18 Albion Mews.
Study #14
An exhibition of white pots by Lucie Rie at Galerie Besson, 1989
“I make pots. Put flowers in them, use them. They are for use.”
Dame Lucie Rie was born in Austria in 1902 and attended the Vienna School of Applied Arts where she discovered her love of functional yet beautiful pottery. As a young woman she joined the Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshop) where the divide between fine arts and applied arts was collapsed.
In 1938 Lucie and her Jewish family fled Vienna at the outbreak of WWII and went to London. There, Lucie got a small studio in Hyde Park at 18 Albion Mews that she would would continue to work in for 50 years. She commissioned an elegant apartment to exactly resemble her Viennese apartment that was designed by Ernst Plischke. The flat had walnut cupboards and versatile shelves that could be rearranged and dismantled.
Reconstruction of a part of Lucie’s Albion Mews studio in Gallery 143
“I work in a completely unorthodox manner, no longer using any form of scientific method. I glaze my pots raw, often using a number of glazes on top of each other and sometimes between one glaze and the next layer of slip.”
During World War II the market for studio pottery declined, and Rie found work making earthenware buttons and jewelry to survive the war years. The buttons she made became popular enough that she employed fellow émigrés in her studio known as the ‘Button Factory’. This new path gave her the opportunity to expand her knowledge of glazing and clay chemistry.
A selection of glazed ceramic buttons, 1945
Her tiny frame was always clad in top-to-toe white (despite the clay); in 1989, the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake was inspired to make clothes for Rie. She responded by giving to Miyake a collection of ceramic buttons that had lain hidden away since the 50s. These formed the basis for Miyake’s Autumn/Winter 1989 collection, which featured Rie’s buttons on oversized collars.
It has been said that “formally she drew on almost every ceramic tradition but depended on none.” She frequently made use of the s’graffito technique, which consisted of inlaid lines and rough texture made with a coarse brush, and drew inspiration from nature, classical art and architectural forms.
Lucie was at base a potter, devoted to the wheel and to the functional shapes made on it. From there, however, she followed her own vision rather than prevailing fashion or even accepted “rules.” She used glazes meant for stoneware on earthenware; produced delicate, understated pieces during a time when bigger and bolder was in style; created richly glazed pieces in a single oxidizing firing; and produced a large body of work that is delicate, sculptural, richly glazed, and still fully functional.
One of her small yellow bowls from the 1980s recently broke records by selling at Sotheby’s for over £125,000 – a sum previously unheard of for British studio pottery.
Photograph of Lucie sunbathing by Stella Snead, 1960
View Lucie in action.