Dame Lucie Rie
Ceramics
Austrian born, British studio potter Lucie Rie is one of the 20th century’s most influential ceramicists. Her early ceramics incorporated late Neoclassicism, Jugendstil, Modernism and Japonism, while her unique and complex slip-glaze surfaces and her inventive kiln processes influenced an entire generation of younger British ceramists.
Dame Lucie Rie, née Lucie Gomperz, was born in 1902, Vienna, Austria in 1902. She was educated at the Vienna Gymnasium and at the Arts and Crafts School. She settled in England in 1938 and, in order to survive during World War II, produced and sold fine ceramic buttons. In 1947 she was joined in her studio by the German-born potter Hans Coper. Rie had her first solo show as a potter in 1949, was in the Arts Council Retrospective of 1967, showed with Coper in Rotterdam in 1967 and Hamburg in 1972, and was given major exhibitions in Düsseldorf, West Germany, in 1978, and in London at Sainsbury Place and the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1981. She was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1991.
