Eileen Lewenstein; potter & founder of Ceramic Review
Hyfler/Rosner
26 March 2005
http://www.aber.ac.uk/ceramics/makers/eileenlewenstein2.htm
Eileen Edith Mawson, potter and editor: born London 28
August 1925; Co-editor, Ceramic Review 1970-97; MBE 1999;
married 1952 Oscar Lewenstein (died 1997; two sons); died
Caterham, Surrey 7 March 2005.
As a potter, Eileen Lewenstein, the founder and until 1997
co-editor of Ceramic Review, was an ardent modernist and
advocate of the new and challenging, rather than the
established and conventional. She preferred the cool, crisp
lines of Scandinavian design rather than the more sombre
browns and beiges advocated by Bernard Leach and his
followers. As an ardent and, until disillusion set in, a
committed Communist, Eileen Lewenstein saw her work as part
of her political practice.
For someone with such deeply held and unconventional views,
she came from an unlikely background. She was born Eileen
Mawson in Streatham, south London, in 1925. Her father
worked in insurance, and she and her two half-brothers had
the most conventional of childhoods.
From a young age Eileen knew she wanted a career in the arts
and so after three years' study at what was then the West of
England Art School in Bristol and a year at Beckenham School
of Art studying drawing and painting, she studied for the
Art Teachers Diploma at the Institute of Education in
London. Here she attended pottery classes at the Central
School of Art and Design under the eagle eye of Dora
Billington, where among her fellow students was Brigitta
Goldschmidt (later Appleby) - both developed a passion for
clay.
For a year Mawson taught at Derby High School for Girls,
introducing pottery into the curriculum, but soon realised
that school-teaching was not her métier. At Derby she had
attended an evening class run by Robert Washington, one of
William Staite Murray's more energetic students at the Royal
College of Art before the war, which had reinforced her
interest in clay and so she decided to try and make her
living as a potter.
In London she worked, along with her college friend,
Brigitta Appleby, with Donald Mills, another Communist Party
member, who had a pottery near London Bridge, run on
collective lines. There were long earnest discussions on how
they should work, discussions brought into sharper focus
when problems with a contract to make 250,000 refractory
ceramic elements forced them out of business
Mawson and Appleby then set up a pottery in Baker Street,
calling it Briglin, an amalgamation of their names. They
worked with red earthenware and produced a range of
hand-thrown tableware with painted decoration that was fresh
and modern in feel. As a student, Mawson had been inspired
by Walter Gropius's account of the Bauhaus, and this
positive response to modernist design led to the development
of an interest in contemporary architecture, which was
significantly to influence her ceramics. Although resolutely
left-wing she was not obsessively anti-commerce and was
attracted to the idea of producing well-designed objects at
reasonable prices.
From the start, Briglin pots were admired, sought out and
stocked by stores such as Heal's and were to feature with
great regularity in magazines and surveys of contemporary
design like Studio Year Book of Decorative Art.
At around this time Eileen Mawson met and in 1952 married
Oscar Lewenstein, a fellow Communist who was active within
the left-wing Unity Theatre. In his autobiography, Kicking
Against the Pricks (1994), he described Eileen as having
"wonderfully bushy brown hair", and as someone who gave the
impression "of fantastic efficiency". Indeed she was - and
had to be - highly organised as she eventually managed a
large house, cared for their two children, supported Oscar's
theatre and film projects, worked as a potter and for many
years lectured at Hornsey School of Art.
Although a skilled thrower, Eileen Lewenstein was inspired
by the experimental possibilities of hand-built work she saw
illustrated in the American magazine Craft Horizons and she
decided it was time to leave Briglin and develop her own
work as an artist. A friendship with the potter Catherine
Yarrow, a fellow Hampstead resident and a maker of totemic
forms with idiosyncratic decoration, encouraged Lewenstein
to explore more sculptural pieces, and she combined
hand-building, moulding and throwing as seemed appropriate.
One notable public artwork was a large architectural screen
for the Convent of Our Lady of Sion in west London, the
flowing linear decoration perfectly in tune with the
grid-like structure. Other pieces included ingenious
interlocking eggs and flower-holders.
In the mid-1970s a move to Brighton, a house on the seashore
and a studio looking on to the beach, saw the development of
new forms. These included dishes with wave-like patterns in
soft blues, creams and greens, one of which is in the
collection of the V&A, and angular linking abstract objects,
their shape derived from sea defences that stood on the
beach. Her work also included tall, thrown vases with pushed
and squeezed walls which, when placed side by side in a
couple-like relationship, took on anthropomorphic qualities
recalling the sculptures of artists such as Brancusi.
Exhibitions at the British Crafts Centre, the Eva Hauser
Gallery and J.K. Hill consolidated Lewenstein's position as
an inventive and sensitive maker. Her pots are in many
national and international collections.
As a founder member of the Craftsmen Potters Association
(now Craft Potters Association) she was well aware of the
debates within the studio pottery movement, like those
between the traditionalists who saw function as paramount
and the avant-garde who wanted more adventurous forms.
Deeply suspicious of "the establishment", her inclination
was always to support the radical and inventive. She and I
met as council members of the association in the late 1960s,
and when I suggested that it was time for the CPA to publish
something more substantial than a mimeographed sheet and
start a new ceramic journal, she enthusiastically supported
the idea.
Ceramic Review, first published in 1970 with Eileen
Lewenstein as co-editor, aimed to embrace as wide a spectrum
of modern work as possible, a commitment that led us to
include a picture of a phallic teapot that resulted in the
loss of several subscriptions. After its early, smudgy
beginnings, the magazine flourished. Its motto "written by
potters for potters" gradually extended to include articles
by critics, scholars, pundits and enthusiasts. It was a
successful and rewarding partnership as we exchanged ideas
about the direction of ceramics, both of us jollying the
other along to ever more ambitious projects that included
books such as New Ceramics (1974).
With a keen sense of the growing international community of
potters, Eileen Lewenstein was one of the small band of UK
potter members of the International Academy of Ceramics,
later serving on its council. During the 1970s she
contributed to a number of International Symposia - Bethune,
Czechoslovakia (1970), Memphis, Tennessee (1973), Mettlach,
West Germany (1974) - and regularly took part in residencies
at the International Ceramics Studio at Kecskemet in
Hungary. There she not only took the opportunity to make
large forms but also to establish further links for the
magazine, enjoying meeting artists from the Eastern Bloc and
exchanging ideas, whether about politics or ceramics. As a
member, and later chair, of the World Crafts Council,
British Section, she was enthusiastic about promoting
cultural exchange. She was appointed MBE in 1999.
When her husband became ill in the early 1990s, she had less
time to devote to her pots, although she continued to
co-edit Ceramic Review until shortly after his death in
1997.
Quiet, reserved and thoughtful, Eileen Lewenstein was a
supportive and loyal friend. Shrewd in her assessments and
an absorbing raconteur, she had a refreshing and disarming
sense of humour that could appreciate the ridiculous as well
as the serious.
Emmanuel Cooper