Eileen Lewenstein was a ceramic artist, writer and editor born on August 28th 1925 and died on March 7th 2005.The works included in this exhibition come from the period in her later life when she ‘retired’ to Hove on the Sussex coast in 1976.
Eileen Lewenstein was a child in the pre-war years in Britain. She grew up through years of upheaval and social change. As a young art teacher, Eileen Lewenstein joined the Communist Party. She studied painting on a scholarship at the West of England School of Art in Bristol and, in 1944, took an art teaching diploma at the Institute of Education in London. She was sent from there to the Central School of Arts and Crafts for practical classes, and it was there that she was introduced to ceramics. Reading ‘A Potters Book’ by Bernard Leach in her final term was a turning point.
Whilst working as an art teacher in Derby, she attended pottery classes given by R.J. Washington - a talented pupil of William Staite Murray. So it is possible to firmly place Eileen Lewenstein within the British Studio Pottery tradition.
Eileen Lewenstein set up the Briglin Pottery with Brigitta Appleby. Despite the deeply unfashionable nature of earthenware at the time, their functional Scandanavian-inspired pieces found a market. Her desire to work more ambitiously and creatively led her to leave Briglin after nine years and go it alone. She was inspired by friendships with, and the work of, Helen Pincombe and Catherine Yarrow who were producing large scale hand built work.
In the 1960s she was a lecturer at Hornsey School of Art and was producing ambitious works exploring the sculptural possibilities of stoneware including abstract grid forms shown at the Eva Hauser gallery in 1966. In 1969 she co-founded the Ceramics Review and remained co-editor from its launch in 1970 until 1998 when she officially retired. A strong sense of duty to the pottery community, her desire to support other artists, duty to her two sons, and her intensely creative partner, Oscar, all had an effect on her output as an individual artist.
The works we are focusing upon date from 1976 to 1980 and show that she had found a new subject for her abstract style. She would regularly walk on the beach, camera in hand, building a vocabulary of forms. These were the inspiration for her pieces, which celebrate the sea’s power to translate objects, and its own constantly changing, shimmering surface.
The pieces bring to mind flotsam and jetsam, subtly altered by the ceaseless motion of the waves, yet their honesty and strength gives a glimpse of the still centre which is, perhaps, an indication of the tranquility Eileen was able to find on the seashore. In Dyptych we see two vessels that were once joined but appear to have been worn apart, possibly by the elements. This is just one way of looking, there is also a tender quality to the piece that brings to mind Brancusis’ The Kiss. A series of press-molded dishes have abstracted images of the sea’s surface rendered as delicately as a watercolour, but made solid by the firing process. There are abstracted modules based upon large, concrete breakwaters. These can be arranged in any number of ways. These pieces evoke a feeling of erosion. Pale sun-bleached colours remind us of the soft light of the south coast. Taken as a whole, they bring to mind a long passage of time - a process of change and subtle shifting. But this is not a process the artist fears - she is quietly celebrating her part and her place in this environment.