Lucie Rie

Lucie Rie was an Austrian-British studio potter whose refined, thin-walled stoneware and porcelain vessels, finished with subtly textured and pitted glazes of her own invention, made her one of the most influential ceramic artists of the twentieth century. Trained in Vienna before fleeing to London ahead of the Second World War, she developed a spare, modernist approach to functional pottery that stood apart from the heavier, more rustic Anglo-Oriental style then dominant in British studio ceramics, favoring instead elegant, precisely thrown forms with flared rims and richly worked surfaces. Rie's decades-long partnership and friendly rivalry with fellow potter Hans Coper, and her insistence on ceramics as a fine art rather than a purely functional craft, significantly raised the international critical standing of studio pottery.