Peter Whitehead's Pottery

Abstract

Peter Whitehead's Pottery Michael O'Brien (bio) A Lidded Bowl from Vumé ... In African villages, it is said that you make your best pots when you are slightly hungry. A small lidded bowl from Vumé,1 (see figure 12) a serving dish made for food, which Peter Whitehead had seen in the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), was created by the English potter Michael Cardew at Vumé in Ghana. The dish fascinated Whitehead. He found himself compelled to go back to the museum again and again to confront it, to discover why it had begun to haunt him. The shape was ambiguous: in two parts. When separated, there were two separate bowls, each of which could be filled with food. The compulsion to return to this object of mystery, he had felt once, when as a student at Cambridge University he had seen a sculpture in the Fitzwilliam Museum, a head of Princess Meritaten of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt, daughter of the Pharaoh Akhenaton and his wife Nefertiti. Staring at the Cardew lidded bowl, which was one pot, but also two, Whitehead sensed that if he were to become a serious potter, he would always be striving to re-create this pot—until the day he died. The number of coincidences between Whitehead and Cardew seems remarkable. Peter Whitehead was born in the slums of Liverpool and brought up in a one-parent family. He became head boy of a prestigious public school and won a scholarship to study physics at Cambridge. Cardew's two elder brothers were sent to Westminster School, but there was not enough money for Michael, so he was sent to the local grammar school, from which he won a scholarship to Oxford (almost unheard of in the 1920s) to study classics. These are the kinds of stories politicians and academics love to hear. At college, both Whitehead and Cardew discovered other things far more interesting than their studies, which they duly neglected. Both were threatened [End Page 944] with expulsion and realized that they had better make a token effort to mollify their long-suffering tutors to snatch a degree of sorts (instead of the first-class honors that had been smugly predicted for them). Forty years later, Whitehead's career had been as colorful as it had promised to be brilliant: from filming the Rolling Stones and student riots in America, to hunting falcons in the freezing wastes of Alaska (and being hunted in turn by the U.S. Army for doing so), to breeding them in Saudi Arabia. But perhaps the strangest part of the story is still to come. It is a story I tell here, even though it is one almost too improbable to command respect as a proper academic study. It tells of how Whitehead found in pottery the strength to put behind him the threat of death, when an emergency qua druple heart bypass operation after a massive heart attack failed and he became inoperable—how he coped, late in life, with the problems of trying to make serious pottery and developing exactly what he wanted in his newly chosen field. In describing what Whitehead has made and achieved in this quest to create pottery, we must return to the source of his energy, through the potters Michael Cardew and the great Japanese potter (and Whitehead's mentor) Shoji Hamada, back to the uninhibited work of peasant potters, to the basic values in the pottery made in traditional, unspoiled African villages. In some of these villages, potters today are making pottery as fine, aesthetically, as any ever made. Whitehead's work is equally original and distinctive, deriving much of its quality from inner considerations, a deliberate lack of concern for commerce. Yet given present Western attitudes, it is more than likely that what ever Whitehead makes, however unique, his work will be overlooked in the official circles of the world of ceramics. Whitehead had just finished his last novel, Girl on the Train, in 2000, when his bypass operation suddenly failed and he was rushed back to the hospital with life-threatening complications. After a prolonged, complicated angiography when he came close to having a...