly "limited to. . . Arab and Islam".10 Neither by academic attainment, social or political status and influence, by outlook, age or generation would Leach be included within even an extended meaning of Said's criticism. De Waal's subsequent ascription to Leach of the Western caricature of the Orient - "homo-orientalis", mystical and religiously inclined, presented in turn a caricature of Leach's relationship to Japan precluding any substantive explanation of the historical basis of Leach's experience in the East for the development of his work and the founding of the studio pottery movement.
Leach's guides to Japan were more often arrivals from America; the itinerant writer folklorist Lafcadio Hearn, Chair of English Literature at the Imperial University; and art scholar Ernest Fenollosa, advisor to the Imperial Court (who along with...