Emmanuel Cooper on pottery, politics and passions

‘You just have to be sure that what you’ve made is you.’ So said the potter, teacher, author, editor, curator and gay rights activist Emmanuel Cooper, speaking towards the end of a life that would offer an embarrassment of riches to any biographer. A boy with what he described as ‘sissy’ interests born to a working-class family in a Derbyshire mining village in 1938, who would later earn an OBE for services to the arts, his story is one of class, sexuality, craft, politics and community.

In Making Emmanuel Cooper, an array of passions spanning the professional, political and personal are relayed through a patchwork of Cooper’s writings. It aims to complete autobiographical work cut short by his death in 2012. Unfinished draft chapters are bolstered with entries from diaries, excerpts from interviews and published writings, and letters to his many friends. Edited by Cooper’s long-term partner David Horbury, the book is, in a literal sense, a labour of love.

Horbury is frank about the fact that this book is ‘one of celebration rather than a critical assessment’, and it is on these terms that it should be judged (though there is undoubtedly room for more objective analysis elsewhere). Contributions from Horbury and from Jeffrey Weeks, a friend and fellow member of the Gay Left collective, offer moving descriptions of Cooper’s life and times that contextualise his writing.

In passages dotted throughout, Cooper mentions how feelings of shame around his sexuality caused him to compartmentalise much of his life to a dramatic degree. London is celebrated by the young man as ‘a place where one could be anonymous, lead a double, treble, even a life broken into neat quarters’. In contrast, Making Emmanuel Cooper acts as what Weeks calls ‘a way of telling a unified story’. Here at least the muck, mess and drama of making pots, making love and making a difference are firmly – and frankly – wedged together. We see Cooper as a schoolboy discovering clay, dreaming of swapping his unlovely surrounds for something altogether more colourful and cosmopolitan. This is followed by military service, a stint in the theatre and teacher training, before a move to Swinging London marks what he considered the real beginning of his life.

It was in London that he became assistant to ceramic artists Gwyn Hanssen Pigott and Bryan Newman, while gradually developing his own skills and style. At the start, ‘pots seemed neutral, things to enjoy, needing no explanation or analysis’. It is only after the 1970s’ craze for chunky tableware in rustic oatmeal hues ends, in favour of the ‘hard, clean, clinical lines’ of the 80s, that Cooper develops a more unique visual language. He is determined to create an aesthetic based on the electric kiln’s possibilities, rather than aping the style wrought by flame-burning kilns. What emerges from his experimentation with oxides is a rainbow of vivid yellows, blues, pinks and more, glazing the often textured and brightly coloured ceramics for which he is now best known.

Cooper’s writing is expressive and evocative, sometimes in surprising ways. His love of food is apparent throughout – the stolid fare enjoyed by a butcher’s family in the 1950s is described with as much attention as his glazes; when writing of 1960s Soho, Cooper praises a certain ‘paillard of veal’ as much as the permissive atmosphere. It goes some way, perhaps, to explaining Cooper’s career-long preoccupation with domestic forms such as bowls and jugs. Another reason for this was moral: an Arts and Crafts-esque sense that there is inherent value in hand-making pots that hold at least the suggestion of function. As he puts it: ‘Ghosts of William Morris haunted me, but there seemed no other way.’

Ceramic Review, which Cooper co-founded with fellow potter and leftist Eileen Lewenstein in 1970 and edited until 2010, provided an increasingly important outlet, as did his rapid success as an author of books as varied as A History of Pottery (1972), People’s Art: Working Class Art from 1750 to the Present Day (1994) and Male Bodies: A Photographic History of the Nude (2004). Alongside this was his involvement in radical politics, as both an arts writer for communist newspaper the Morning Star and a member of the Gay Left group, who published a journal during the 1970s. As Weeks puts it in his introduction: ‘We wanted to change ourselves as well as change the world.’ Cooper’s interests are broad: there are passages on the question of monogamy, on the role of the Crafts Council, on gay radicalism versus mainstream integration.

Unfortunately for the biography of an editor, there are an unusual amount of errors, some of which are inadvertently comic – ceramics in the Leach tradition are described as ‘Lechian’ (unfortunate, given the great potter’s known infidelities). Yet while such wince-inducing mistakes would undermine most books, in the case of Making Emmanuel Cooper – about a man who described himself as ‘more enthusiastic than careful’ – it doesn’t seem to matter much. What matters instead is Cooper’s astonishing scope, clarity and ambition of vision. The only question left unanswered is: how can one person do so much, so well?

Making Emmanuel Cooper: Life and Work from his Memoirs, Letters, Diaries and Interviews. Edited by David Horbury. Published by Unicorn, £25, hardback