English Heritage Blue Plaque for Dame Lucie Rie
An English Heritage Blue Plaque for Dame Lucie Rie (1902-1995), one of the most important potters of the twentieth century, has been erected at 18 Albion Mews, W1, City of Westminster, where she lived and worked from 1939 until her death. Rie’s work has been widely admired by potters, curators, collectors, and the general public since the 1950s. The perfection of her original but much copied style could not have been found without her experiences in England, and today the body of Rie’s work - held in the collections of museums such as the Victoria and Albert - stands as a milestone in the English tradition of studio pottery.
Rie was born Lucie Gomperz in Vienna and grew up in an intellectual atmosphere: her father was a Jewish professor of medicine and a friend of Sigmund Freud and her mother came from a rich family of wine producers. In 1922, after contemplating a medical career, she enrolled at art school, where her work soon became noted for its austerity of form and colour, a style opposed to the decorative mode of Viennese ceramics. In 1925 Lucie’s pots were selected for the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. The following year, she married Hans Rie, a businessman, but they had few interests in common apart from skiing, and Lucie spent the following decade developing her techniques as a potter to increasing acclaim.
In 1938 the Ries fled Austria for England, intending to move on to America. Lucie's decision to stay in London, alone, determined the course of the rest of her life and work. She was introduced to the world of hand-made pottery in England, where she met William Honey, Director of the Ceramics Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Muriel Rose, owner of the Little Gallery in Chelsea, and the potter Bernard Leach, all of whom encouraged and influenced her work. In 1939 Rie discovered a garage workshop with living accommodation above at 18 Albion Mews, W1. The building, altered for her by Ernst Freud – son of Sigmund – was Rie’s home and studio for the rest of her life.
During the Second World War, Rie found a job pressing glass buttons in a Soho workshop. She then began making ceramic buttons for haute couture, and jewellery, in her own studio. The operation was shut down as a non-essential industry and she embarked on war work adjusting optical instruments, but with the end of the war her button 'factory' reopened.
Rie’s confidence in her method and style had been shaken by the move to England, and in particular by the criticism of Bernard Leach, whose uncompromising views on the principles of good pottery were tested by the hybrid sophistication of Rie's work. Under his influence she produced pots thought to be touched by a heavy rusticity not in keeping with her own temper.
In 1946 the German refugee Hans Coper came to work as Rie's assistant, and it soon became clear that he had an immense talent which Rie respected far beyond her own. She later said, 'I am a potter, but he was an artist’. With Coper's encouragement, Rie was able to rediscover and develop her unique approach to ceramics. She always insisted that her work was functional, and in spite of the sculptural delicacy that characterises her pots, most are well suited to a domestic setting and use. Rie and Coper collaborated in making ranges of inexpensive tableware for shops such as Heals and Liberty in the late 1940s and 1950s, as well as continuing to design their own individual pieces.
In 1948 the acquisition of an electric kiln allowed Rie to produce a greater range of glaze effects in her stoneware and porcelain. It was from this point that she began to create the pots that made her reputation. These were shown at the Festival of Britain in 1951 and at a retrospective Arts Council exhibition in 1967, which marked the full acceptance of a potter whose work, as the catalogue noted, went against the national grain by having 'no nostalgic undertones of folk art.'
Rie, who was a part-time tutor at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts from 1961 to 1971, received an OBE in 1968; she was made a CBE in 1981 and a DBE in 1990. She worked into her late eighties, continuing to experiment as well as exploring and refining her most successful forms.
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