Dame Lucie Rie (1902-1995), Small Vase

Stoneware with a matt white and manganese glaze and hatched sgraffito decoration to the body

Impressed with the Artist’s seal (on the underside)

10cm H

Price £5,500 + applicable taxes (VAT + ARR)

Born in Vienna to a family of liberal Jews, Rie arrived in London as a refugee from Vienna in 1940. In Vienna Rie studied under teachers including Adolf Loos and the painter Oskar Kokoschka, and as a result she had originally contemplated a career in science. At the same time, the British-Danish born Arup studied philosophy and engineering at the University of Copenhagen in the early 1920s, where he was influenced by the writings of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus movement.

The renowned engineer and philanthropist Sir Ove Arup was a close friend and first came to know of Rie’s practice in 1945, when he happened to buy some of her pieces at the antique store Heal’s in London. He admired the approach of Rie and Hans Coper, who was first her assistant, and from there, he came across their work on travels to the Triennale in Milan, Italy and in New York, Philadelphia and Harvard in the U.S.A. In his opening speech for the 1956 Exhibition of Celadon Pottery and Porcelain at the Berkeley Galleries in London, Arup praised the two artists for establishing ‘contact and understanding between the artist and audience which is so essential for the thriving of true Art’. This exhibition was one of the first to internationally debut the joint work of Rie and Coper, who presented a group of ceramics that are now considered as some of their most recognisable forms.