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| Book Review
Searching for Beauty: Letters from a Collector to a Studio Potter
by Richard Jacobs
Reviewed by Helen Bevis
 The interaction between potter and buyer is usually limited to a short moment. Perhaps a flattering, inquisitive conversation and the sometimes embarrassing moment of money exchange—I give you my pot, you give me your money; end of relationship. Perhaps as the buyer turns collector, and admirer, the encounters will repeat and lengthen as the rapport deepens, but still remain essentially superficial. Yet something different is recounted in Searching for Beauty. A rare and unusual event.
In 2002 Richard Jacobs, a Californian ceramics collector and retired educator made an unplanned visit to the Verdigris gallery in San Francisco run by three potters. There he bought a vase by Christa Assad, had a conversation with her, paid for the pot and walked away. Except, for once, the buyer-potter moment didn’t end there.
He began writing to her. His intentions were honest and direct—he had chosen her as his muse and recipient of his letters to a young potter; inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. These original poems explore the themes of the unattainable in troubled times. Rilke’s poems were written in 1903, a century later the quest for meaning and beauty in a turbulent world is no less complex.
Over the space of three years, Jacobs sent Assad forty long letters and from the letters came the book. The privacy of a writer and his muse has been published and we have the chance to share in the questions and the quest. Searching for Beauty is a work of biography, autobiography and ceramic histories. It has its basis in an old fashioned communication between mentor and mentee, but these are words shaped by contemporary life and in America, inevitably, the spectre of 9/11 is raised to haunt the search for beauty. In such a world can there ever be beauty again?
Jacobs presents Assad with questions about her, about him, about life and about ceramics. These are not questions with simple answers. Answers would somehow spoil the journey; the questions are there to provide food for thought and hand. Jacobs relishes the freedom of retirement from academia to pose endless, sometimes simplistic, questions. He remarks that it is important that one never lose a sense of wonder at the world, “a far more innocent and rewarding motivation for me....is the sense of wonder....the committed defiance of an ongoing engagement with life. I have never lost it.” Jacobs has the enthusiastic delight of a child, with a nonstop “why” on his lips. He quotes Rilke as writing, “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language…. At present you need to live the question.”
To Jacobs there is hope in uncertainty. He is a Ruskinian idealistic who yearns for a gentler world. The longing for old skills and poetry in today’s world is a recurrent sentiment. From the safety of his air-conditioned home and ceramics collection, he takes in vast rafts of literature on a quest to find meaning. The result is a lifetime’s erudition released upon Assad and us. Yet each letter is like a ramble about his garden, lightly touching different plants and moving on. Perhaps the most striking letter is number 29, where he takes in torture techniques used in Iraq, a Harvard professor of aesthetics, Soetsu Yanagi, Edmund de Waal and news that “Letters to a Young Potter” was selected for a conference program. It is a mind blowing ramble.
The glimpses into his mind are as fascinating as the peeks into his life. The details are in the domestic; the wax to stop the pots shuddering themselves to death in the next Californian quake, the Morris wallpaper and his daily routine of chores, gardening with his beloved roses and dashes to the computer.
As Jacobs observes there is a need for more why books in ceramics. We know the how very well, but the why is an under explored area. Even less time has been spent investigating the intriguing relationship between potters and collectors. It is this exploration of the potter/collector dialog that marks the book out as a valuable addition to ceramics literature. Indeed (in true Jacobs style) I pose the questions; should there be a relationship? Do the potters want it? Do the collectors want it? Jacobs suggests a potter be allowed visiting rights to their pot so that they can see the pot’s life after they have parted company. An object must be seen to exist, but a pot inside a museum, cased or stored, ceases to exist. Its life has been taken from it the moment that it becomes locked away. Arguably once Jacobs seals his pots to his shelves he too is sealing their fate as pots in a collection. Yet Jacobs communes with his pots daily; he loves and needs their presence just as he loves and needs his garden.
Collecting is a strange art. Perhaps it is all about the collector’s ego; Jacobs writes that “the ego of the collector becomes dependent upon the reputation of the potter to vindicate the decision of purchase. A potter is judged by her pots, a collector is judged by his judgment.” Collecting, amassing, discussing, all form part of the eternal search for beauty. We glimpse inside a collector’s obsessive mind when he says “I do not need to justify my motivation. I know a need from a want. I want pottery because I have an obligation to support human imagination and creativity in a world where human destruction and tragedy often appears to be triumphant. I need pottery because I am daily enhanced and enriched by the presence of pottery.... Collecting cannot be explained, since it is not a rational pursuit and depends on an unlikely duality—obsession with beauty and a lust for private ownership of beautiful things.... Mortality is the unspoken curse of the collector.”
Jacobs gives us hints about defining beauty. He says “Beauty lacks precision. At best it is a generous word, lacking the edge of irony or the more favored force of aggressive criticism. It is a dangerous word to us. It is old-fashioned this word, this idea of beauty.... It is the one idea that I do not want clarified or defined for me.” The search for beauty continues.
There are many rich threads to this book. There is a beauty in ideas, the beauty of a worldly observation; the beauty of self-referential humor, derision and burgeoning comprehension. There, too, is the Beauty and the Beast as represented by Jacobs’ pots and the woes of the world. We need the beast to help us see the beauty. Searching for Beauty works on many levels, as one man’s odyssey to understand the strands of his life; as a guide to understanding a collector’s mind or even simply as an eclectic guide to ceramic literature. The range is intriguing, frustrating, eye-opening and crazy; much like us all. It is a haunting book that demands reading and re-reading of selected passages.
Fundamentally the letters are a petition to Christa Assad to continue making beautiful pots. To us they are a petition to keep searching for our own sense of beauty.
341 pages. Hardcover, $39.95. ISBN 0-9548840-6-X. Published by Kestrel Books Ltd., 2 Cwrt Isaf, Tythegston, Bridgend CF32 0ND Wales; www.kestrel-books.co.uk; or tel 44
1656 784 021.
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