I walked around Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge twice. The first time I was concentrating hard, making notes, absorbing dates, places and styles. The second time, I raced around, as if I was in a shop: Heal’s some time after the second world war, say, or David Mellor in its earliest incarnation. Which things would I buy if I could? So many! A pair of stoneware teapots with bamboo handles from the 1950s. A collection of prototype cups, saucers and mugs for Wedgwood, made of its famous blue and white jasperware in 1963 but never produced. A footed bowl from 1971 of porcelain with a uranium acid yellow glaze. A tall “bottle” – a vase by any other name – from 1986 with a manganese glaze, horizontal stripes and wide lip that could somehow only be Rie’s work. All these things I would wrap in tissue, before rushing for the door, my booty over my shoulder.
Rie’s pottery is art now: extremely precious, lusted after by collectors and displayed in museums in glass cases (those at Kettle’s Yard are designed by David Kohn Architects). But no matter how exquisite, nor how rarefied the places in which one encounters it, there’s still no getting away from the fact that form and function are inseparable; that you can imagine (dream) not only of owning it, but of using it, trying hard not to worry about chips.
And this makes it so much more than a mere feast for the eyes. Rie’s practice, careful and ever modest, has strange effects on a person. To look at it is to want to live in a different, better way. This has to do with ritual; with the incorporation of beauty into the everyday. The final piece in this exhibition is one of the last bowls she ever made (in 1990, when she was 88). It has a glaze the colour of forced rhubarb, a manganese drip (loose, vertical lines) and narrow turquoise bands, and such is its harmony, it seems almost to vibrate. How, you wonder, can a thing be so straightforward and yet so absolutely extraordinary?
Rie (1902-95) was born in Vienna and trained at the city’s school of arts and crafts; the earliest piece on display at Kettle’s Yard, an artfully shaped earthenware pot of 1926, suggests the influence of the secession movement, its swirling oranges and blues bringing Klimt irresistibly to mind. In 1938, however, she fled Austria (Rie was Jewish), settling in London, her base a mews near Marble Arch. This in itself was radical – under the influence of Bernard Leach, the grandfather of British studio pottery, most ceramicists worked in the countryside, albeit near main roads (the better, he advised, that buyers could access them), and thereafter Rie would always forge her own path. Leach didn’t like her pots when they first met – though they eventually became firm friends – and having at first tried to please him, she soon gave up.
But there was one big influence on her work: Hans Coper, another refugee from Nazi Germany, who joined her studio as her assistant in 1946 and became her only true collaborator (he left to set up on his own in 1958). “He educated me,” she once said. “He knew much more than I did.” It was with Coper that Rie visited Avebury, the neolithic stone circle in Wiltshire, and the museum nearby, where she saw bronze age vessels that had been decorated with sgraffito, patterns etched into their surface using bird bones. Charmed, she began embellishing her own pots in similar fashion, using a steel needle.
Making a living was difficult at first. In a wonderful BBC Omnibus interview from 1982, also to be seen at Kettle’s Yard, an ardent fan of Rie’s called David Attenborough enquires how, starting out, she made ends meet. “With an overdraft,” she replies, with characteristic brevity (the birdlike Rie is minimalist in conversation, her Austrian accent still pronounced). During the war, she turned to making buttons for the fashion industry, experimenting in miniature form with shapes and glazes, and in the show you can see dozens of them (they’re fabulous). After the war, she returned to making modern tableware, as well as more ambitious, and more sculptural, one-off pieces.
Recognition took its time, but finally arrived in 1967 when the Arts Council staged a retrospective of her work. Rie’s pots, for those interested in technical things, were fired only once, the glazes applied while the clay was raw, and she used an electric kiln, liking its precision. “Is it a revelation?” asks Attenborough, as she removes a piece from this kiln, about the size of a bedside table. “Not a revelation, but a surprise,” she replies, holding a small miracle in her hands.
This is a ravishing exhibition – it arrives at Kettle’s Yard from Mima in Middlesbrough, and will go on to the Holburne Museum, Bath. Arranged chronologically, the show’s atmosphere of tranquillity – even of contemplation – is never spoiled by the curators telling us more than we need to know. The focus, always, is on the work, which is just as well because there is so much to see. The biggest survey of the potter for two decades, 25% of the more than 100 items in it come from private collections, something that makes it completely unmissable in my eyes.
And what variety. You may think of Rie’s typical style as somewhat porridgey, but here are bowls that look as if they’re made of bronze, wood, papier-mache and pumice. Some of her late vases are feats of engineering; by rights, they should topple clean over. There is even some jewellery – and now I think of it, perhaps to my swag bag I would add the necklace, bracelet and earrings she made c1945 of earthenware with a gold lustre glaze. On the heavy side to wear, I imagine, but what a talking point at parties.
At the Courtauld Gallery, a small show of recent work by Peter Doig (b.1959), the Scottish-born artist now living in London again after years in Trinidad. Such an exhibition should be a tonic in these late winter days: here is so much colour. But be warned. His vast canvases are not sun lamps for the soul.
The mood, overwhelmingly, is one of alienation; for all their colour, most have a swampy weirdness that makes me think of the writer Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea) as much as of Claude Monet. Alice at Boscoe’s (2014-23), in which the artist’s daughter lies in a hammock overhung with heavy fronds, is striking for the way the plants seem more alive than the child. In Night Bathers (2011-19), a woman reclines by moonlight on a sandy beach, her skin purplish-blue like that of a dolphin (or a corpse). Such a mingling of the animate and the ghostly is an enduring motif of Doig’s, and it remains peculiar and unnerving.
From Trinidad to Zermatt, Alpinist (2019-22) struck me as a masterpiece with the force of an avalanche; it should be owned by a great museum, not (as it is) by a private collector. But this skier, who wears a harlequin’s costume as well as goggles and a rucksack, is another zombie figure, inhabiting a space between heaven and hell, this one just a little colder. The Matterhorn rises behind him, like some great icy wave. His loneliness is absolute: as singular – and as terrifying – as his macabre orange face.
Star ratings (out of five)
Lucie Rie ★★★★★
Peter Doig ★★★★
Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery is at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, until 25 June, then at the Holburne Museum, Bath, 14 July to 7 January 2024
