Lucie Rie

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, towards the end of her life, Lucie Rie began to develop more elaborate silhouettes in her pottery. She had previously specialised in short pots and footed bowls, both of a distinctive elementary design. Her introduction of a double curve into her vases was a decisive move away from these earlier, simpler pieces. This new feature came to typify her later work, the double curve indicating the new complexity she sought. Breaking with the founding convention of studio pottery, namely that a pot is spun on the wheel from a single piece of clay, this vase belongs to a small group of composite pots that Rie made in the nineteen-seventies. The conventionally bulb-like base of the vase is surmounted by a tall bulging neck – an elaborate outline which developed from Rie’s style of flared-lip vases. The two rounded parts of the vase were spun separately, only being joined later during firing. This vase is an early example of Rie’s ‘Byzantine’ style, which she developed as early as 1960. The Byzantine works are characterised by a muted golden-brown glaze – made with a combination of four parts manganese to one part copper carbonate – which gives the vase a patina of aged bronze. This play on materials, creating the appearance of metal in a ceramic vessel, was an important theme in Rie’s work and she later made use of an iron slip in some of her vases. In this work, the glaze is noticeably darkened by the addition of an impenetrable black coating, applied most regularly around the base of the vase. The speckled black-brown patina in the vase’s upper register is a novel development in Rie’s ceramic language. The use of ‘sgraffito decoration in this work is also highly characteristic of Rie’s style. She originated this technique in chocolate-brown tableware from the nineteen-fifties and, with time, the device became a signature trait in her work. At the shoulder of the vase, she made exact parallel incisions into the glaze, forming a perfect ring around its throat resembling a necklace; the regularity of the design has that rare dexterity which typifies her work. In other pieces from the nineteen-seventies, including a number of bowls, Rie achieved the same decorative effect not from scraping but from inlay lines - a technique that involves inserting a contrasting clay into the main body of a ceramic. Rie experimented with historicism throughout her career and a vase such as this suggests her immersion in the ceramics of the past – both in its espousal of her later Byzantine style and its material punning suggestive of great age. Though she has recently been presented as a ‘modernist potter’ in Emmanuel Cooper’s monograph about the artist (2012, Yale University Press), this vase demonstrates the wide range of Rie’s interests and her thoughtful, subtly-crafted adaptation of historical ceramics.