PEMcast 7: Blue & White Magic

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Edmund de Waal: Porcelain is alchemy. Porcelain is alchemy because it is totally mysterious.

How can you make earth which is so fine that light comes through it? How can you make something out of different kinds of white earth, and then make something which is so light that it lifts into your hands when you pick it up?

How can you make something out of white earth which, when you do that to it, the sound keeps spiraling. Like smoke, it just keeps on going. That's alchemy, so you're already in the province of...

Paul Holdengräber: Magic.

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Edmund: of magic.

Paul: of magic.

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Chip Van Dyke: Welcome to the "PEMcast," conversations and stories for the culturally curious. From the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, I'm Chip Van Dyke.

Dinah Cardin: I'm Dinah Cardin. At the top of the show, you heard Edmund de Waal speaking during an interview at the New York Public Library.

De Waal is a London-based artist who is said to throw a pot and craft a sentence with equal skill. In his recent book, "The White Road," de Waal writes about the history of his lifelong obsession with porcelain.

Chip: We're talking about porcelain today because of our current exhibition "Asia in Amsterdam." It's all about the influence of Asian luxury goods on Dutch culture.

Dinah, the Germans have a special word -- of course, they have a special word for everything -- this word is "Porzellankrankheit."

Dinah: Porzellankrankheit.

Chip: Yeah. In English, it means porcelain sickness. It's not a life-threatening sickness. [laughs] It's a term derived to describe the obsession that grabs hold of people when they fall in love with the real deal, real porcelain.

Between the two of us, Dinah is the most likely to be currently suffering from porcelain sickness after having spoken with so many people for this episode that are very clearly porcelain obsessed. Let's meet some of those people.

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Claudia Swan: Nobody could reverse-engineer porcelain when it first arrived.

Chip: This is Claudia Swan, associate professor of history at Northwestern University. Claudia was a panelist at a symposium here at PEM that was all about the 17th-century Dutch importation of Asian luxury goods.

Claudia: There is a term for shells, porcineno, that is then carried over into descriptions of porcelain. There are also theories, very active theories in the early 17th century, that porcelain might have been made from ground shells.

Chip: Claudia says some believe there was a secret underground mine in which the Chinese harbored their precious stock of porcelain clay. As you can imagine, getting their hands on this elusive commodity made the Dutch elite kind of crazy.

Dinah: They were used to getting what they wanted. They were fueled by the prospect of exploration, commerce, and opportunity. They founded the world's first multinational business. They created the first stock market.

Chip: As Dutch ships set sail to open trade with Asia, the Dutch consumer class emerged, eager to define themselves with luxuries from abroad, including Chinese porcelain.

Dinah: What are we looking at?

Femke Dierks: We're looking at a group portrait, an interior view of a Dutch family around 1630.

Dinah: We're here in the gallery with Femke Dierks, curator of European ceramics at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. She joined us here for the opening of our exhibition. The exhibition, Asia in Amsterdam, is co-organized with the Rijks.

Femke: We can see their beautiful, sheer black garments. We can see beautiful cloth on the table. Of course, what is most interesting to us for this exhibition is the almost 35 pieces of Chinese export porcelain that are displayed on the wainscoting.

This painting is such a beautiful illustration of how these objects were used and venerated in the early 17th century.

Chip: Dinah, before this exhibition, I would not have been able to explain the difference between normal earthenware ceramics that everybody has in their home and real porcelain. Femke was actually able to very clearly point out the differences.

Femke: Here we're looking at a piece of earthenware and a piece of Chinese export porcelain. Because they're both standing on a light, you can actually see the difference between the materials very, very well.

Dinah: You can see the light shining right through the porcelain.

Femke: Yes, absolutely. The earthenware, when I pick it up, is quite thick. Now, this was what people were used to. When you compare that to the porcelain plate that's right next to it, you can really, really tell that there's such a difference.

Porcelain is clay that has kaolin in it, and that's a specific mineral that's used that allows it to be fired at a very high temperature. It becomes much harder, and just like glass, is a little bit translucent. That's what you can see very beautifully here.

Chip: Further along in the exhibition, beyond the porcelain tulip vases and tapestries and oil paintings of the Dutch 17th century, is the work of 21st-century artist, Bouke de Vries.

Bouke de Vries: Bouke de Vries, and I'm Dutch.

Chip: PEM commissioned Bouke to create three works of art for this exhibition, among them, a map of the 17th-century Dutch Republic made entirely of porcelain shards.

Dinah: Bouke finds his shards in auctions at London's Portobello Road Market and while mudlarking along the Thames.

Chip: Did you say mudlarking?

Bouke: Mudlarking.

Dinah: What is the definition exactly?

Bouke: You're larking about in the mud, basically, [laughs] with your Wellington boots on, your rubber boots on. You have to be very careful because there's rats in the Thames. You have to be very careful that you don't catch anything.

There used to be lots of potteries along the Thames. If things were damaged in the firing or things were fallen when they were packing them, it would all disappear into the Thames.

Chip: Bouke is also a conservator of ceramics for dealers, auction houses, and England's National Trust. He points out that, historically, porcelain was so precious that people would go to great lengths to repair broken objects, even make those repairs visible.

Bouke: In the East, they would do the repair with gold lacquer. Their philosophy was that if something break and it's important to me, then the damage is part of its history and we celebrate it.

Whereas in the West, it's much easier that people want to, "Oh, it's broken. We throw it away," or if they wanted to repair it, they want it done so invisible that nobody can ever see that it was damaged.

I'd compare it to facelifts, this endless search for perfection and making yourself into something what you aren't. Even when something is broken, it can still be beautiful.

A lot of things that we know of earlier cultures is the ceramics they have left behind. When the first porcelain came into Holland, it was so incredibly expensive. It was only for the very wealthy, but everyone wanted some of this blue and white magic.

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Bill Sargent: No matter how carefully made a piece of Chinese porcelain is made, it really shows the hand of the potter and the decorator in a way that European ceramics doesn't, and can't.

Dinah: This is Bill Sargent. Bill is the former curator of Asian export art at PEM.

Chip: For more than 30 years, Bill stewarded the museum's comprehensive collection of Asian export art, art made in Asia for Western markets.

Dinah: On a warm and sunny day, Bill and I went to do something he loves, hunt for shards on Salem Harbor.

Here we are approaching Salem Harbor. How often would you say you find shards here?

Bill: Oh, every time I come down I find shards. When I first came to Salem, it occurred to me that, perhaps, ships that were arriving, if they had broken ceramics, they'd throw them overboard. I came down hoping to find Chinese export porcelain.

Chip: Bill retired from curating Asian export art in 2009, but his porcelain sickness persists. He now consults for collectors of the blue and white magic.

Bill: I've been going around the world since I retired. I just sent an email off this morning to Singapore about one of their acquisitions. I'll be going down there next week, for the full week, to assess a collection of 800 pieces.

Dinah: It's interesting that you collect the shards that are...you don't care whether they're worth anything, and they're broken bits. Then you're traveling around the world consulting, helping people buy expensive things.

Bill: If I had become a [laughs] Wall Street broker, I'd probably be collecting whole pieces rather than shards. [laughs]

Dinah: While traveling the world helping others buy expensive objects, Bill keeps an eye to the ground. His baskets of shards reveal a global collection of bits and pieces. He's picked up shards in Versailles, Jingdezhen, Tuscany, Cape Town, Dresden, Peru, Egypt. He says he can't stop picking them up.

Bill: I'm getting very picky now. I used to pick up everything, but you can get overwhelmed by the numbers of shards. Look, the tide is out. Perfect. I hope we'll find something.

Here's another piece of redware. Look at that. Isn't that nice? The inside has that brown glaze, as most of them do, which is probably like an Albany slip. The exterior has a cream-colored salt glaze surface. These are my treasures, worthless bits of ceramics, but they're treasures.

They're too small to say anything, really, about the age or the origin, but that's not my reason for doing it. I'm loving the shard as an object.

I sometimes will walk along and kick something over and see. Look at that. It has a remnant of a glaze on the inside. The outside has been totally worn away, but you can still see the fingerprints of the pottery on it. It's a rare find.

Dinah: You're right. You can see the fingerprints.

Bill: This is the kind of thing that excites me.

Dinah: I want to take a picture.

Bill: Sure.

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Chip: That's our show for today. Thanks for listening. If you've somehow caught porcelain sickness over the course of this podcast, then I recommend that you come to the Peabody Essex Museum and satisfy your feverish desires on Asia in Amsterdam. It closes June 5th.

Remember to find us on iTunes, SoundCloud, and on any podcast app.

Dinah: Have you heard the latest good news about podcasts? A recent story in "The New York Times" looks at our brains on podcasts. In short, increased brain activity, good.

Chip: If you're looking for more museum-related podcasts, check out the new one from our friends over at the New England Museum Association. It's called "Museum People."

Dinah: What are you listening to? Write to us at our email address, pemcast@pem.org.

Chip Send us your questions, comments, or stories to that very same email address, pemcast@pem.org. Find more content related to this episode on our blog, connected.pem.org.

Music for today's episode is provided by Chris Zabriskie and Psylogic. You can find out about both of these artists in the show notes for this episode, and also by visiting freemusicarchive.org.

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