Three decades after her death, Lucie Rie’s pottery continues to fascinate curators, collectors and connoisseurs. Born in 1902 to a well-to-do secular Jewish family in Vienna, she learned her craft at the city’s Kunstgewerbeschule, then a hotbed of modernist thinking influenced by the Wiener Werkstätte, which bridged the artisanal approach of the earlier arts & crafts movement and the machine-age rhetoric of the later bauhaus.
There, Rie developed an interest in the technical aspects of pottery, such as glazes, and a strong belief in the transformative power of thoughtful design across all disciplines. So, when in 1938 she fled to London to escape Nazi persecution, she painstakingly brought over her Viennese flat’s interior, designed by architect Ernst Plischke, to her new studio just north of Hyde Park.
Rie was already a successful artist in Europe, but she found little initial acclaim in Britain, where fashionable taste ran either rustic or east Asian. To survive, she turned to making decorative buttons for fashion houses and department stores such as Harrods and Liberty. Here, her research into glazes continued, fuelled by the need to colour-match her ornate creations to the fabrics. A confident artist, she was inspired by others with vastly different approaches. Rie said she learnt to make handles from her friend and mentor Bernard Leach, whose rustic style contrasted with her more metropolitan manner.
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By the early 1950s, Rie had exhibited at the Festival of Britain and at the International Conference of Craftsmen in Pottery & Textiles at Dartington Hall, where her work, and that of her collaborator Hans Coper, was held up in contrast – this time as a compliment – to the nostalgic, rural qualities typical of British studio pottery at the time. Formally, her tapered bowls resonate with nascent mid-century modernism and the fashionable cinched silhouettes exemplified by Christian Dior’s New Look. But whereas the latter was a reaction to wartime privations, revelling in excess fabrics, Rie’s work elevates the economy of means into pure elegance.
Throughout her career, Rie produced subtle variations of her archetypal forms, most famously her bowls and vases with flared lips, experimenting with glazes and sgraffito patterns that made each piece unique. Working in her small London studio, she was never able to scale up production, yet she has still attracted many high-profile admirers over the years, including David Attenborough, Issey Miyake, Nigel Slater and Jonathan Anderson.
Anderson is such a fan, he has collaborated with Wedgwood to bring some of Rie’s designs into production for the first time. The limited-edition collection will be available from selected stores, wedgwood.com and at jwanderson.com, with proceeds supporting the newly formed Lucie Rie and Hans Coper Foundation.
