Art historian Julia Bagguley gives an introduction to the extraordinary artist at the centre of Kettle’s Yard’s latest exhibition, Lucie Rie, and celebrates her almost alchemical ability to make stunning pots, buttons, bowls and vases.
Art theories have no meaning for me; beauty has.
This is all my philosophy
– Lucie Rie
First thoughts
Have you ever taken part in one of those quickfire Q&A quizzes? When I was studying to be an art historian my tutorial group were asked – having ploughed through the syllabus from the ancient world to the C21st – what their ‘object of desire’ would be. My instinctive answer: ‘a bowl by Lucie Rie’.
Back story
Lucie Rie (1902-1995) was born in Vienna in 1902. Her father, Benjamin Gomperz, was a consultant to Sigmund Freud and he nurtured his daughter’s artistic upbringing. She learned to throw pots at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, where she attended in 1922. After graduating in 1925 she opened her first studio and swiftly gained a reputation in continental Europe as an exciting new ceramicist with her pots inspired by Viennese Modernism
It was, therefore, in Vienna that Rie built the foundations of her ‘adventures’ but her reputation is largely defined by the period after 1938 when she settled and set up a studio in London. Here she remained until the end of her long life, always rising early and following a disciplined routine of throwing and glazing forms that have expanded the vocabulary of the wheel for subsequent generations of potters.
Techniques
Rie observed:
‘There seems to the casual onlooker little variety in ceramic shapes and designs. But to the lover of pottery, there is an endless variety. And there is nothing sensational about it, only a silent grandeur and quietness.’
Sixty years of continuous potting must be a record for any ceramist! Across these years her focus remained largely on relatively simple shapes. Her reputation – which is beyond major – lies in her constant evolution and development of glazes and surfaces.
Vienna, 1925-38
Here Rie began developing and experimenting with the styles that would stand her in good stead for the rest of her professional life. She made earthenware and stoneware for domestic purposes: tea and coffee sets in simple shapes with finely potted rims and plain handles.
Stoneware is a mix of hard, dense, non-porous clay requiring firing at high temperatures. It enables the potter to shape large pieces but is limited to a palette of dark ochres and browns through to blue and grey. Rie began to experiment with glazes on stoneware producing the first of her unique ‘volcanic’ cylindrical jars with deeply fissured, matt or pitted sides. In The Pot Book, the distinguished ceramicist, Edmund de Waal, commented ‘Lucie Rie had an alchemist’s ability to make ravishing pots that, on closer inspection, looked like they might have been dropped in a pool of sump oil’.
Her reputation was steadily increasing in Austria and beyond, and she won prestigious prizes for her work, such as a gold medal at the Brussels International Exhibition in 1935 and a silver medal at the Paris International Exhibition in 1937, which featured seventy of her pots displayed in a glass corridor.
London (WW2), 1938-46
In 1938, following the Anschluss (the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany), Rie left Vienna for London; there was no longer a future for the Jewish community in Austria. She established a studio at 18 Albion Mews, near Marble Arch, working as a fire watcher during the London Blitz and mixing in Austrian émigré circles.
Initially, she found little encouragement for her work. She faced the challenges of a country where even “progressive” potters favoured a sturdier, earthier aesthetic – stoneware ruled the home grown studio potters! She struggled to find customers whose taste had the sophistication of her continental style and was not helped by being branded an ‘enemy alien’. She was thus unable to secure a Board of Trade license to make pots.
Through fellow émigré and close friend, Fritz Lampl, who owned the Bimini/Orplid Glass workshop in Soho, she began producing ceramic buttons and jewellery for sale in Harrods and Liberty, and couture designers such as Molyneux and Victor Stiebel. Sales went well as buttons were exempted from wartime rationing on the grounds that such humble luxuries would raise female morale. She moved the production of buttons to Albion Mews and hired fellow refugees as assistants.
This button work enabled Rie to be experimental while meeting commercial demands. She created earthenware buttons in abstract shapes and figurative forms such as flowers, shells, leaves, stars, fossils and knots. Some were plain round buttons, versatile and tasteful; others were lavishly sculpted. She hand-formed or threw each button and then created moulds to be used as templates from which multiples could be swiftly produced.
The fashion industry required that she matched glazes to fabrics obliging her to expand her glaze recipes to a wider palette of colours. She spent much time reformulating recipes for lustres and glazes to create new surface effects in a rainbow of hues. This was time not wasted. Here was the foundation of her future work and success, moving from the palettes of the past to the exuberance of exciting and new pieces.
London (post-WW2), 1946-58
Among the émigrés recruited to Rie’s button workshop was a young German engineer, Hans Coper. He came to Albion Mews in 1946 with no experience in ceramics. Initially he assisted in firing the buttons in her small brick and electric kiln, then moving on to work on firing her monochromatic domestic wares. Rie quickly recognised his inherent skills as a remarkable ceramist and sent him to gain experience of using a wheel and working with stoneware.
Eventually they formed a professional partnership, which saw them work and exhibit together, making ranges of restrained and modernist tableware and individual one-off pieces made with strong sculptural or bodily qualities.
In 1950 they shared the first of a series of exhibitions at the Berkeley Galleries, London. Their work was also shown at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Because of this close association, their work is often compared together – indeed, quite often they both signed individual pieces. ‘He potted and I glazed’ she told Sir David Attenborough in a 1988 BBC film. In truth their two styles were very different; Coper’s pieces are more abstract ceramics, while hers are more functional and traditional.
London, 1958-1990
In 1958, Coper moved to Hertfordshire to set up his own studio. Now, as a female potter working independently, Rie began to forge her own path. In these later decades of her professional life she worked mainly with sturdy, high fired stoneware and porcelain – the latter the most exquisite but unforgiving of materials, immensely pliable and tricky to control on the wheel. These clays not only allowed her to create pieces with thinner walls than heretofore but, when combined with her unusual method of raw glazing, they enabled a greater fusion of glaze and body.
Her work on the wheel was disciplined and controlled. Most of these one-off individual pieces were relatively conventional shapes: beakers, tall, thin and long necked bottles, flared vases and simple bowls sometimes narrowing to a deep foot. Occasionally she would throw the clay off centre onto the wheel forming a quirky or wonky shape which added to their charm and individuality. The pieces can be difficult to date as she often returned to favourite shapes.
When the form came off the wheel she would manipulate these basic shapes whilst the clay was still malleable. Then she would dry the piece with the use of a firebrick tabletop heated by a gas burner beneath to a bone dry ‘green’ state. Then the magic began, as she started glazing and decorating. Glazes were brushed on layer by layer; there were no specific recipes but in the way she used them, tweaked with mixes of colourants and underlying slips together with liberal dollops of gum Arabic for stability and bonding. The result was always unique.
Many of her ceramics are decorated with marks, hand scratched or incised usually through a black-brown glaze. These patterns were fluted, crosshatched or concentric lines, following and reflecting the shape of the pot and often highlighted with manganese oxide. The inspiration for this ‘sgraffito’ came from a visit to the museum at Avebury in Wiltshire where she was much taken by displays of Neolithic and Bronze Age pottery, and the basic tools – made with bird bones – used to make patterns into the clay.
Drying, glazing and decoration completed, only then would she fire each ‘green’ pot in the small kiln in the studio at Albion Mews. The results were surfaces that pushed the boundaries of decoration: smooth, pumice-like, mottled or pock-marked (‘the sump oil’); with colours ranging from blacks, bronzes, greys to greenish-blues, dark yellows, beiges, off-white and, latterly, to deep, richly coloured glazes of pinks, gold bronzes, yellows, greens and turquoise.
All these techniques were delicate, fragile and risky in their application, and quite unlike the conventional dual firing used by most potters. She never stopped experimenting; towards the end of her life she said ‘I shall never cease to be a pupil.’ That said, here is the defining characteristic of her work. She was reluctant to sing her own praises. In her own modest words:
‘If one should ask me whether I believe [myself] to be a modern potter or a potter of tradition I would answer, I don’t know and I don’t care. Art alive is always modern, no matter how old or young’.
Collecting
Asked on a YouTube clip why her pots are so successful amongst collectors, Rie replied, ‘perhaps because they are simple, straightforward shapes’. She attracted prestigious followers: broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, chef and writer Nigel Slater and fashion designer Issey Miyake.
One of her most interesting commissions came in a group of works of art acquired to decorate a new suite of guest rooms in the C13th Edward III Tower at Windsor Castle. The suite was created for Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh by Sir Hugh Casson (1910-99) as ‘typical of this time as other suites have been of times past’. Three pieces were acquired. Two bowls: a large deep porcelain bowl and a small shallow, delicately potted earthenware bowl with a wide rim and tapered narrow foot, both decorated with bronze – manganese and copper carbonate – glazes and the painstaking scratched technique. The third bowl is an irregular simple earthenware bowl with a soft, brilliant yellow uranium oxide glaze and dark rim.
Rie’s reputation has grown enormously since her death, particularly in Japan where her style is immensely popular. Her pieces, originally sold for less than £100, can now fetch for up to six figures at auction. Given that her output was prolific, there must be many pieces still with their original owners who may not even know what they have. Rummaging in charity shops is recommended. Whilst not consistent with her marks, one should look out for variations of her ‘LR’ initials. Pinterest shows the different ways she used them, sometimes brushed or impressed.
Potting and wellbeing
Mental health symptoms can be overwhelming. Feelings, anxiety, flashbacks, anger, depression and fear spiral and become all-consuming. The creation of ceramic pieces can assist in much needed relief from troublesome symptoms.
The potter has to be fully focussed on the task in hand – moulding, forming, shaping, handling and turning the clay on the ever demanding wheel requires total concentration. As they immerse themselves in the process, sufferers have openly expressed reprieve and release from troublesome thoughts.
This is not new. In Henry VI, Shakespeare has the King’s celebrated military commander during the Hundred Years’ War, John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, expressing ‘My thoughts are whirled like a potter’s wheel, I know not where I am nor what I do’. As the great studio potter, Bernard Leach opined, ‘a potter is one of the few people left who uses natural faculties of heart, head and hand in balance – the whole [person].’
There is no room for intrusive and distracting feelings flooding the mind; no reaching for iPhones and social media. Working the clay improves flow and spontaneity, provides an outlet for those deep dark holes, assists in the processes of self-identification and self-expression, bolstering confidence and self-esteem. A friend who suffered chronic post-natal depression found immense relief in learning new skills on a small wheel, which contributed to her eventual recovery.
It may be that Rie’s long sojourn in London enabled her, albeit unconsciously, to maintain her own version of wellbeing. Given the difficult years leading to her settling in London for the rest of her life, the small flat and studio in Albion Mews provided the sanctuary and stability that so many émigrés needed and sought – and still do. Her log books show defined, almost austere, routines with designated potting days while, separately, she welcomed visitors but strictly on her terms (tea and homemade cake). These are signs that she rigorously controlled her surroundings, enabling her to create an atmosphere where she could use her creative skills in her own ‘safe place and space’. She notably said, ‘to make pottery is an adventure to me, every new work is a new beginning’.
Not to be missed
There is a rare opportunity to see Lucie Rie’s life’s work as it developed chronologically and in the intimacy of Kettle’s Yard, the best of all possible venues. The house is of her time and Rie’s professional relationship with Jim Ede, the museum’s founder, was a close one, since both of them shared an identical aesthetic. To paraphrase the critic Hannah Glugston, from her own review of the show, ‘Jim and Helen Ede loved Rie’s work and they understood the power it had in their home. They placed her work ‘The Wave’ into the house to observe the way the evening light interacted with its dappled surface. This conical bowl sits permanently where Jim Ede first placed it, on a modern slate console table, where it supports the way in which her modest creations could enliven an entire scene.’ Truth, if truth were needed, that her pieces were not just ‘pots’!
Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery will be shown at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 25 June 2023. Click here to book for free via the Kettle’s Yard website in advance of your visit. A selection from the exhibition will be shown at the Holburne Museum, Bath, from 14 July 2023 – 7 January 2024.
Feature images: Lucie Rie, Bowl, 1977, thrown porcelain with manganese glaze and sgraffito decoration, Middlesbrough Collection. Purchased with assistance from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund
