The potter Lucie Rie was a rising star at 25 in her native Vienna and famous across Europe by her 30s, yet when she arrived in Britain as a refugee she struggled to rebuild her reputation from scratch.
But within a decade she was on top again, showcased by her adopted country at the Festival of Britain, and in 1991 she became the first potter ever to be made a Dame.
Now, on the centenary of her debut at the potter’s wheel, a celebration of her life and work has opened, and it is well worth travelling to Middlesbrough to view it.
Why Middlesbrough? The city’s Institute of Modern Art has more than a dozen of Rie’s pieces in its permanent holdings and one of the best collections of experimental ceramics in Britain. Rie experimented wildly from the moment she threw her first bowl at 20 and knew it was her destiny to make beautiful things for the home.
Lucie Rie, Bowl, c.1965, Stoneware (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art)
“I was lost to the wheel,” she said as a young woman. She started out as a scientist, but went to art school to study sculpture. She then changed track, saying of science, “It’s too unsure for me, not precise enough.
"The wheel is a perfect machine and makes perfect pots.”
Rie completely rejected convention once she got started, and the scientist in her resurfaced as she started to explore the qualities of different glazes and the results of doing things differently from the norm when firing her work.
The paradox is clear in her 1926 bowl whose symmetrically scalloped edges recall the Art Nouveau curlicues still popular in Vienna, but whose bold splashes of blue, orange, white and brown pre-date Jackson Pollock’s abstract drip paintings by more than 20 years.
Within a decade, elegant form and vivid colour were giving way to rugged shapes, strangely pitted brown and white glazes and minimal, Japanese-inspired tea sets, which were not glazed at all, merely burnished to the terracotta sheen still the norm in the country’s tea houses.
Rie’s lack of convention and consistency may have hindered her progress when she arrived in London in 1938 seeking approval from art establishment figures in support of her application for a licence to make pottery.
Lucie Rie, Bottle, 1986, Stoneware. (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art)
She got a letter of recommendation from the Professor of Pottery at the Royal College of Art, even though he asked, after looking at her work: “When are you going to stop playing and start making pots?”
“Her work felt unfamiliar to the British pottery world,” explains Eliza Spindel, of Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge , where the show will travel in March.
It’s the home of one of Britain’s greatest collectors of art, Jim Ede, who lived surrounded by several pieces of Rie’s work, bought from gallerist Henry Rothschild, who championed Rie and other contemporary ceramicists at his Primavera shops in London and Cambridge.
“We wanted to do a show because we could offer the public a chance to see her pieces in the domestic setting Rie intended them for, as well as in display cases in our gallery — and also because we felt Rie hasn’t always had the attention she deserved as a solo artist,” says Spindel.
Rie is often shown as part of a duo with her friend and collaborator, the late potter Hans Coper, and was surprisingly deferential to her early critics, including the famous mid-century British potter Bernard Leach, who made her pay to attend one of his beginners’ courses. He encouraged her to make heftier pots before she found the confidence to go back to the shapes, styles and techniques that were her own.
When Rie first came to the UK she made a name for herself with beautiful ceramic buttons for Liberty, Jacqmar, Molyneux and Worth, furniture handles for Heals and tableware for interior design stores. It took only a decade from Rie’s arrival in London for the Council of Industrial Design organising the Festival of Britain to be convinced they had a star on their hands.
Lucie Rie as a young woman
They chose several of Rie’s pieces to furnish their room sets as well as exhibiting her work in the show, and commissioned her to make affordable souvenirs for visitors. “One of the rare pieces we’re most excited about showing is a beaker, which is one of the few of these souvenirs that still exists,” says Spindel.
Also gloriously Fifties are the cruet, casserole, cups and saucers, which serve as a reminder, in a show full of collectible bowls and vases, that Rie made stuff she liked to think of being used every day.
Despite being a busy working woman she loved to bake, making Sachertorte and other cakes, serving them with very good coffee to visitors at her studio home in Bayswater. “So many sweet memories of visiting Albion Mews, and treated to delicious sandwiches and her famous apple cake,” recalled the late collector Lisa Sainsbury, who with her husband Bob staged a huge retrospective to mark Rie’s 80th birthday.
Lucie’s first love was Ernst Rie, but he died in a skiing accident. She subsequently married his brother Hans, but the marriage was dissolved soon after they fled the Nazis. Amazingly, she managed to save her pots when they fled, carrying them by hand, protected in layers of clothing.
For the second half of the 20th century there was no looking back for Rie, whose fame spread as far as Japan, where she found a warm reception for her many new experiments.
These include the lines and patterns scratched into her pottery, which became a watchword for Sixties design, the extravagant use of manganese glazes, which made her pieces glow like precious objects(she did make some actual jewellery, also featured in the show), and the exquisite use of colour, which characterises one of her very last pieces, and the vibrant pink and turquoise bowl she made at the age of 88.
She survived breast cancer, but suffered several strokes, which put an end to her work in 1990, and she died five years later aged 93.
What confounded Sir David Attenborough, who interviewed her at 80, was that despite her predilection for variety, there was never any doubt as to who made her pots: “Salmon pink and peacock blue, piercing green and softest cream, uranium yellow, manganese brown and metallic glinting gold.
And here is the paradox: you know that each is hers, even if you have never seen its like before.” This endless invention, he said at a tea party for an exhibition marking her 90th birthday, was the answer to his question: “What is the genius of Lucie Rie?”
Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery is at MIMA, Middlesbrough until 12 February and from 4 March to 25 June at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge.
Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter by Emmanuel Cooper is published by Yale University Press
