Lucie Rie

Dame Lucie Rie (1902-1995) was an influential British studio potter.

Lucie Rie was born Luzie Gomperz in Vienna, Austria, the youngest child of Benjamin Gomperz, a medical doctor who was a consultant to Sigmund Freud. She studied pottery under Michael Powolny at the Kunstgewerbeschule, the art school associated with the Wiener Werkstätte (the "Vienna Workshops"), a craft workshop. She set up her first studio in Vienna in 1925. She exhibited at her first International Exhibition that year, in Paris. In 1937 she won a silver medal at the Paris International Exhibition (the same exhibition for which Pablo Picasso painted Guernica). In 1938 she left Nazi Germany and emigrated to England, where she settled in London. Around this time she separated from Hans Rie, a businessman whom she had married in Vienna. During and after the war, to make ends meet, she made ceramic buttons and jewelry.

In 1946 she hired Hans Coper, a young man with no experience in ceramics, to help her fire the buttons. Although Coper was interested in learning sculpture, she sent him to a potter named Heber Matthews, who quickly taught him how to make pots on the wheel. Rie and Coper exhibited together only two years later, in 1948. He quickly became a partner in her studio, where he worked until 1958. Their friendship lasted until he died in 1981. Rie herself stopped making pottery in 1990, when she suffered the first of a series of strokes. She died at home on April 1, 1995.

Because of her close collaboration with Coper, and perhaps because they were both pre-war immigrants from German-speaking countries, Rie's pottery is often associated with Coper's. But while his work tended to be sculptural and abstract, Rie's remained predominately functional. Rie's pottery was also very different from that of Bernard Leach, the dominant figure in British studio pottery at the time. Unlike his rustic, Japanese-influenced pottery, her work has been described as cosmopolitan and architectural, and often was decorated with much brighter glazes. Rie is particularly known for bottle forms. Her pottery is displayed in collections around the world.

In 1981, Rie was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 1991, she was made a Dame.

Sources

"Dame Lucy Rie, 93, Noted Ceramicist," New York Times, April 3, 1995, B10.
[A Ceramic History, by Edmund De Waal], last visited December 12, 2005.
Cooper, Emmanuel (ed.). Lucie Rie: The Life and Work of Lucie Rie, 1902-1995, Ceramic Review Publishing Ltd., 2002. ISBN 4860201221.

Bibliography

Birks, Tony. Lucie Rie, Marston House Publishers, 1998. ISBN 0951770071.
Coatts, Morgot (ed.). Lucie Rie and Hans Coper: Potters in Parallel, Herbert Press, 1997. ISBN 0713646977.
Frankel, Cyril. Modern Pots: Hans Coper, Lucie Rie & their Contemporaries, University of East Anglia Press, 2002. ISBN 0946009368.

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