Dame Lucy Rie
| Description | Ceramic Artist, Potter |
| Dates | 1902-1995 |
| Lived/Worked | England, London |
Best known for...
Her urban architectural and modern pottery designs. Rie's use of Glazes are used in conjunction with sets of parallel banded lines of inlay or deeply scribed lines that cut away to reveal other colours. No brushwork of flowers or other kinds of pattern-making disturb the austerity. Rie's palette of colour was also different from that of the English contemporaries: It was a wider range and included bright mustard yellows and cerulean blues. Her influence was great in that she provided a completely different model of working (urban, small-scale) and enlarged the circles of those collecting pots.
Why is she important?
Lucy Rie is one of a few artists who brought a highly developed sense of understanding of modernism to British ceramics by producing pots could express the same kinds of concerns as architecture could. Her work is best characterised as 'urbane' rather than the 'ruralist'. For instance in her coffee and tea sets made during the 1950s and 1960s the forms are thrown in an exact rather than a spontaneous way.
Historical context
Around 1940'S Bernard Leach, was seen as the dominant figure in British pottery. His works focused on traditional Korean, Japanese and Chinese pottery, in combination with traditional techniques from England and Germany, like slipware and salt glaze ware. He saw pottery as a combination of art, philosophy, design and craft – even as a greater lifestyle. However unlike the Japanese-influenced pottery, Rie's work had been described as cosmopolitan and architectural, and often was decorated with much brighter glazes. Rie's style of work is believed to be influenced by her quick learned student and later partner in her London studio, Hans Coper.
How to see her work
Burks, 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. Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Lucy Rie on the web
http://www.vam.ac.uk/collections/ceramics/points_of_view/transcripts/brri/index.html - edited transcript of an Alison Britton on Lucie Rie, Nov 2001
See also...
List of other similar artist designers or those influenced by or associated with this designer e.g. Hans Coper, Bernard Leach.