Lucie Rie 1902-1993
Rie, potter and educator, was born in Vienna, Austria, After training at the city’s Kunstgewerbeschule, she forged a successful early career in Vienna. She won prizes at the Brussels International Exhibition in 1935, the Milan Triennial in 1936 and the Paris International Exhibition in 1937. However in 1938, in her late thirties, she moved to England to escape Nazi persecution, settling in London. She opened her own studio in Albion Mews in 1939 and during the Second World War, a small team of people working for her with, Rie produced ceramic buttons. In 1946, Hans Coper, a young man in his twenties, not having used clay before, joined her team of workers. Lucie Rie gradually returning to domestic ware. Hans Coper, keen to learn, had lessons in throwing and began to assist in her making domestic ware with her designs.
Although her work was initially at odds with the prevailing pottery trend in Britain which was dominated by Bernard Leach’s rustic approach, Rie established her own style stimulated by trends in architecture and design and, seeing talent in Coper, encouraged him to do the same. They began to diverge. In 1959 she began teaching at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts.
Rie’s earliest London exhibitions began in 1949 at the Berkeley Galleries. From 1954 she often exhibited individually or with Hans Coper in cities such as New York, Minneapolis, Gothenburg, Rotterdam, Arnhem, Hamburg, Düsseldorf and extensively throughout Britain. She continued to work into her late eighties and was awarded a Damehood in 1991. Following her death in London in 1995, the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, the Victoria and Albert Museum as well as museums throughout Japan have held major retrospective exhibitions of her work.
