Antique Collecting articles Feat of Clay

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