Artist Highlight: Dame Lucie Rie (British 1902

Dame Lucie Rie (British, 1902-1995)

Bulbous Vase with Flared Rim, circa 1980s

Porcelain; Bronze manganese glaze over brown

Bare clay bands crossed with linear sgraffito and blue inlay design

10 ¼ H. x 4 ¾ Diameter, inches

Artists cipher underneath: LR

Provenance:

Peter Marino, 1997

Private collection

Pot, circa 1970s

Stoneware; Grey pitted glaze with manganese speckle and diagonal sgraffito

6 ¾ H. x 3 ¾ W. x 3 ¾ D. inches

Artists cipher underneath: LR

Provenance:

Peter Marino, 1997

Private collection

Lucie Rie, c. 1946

Born in 1902, Dame Lucie Rie grew up in the rich intellectual environment of early twentieth-century Vienna. In 1922, she entered the Kunstgewerbeschule under Michael Powolny and was immediately ‘lost’ to the potter’s wheel. Rie began exhibiting at international exhibitions immediately, having her work selected by Josef Hoffman for inclusion in the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels in Paris, 1925.

Lucie Rie increasingly devoted herself to the development of her own artistic style and in the late 1930s, she settled in London and established her ceramics studio at Albion Mews. She developed quickly, combining a taste for a clean, modernist aesthetic with daring technical skill. Lacking convenient access to a kiln, she raw glazed her pots -- applying glaze to un-fired clay and then fusing form and glaze in one firing. This became an essential feature of her pottery.

Dame Lucie Rie's decades of work were devoted to experimenting with glaze and form. During this period she won a number of awards for her work at major exhibitions, including a gold medal at the Brussels International Exhibition of 1935 and a silver medal at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937. The Gallery represented Lucie Rie in the 1970s through 1990s and exhibited her work along with that of other noted British ceramicists of the time.

Collections:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Museum of Modern Art, New York

British Museum, London

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles

Amgueddfa Cymru, National Museum Wales, Cardiff

Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK

York Art Gallery, York, UK

Crafts Study Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK

Brooklyn Museum, New York

Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Middlesbrough, UK