Opposite: Glazed stoneware teapot with bamboo
handle, c.1960. Photo courtesy Wright
www.wright20.com
Early days
Born Lucie Gomperz in Vienna in 1902,
Rie was the youngest child of a prosperous Jewish doctor, who designed his
waiting room and surgery in a modernist
style. She studied at the Vienna School of
Arts and Crafts under Michael Powolny
and was also influenced by the modernist
architect and designer, Josef Hoffmann.
Her early work was characterized by a
sense of austerity and purity of form.
She married Hans Rie in 1926 (the
marriage was dissolved in 1940) and
began exhibiting her work in the late
1930s. Her apartment in Vienna was
designed by the architect Ernst Plischke
in the modernist style. But in 1938, just
after the Anschluss and in the face of
growing anti-Semitism, Rie moved to
England, taking her work and as many
pieces from her apartment as she could.
Feat of Clay
A selection of ceramics from Lucie Rie goes under the hammer
at two major auctions next month – highlighting the popularity
of the Austrian-born potter’s innovative designs
A FASCINATING PARADOX lies at the
heart of Lucie Rie’s work. On the one
hand her work is grounded in modernism
and an interest in design and architecture
dating back to her early years of study in
Vienna; yet on the other her most
personal work has a depth of character
and texture, as well as a powerful
simplicity of form and deliberately
evocative, primitive quality, that is
reminiscent of the ceramic treasures
unearthed in an archaeological dig.
In the late 1940s Rie apparently
visited the museum at Avebury in
Wiltshire and was much taken by the
16
displays of Neolithic and Bronze Age
pottery, as well as the basic tools – made
with bird bones – that were used to
make patterns on the clay. Certainly her
work was very different in character
from the model championed by the likes
of Bernard Leach, who, along with many
followers, was far more influenced by
Japanese and Asian ceramic traditions.
Rie – rather like Gertrud and Otto
Natzler and her dear friend and
colleague Hans Coper (all émigrés from
Austria and Germany) – was more
concerned with finding an individual
voice, outside the mainstream.
London calling
She settled in London and established a
studio in Albion Mews near Paddington.
During the war years she worked in an
optical factory. To make ends meet she
then began designing and making
ceramic buttons for Bimini, as well as
jewelry. In 1946 Coper joined her at the
pottery, later helping her develop a range
of functional table and kitchen ware.
At the same time Rie was evolving her
personal work and developing individual
pieces in stoneware and porcelain. She
and Coper provided one another with
mutual encouragement and support.
Certain characteristics and common
interests connected their work – which
was often exhibited together over the
years – but Rie focused upon a more
limited range of shapes and forms, particular bowls, urns and vases, within a
modest output that was highly accomplished and increasingly sought after.
Coper restricted his finishes to a
concentrated palette of slips and firing
techniques, but Rie was intrigued by
her ongoing experiments with glazes
and the chemistry of ceramic textures.
In this respect she had more in common
with Otto Natzler, and a number of her
footed bowls, bottles and vases reveal a
similar interest in highly textured
surfaces that are pitted and pocked,
with melting colours and rugged hues.
Rugged appeal
Rie’s pots have a weathered quality – as
though worn down and scarred by
exposure to the elements over hundreds
of years. This was especially true of her
work of the 1960s and beyond – using
layers of slips mixed with metal oxides –
Porcelain bowl, c.1970, with a manganese and
copper glaze on the interior and crimson pigment
for incised lines on the exterior. Dr and Mrs
Yvonne Mayer. Crafts Study Centre, University for
the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey
Left: A stoneware vase with porcelain slip and
dolomite glaze. c. 1970. Dr and Mrs Yvonne
Mayer. Crafts Study Centre, University for the
Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey
while the 1950s pieces tended to have a
more familiar decorative element, with
sgraffito markings and simple but
evocative abstract patterns. Rie’s work
always sat well with the interiors and
architecture of the time, offering a
striking focal point. Hard working,
ordered, precise and direct, Rie began
to receive considerable acclaim by the
late 1960s. She taught part-time at the
Camberwell School of Art but always
remained highly focused on her work,
calling herself, simply, a potter.
‘Through her training as a potter in
Vienna to her exile in London, and to
her creation of a style of making that
had no counterpoint in the earthy
functionalism of British pottery,’ wrote
ceramicist and author Edmund de Waal
in his assessment of Rie, ‘she projected a
force-field of separation from the
expectations of those around her.’
Oval vase, in stoneware, with pale limestone glaze
inlaid with manganese and sgraffito leaf decoration
on either side. London, UK, 1960s. Dr and Mrs
Yvonne Mayer. Crafts Study Centre, University for
the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey
Mallams, Oxford, has a sale of international studio ceramics on December 10,
while Woolley and Wallis, Salisbury, holds
its British art pottery sale on December 3.
Both include pieces by Lucie Rie.
Taken from Mid-Century Modern
Complete by Dominic Bradbury
published by Thames & Hudson
www.thameshudson.com at £60.00
Meeting Lucie
The vase (left), which had an estimate of
Earlier this year, Peter Wilson, a leading
£1,500, was bought from the famed potter
auctioneer of fine art and antiques in Cheshire,
over tea and cake at her London mews cottage
which specialises in Lucie Rie, sold this vase for
in 1983. In a letter sold with the