To make pots is an adventure to me, every new work is a new beginning. Indeed I shall never cease to be a pupil.
Originally from Vienna and born into a secular Jewish family, Rie trained in sculpture and then ceramics at the Wiener Kunstgewerbeschule (Vienna School of Arts and Crafts) and enjoyed the beginnings of a successful career in her home country. However, in 1938 she was forced to flee to Britain, escaping Nazi persecution in Austria. In London she settled in a small mews house in Bayswater, initially with her husband Hans Rie, though they separated soon after and he moved to the US.
At Albion Mews Rie established a small home-based studio using an electric kiln, a set-up that stood in stark contrast to the rural locations chosen by many British studio potters in this period who tended to use wood or gas-fired kilns. For Rie, this approach mirrored the practice she had begun in Vienna where she also worked in an urban setting – her home serving as studio, showroom, and living quarters.
The move to London meant starting again for Rie as she had no established reputation in Britain. This, together with the circumstances of war, forced her practice in new directions for a time. A family friend, Fritz Lampl, had moved his glass making company to London in 1938 and he offered Rie a position designing and making buttons for the fashion industry, a commodity which was not under rationing restrictions. Initially she made buttons for Lampl’s company Orplid, but soon branched out into making her own stoneware versions, which also proved popular. Rie employed several assistants to help her, including the émigré German artist Hans Coper, who would go on to become Rie’s frequent collaborator and life-long friend. In the 1980s, Rie became friends with the Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake who was a great admirer of hers and used some of Rie’s wartime buttons in his collections.
Rie continued to make pots alongside producing buttons and adjusted to the new landscape of ceramics in which she found herself, becoming briefly influenced by the style of Bernard Leach. Leach provided the dominating voice in British studio ceramics during this period and at his studio in Cornwall produced weighty, robust pieces inspired by East Asian and medieval English ceramics. He also produced a considerable quantity of functional, so-called ‘standard’ wares, from coffee cups to casserole dishes and sugar pots. However, Leach’s heavier style was not in keeping with the spirit of Rie’s practice and, encouraged by Coper, she returned to making thinly-thrown Modernist pots and table wares, which held their own as both functional objects and pieces of art. Unlike Leach, Rie smoothed away the rings on the surface created during hand-throwing and other more conspicuous evidence of the making process, presenting in her work a different kind of handmade aesthetic, neither rustic nor overly perfected.
In 1950, she and Coper presented a joint show at the Berkley Galleries in London. On display were the pared-back forms and clean lines for which Rie would become internationally known. Described in the exhibition material as exhibiting ‘exquisite restraint’, Rie used a limited colour palette of white, brown and black, often employing subtle sgraffito decoration, a technique whereby decoration is carved or scratched onto the surface. For Rie, decoration played an essential role, from the use of textured glazes to metallic oxides and fine sgraffito lines, surface and form were united in one overall effect. In some cases, the distinction between form and decoration was blurred. She single-fired her pots, forgoing the usual lower temperature biscuit firing (the initial firing of clay pottery in a kiln) which produces the hard yet porous surface on which glazes are then typically applied. Instead, she glazed her unfired wares, bringing both clay and glaze up to vitrifying temperatures (where liquids become glass-like) as one. In some instances, the thickness of volcanic-like glazes appears greater than the walls of the pot itself. For other pieces she added stains to the clay body, letting the rotation of the potter’s wheel form spiraling patterns, as in her quintessential flared-rim bottles.
In each case, the decoration was in service to the form. From tapered, footed bowls with bands or rims of bronze pigment, to softly squashed cylinders, and sweeping bottle vessels, Rie's pots echo her roots in Vienna’s Modernist design scene as well as earlier childhood influences – particularly her uncle’s excavations of Roman pottery on their family’s rural estate.
By the 1950s, Rie had become more established in Britain. She and Coper both exhibited in the Festival of Britain in 1951 and the International Conference of Craftsmen in Pottery & Textiles at Dartington Hall in 1952. At the latter, one critic singled out the pair as providing a pleasing contrast to the ‘rural quietism’ evident elsewhere in the show.
In 1959, Rie began teaching at Camberwell School of Art (now Camberwell College of Arts) and several large, high profile retrospective exhibitions followed. The Arts Council held a diverse retrospective of Rie’s work in 1967 from which the V&A acquired several pieces. The V&A hosted its own exhibition on the Austrian potter in 1982, a show which had transferred from the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich, and from which were acquired a further group of works, these donated by the artist herself. An exhibition of Rie’s and Coper’s work at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1994 signalled achievement of truly international acclaim.
Rie died the following year in 1995 having suffered a series of strokes. Her work has continued to be a touchstone for studio potters around the world, who find inspiration in her forms and glazes and her endless invention.
The V&A has a significant collection of Rie’s work from across her career. Following her death, the contents of her studio at Albion Mews were preserved by her executors and given to the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent. In 2009, a number of items were transferred to the V&A where they went on long-term display in a recreation of her studio, providing an evocative insight into Rie’s world.
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