On Lucie Rie
Even in old age the potter Lucie Rie, slight, immaculate in white, could be dauntingly rude. I wanted to write ‘direct’, but realised that this doesn’t capture her ability to speak in a way stripped back from social niceties. Years later I realise that it was a habit, shared by other Viennese émigrés, of getting to the point. She answers a writer’s request, ‘I do not want to be in your book. I like to make pots—but I do not like to talk about them. I would answer your questions today but they would be wrong tomorrow’. She tells students at Camberwell College that their work is hopeless and to try teapots ‘for discipline’. There was a divide between émigrés, those who never mentioned Vienna and those who couldn’t stop, artists who explain their lives and those who are silent. She fell into the latter category with some force.
I keep thinking of getting to the point as the subtext of the trajectory of her life. Born in an apartment off the Ringstrasse into affluent, assimilated Jewish culture, her life was one strong iteration after another of independent thinking. Through her training as a potter in Vienna to her exile in London, and to her creation of a style of making that had no counterpoint to the earthy functionalism of British pottery, she projected a force-field of separation from the expectations of those around her.
Rie learnt to make pots in Vienna in the 1920s. She studied at the Arts and Design School with the great designer Josef Hoffmann, a man who had a strong sense of how handmade objects could work in settings of luxurious simplicity. Hoffmann’s vision of all the arts and crafts working together depended on wealthy and informed patronage, something that Rie benefitted from in her early career. Her austere pots—mainly dishes and bowls—were glazed to give a rugged and pitted surface, the perfect kinds of pot to sit on a sideboard in a light-filled Modernist apartment. You can imagine them, a trio of vessels perhaps, with an abstract painting behind them and some good Bauhaus furniture in the foreground.
To think of these early years in Vienna is to navigate an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary city. Her early life, her discovery of ceramics, the approval and support of her teacher Michael Powolny and of the architect and designer Josef Hoffmann, the prizes and plaudits at international exhibitions: all these things are well known. You can read of them in the catalogues and barely take them in, they often seem to be mentioned as a seamless prelude to her great years in Albion Mews. But when you look at and handle the early Viennese pots she made between 1926 and 1938, you are tempted to ask more searching questions as to how this remarkable aesthetic came into being. How do these austere, controlled and precise pots relate to those made by her contemporaries? Who, indeed, were her contemporaries? To what world were these objects destined to belong?
Lucie Rie’s Vienna was a world in which there had been ‘the conquest of applied art by architecture’ [1]. Within the crucible of Viennese art the idea of the ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, the total work of art, had become critical. This was an idea that the whole environment in which you lived should be designed as a piece, that there should be harmony between exterior and interior, furnishings, paintings, ceramics—even clothing would contribute to an almost operatic intensity of aesthetic living. People would animate these spaces, the objects they used would act as a sort of living still life. And architects were to be the impresarios of these works of art. The setting up of the Wiener Werkstätte, the Vienna Workshops, in 1903 by the painter and designer Koloman Moser and Josef Hoffmann was to be the foundation stone for this concept. Their aim was unequivocal: ‘We wish to establish intimate contact between public, designer and craftsman, and to produce good, simple domestic requisites… usefulness is our first requirement…’[2] In practice the Wiener Werkstätte was driven by anything but such Ruskinian evangelism and soon Hoffmann had to concede that ‘it is absolutely no longer to convert the masses. But then it is all the more our duty to make happy those few who turn to us’ [3]. The applied arts were to be unhampered by the need to proselytise—and by the need to be seen to be cheap or offer ‘value for money’. In fact ‘usefulness’ was never really a determinant within this world: objects were selected for their symbolic weight, materials were often lavish. By 1914, in the villas designed and furnished in their entirety by the Weiner Werkstätte, the fierce didacticism that had prompted its inception had given way to a ‘tendency towards monumentality and the decorative.’[4] By 1922, when Rie entered the Kunstgewerbeschule, the art school that shared many of its teachers with the guiding lights of the Wiener Werkstätte, the ‘purist phase’ of Viennese applied arts had passed and there was a bewildering catholicity of styles.
So Rie studied pottery at a critical time, a cusp between what has been claimed as the birth of modernism and an incipient decline where ‘fine art impulses became submerged in Kleinkunst. From craftsmanship the Wiener Werkstätte had descended into Kunstgewerbeliches – the artsy-craftsy’.[5] It is possible to see that it is just because of this that she managed to define herself so quickly and coherently as a potter, as she was learning to make she was also discovering her identity as a potter in contradistinction to those around her. And the majority of those students to whom she was relating were women.
The issue of gender within the Viennese applied arts was highly charged. Women were not allowed to train as architects or to work within the Wiener Werkstätte furniture design studio: this meant that women of a certain social class—the Viennese upper middle classes who, like Rie’s family, were patrons of the new art—were most likely to train as potters or as textile designers. By the mid 1920s—the period that Rie was studying ceramics—this preponderance of women was subject to much comment. That ten out of twenty-five artists exhibiting at the 1925 Paris Exposition des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Moderne were women caused interest. And within the heated atmosphere of Viennese art politics this meant that such critics as Adolf Loos and Julius Klinger had their knives out. The Wiener Werkstätte was renamed the ‘Wiener Weiberwirtscaft’—the Viennese Vixens Arts and Crafts. There were comments by Loos about ‘Frauleins who regard handicrafts as something whereby one can earn pin money or while away one’s spare time until one can walk up the aisle’.[6] They were ‘daughters of senior civil servants and other Frauleins’.[7] This kind of commentary betrays an anxiety about independence. Loos is really hoping that this new kind of Fraulein would marry and give up the handicrafts. In a novel set between the wars by Joseph Roth, The Imperial Tomb, the hero returns home to discover news of his estranged wife. He guesses from the demeanour of his mother that his wife has become something dreadful, like a ‘dancer’: ‘My mother shook her head gravely. Then she said sadly, almost mournfully, No, a craftswoman. Do you know what that is? She designs, or rather carves, in fact—crazy necklaces and rings, modern things, you know, all corners, and clasps of fir…’[8]
‘Modern things’ for the modern ceramics craftswoman meant one of two things. Either it meant figuration or it meant pots for display. The growth of figuration in ceramics had its inception in Powolny’s putti, a staple of Viennese ceramics from early in the century. But the change from putti (or models of women in crinolines) was due entirely to women artists, in particular to Vally Wieselthier, Gudrun Baudisch and Susi Singer. Their figures owe little to the light-footed figures of Parisian Art Deco inspired by modern dance, they are grounded and solid, not types or indeed archetypes so much as modern women. They also seem to be enjoying themselves. Rie collaborated in her student days with Grete Salzer in making a life-size ceramic figure holding two warped bowls. The figure is entirely of its moment, with the favoured slightly blank expression and crinkly hair of Baudisch and Singer’s figures: it is the congruence of the two unmistakable Rie bowls that is so startling.
The pots for display are baroque, with pierced panels, exaggerated multiple handles, undulating rims and complex profiles. They are far from the Hoffmann ideal—and have thus been unequivocally rejected. But in contemporary criticism all their ‘excesses’ were approved of: ‘the works in ceramics once again demonstrate the free, voluptuous handling which is the familiar speciality of the Neu Wiener Keramik. It is no coincidence that they should occasionally echo the rococo vocabulary of it, for they share the same uninhibited, playful, sensuous spirit.’[9] In short, Viennese ceramics were an indication of an enjoyment of the plastic qualities of clay and a positive revelling in redundancy of colour and decoration—both in figures and vessels. Indeed when Wieselthier went to America in 1929 it was these qualities that were to mark her out in opposition to others: her ‘spontaneous, joyous work combined with gay colour and without fuss or worry over the usual potter’s concerns for texture, detail or finish’.[10]
No one could use these words without spontaneity about Rie’s work of the same period. Indeed her trajectory away from Powolny’s way of working was a learning of control over texture, detail and finish. But there is a sensuousness, a play between control and flux, at work. The way that the exterior of a severely burnished earthenware form with a turned in rim contrasts with a rich fluxing brown and white interior is startling. Or the way that a band of running glaze pulls away from the rim of a tall cylinder (prefiguring Rie’s use of banded glazes in her later pots, perhaps) shows an interest in formal tension. But these pots are the exception. In the main Rie used an extremely limited palette of colours—beige, white, grey and black, only matt or pitted glazes, and only a few variants of beaker or bowl. It is possible to read this as a parallel to ‘Quadratl’, Hoffmann’s use of the square across his architecture and design practice—as a syntactical device, a way of allowing disparate elements to sit alongside each other. It allowed Rie to make coherent groups of her work—in a way that the baroque effusions of her peers could not.
Indeed Rie’s interest in the control of how her work was viewed can be best seen in her commissioning of the young architect Ernst Plischke to design her apartment and studio between 1926 and 1928. Nothing was to be hidden—there was to be a transparency of living with objects in glass vitrines or on open shelves. It was, in fact, her own Gesamtkunstwerk—a work of art in which to live and make pots.
And this is what is so compelling about Rie’s life in Vienna. Her early pots with their irreducibility of form and glaze, their powerful concision, are at one with her way of making an identity as an independent woman. In a place of artistic ferment and at a time of complexity.
Rie’s tribulations of trying to separate her life from that of her mother, who lived in the neighbouring street, were almost comically played out. You marry: you are given a room in the apartment. You are given a family apartment nearby, but instructed to keep a family maid. The maid leaves. You begin your working life as a potter: your mother handles the orders, another maid picks up pots from the workshop. So to have not only an apartment of your own, but one that is devoid of family portraits, inherited furniture, the tableau of unmoveable possessions that make up a bourgeois Viennese interior, is in itself a radical act. Plischke’s design with its walnut cupboards and its versatile shelves that could be rearranged and dismantled, enacts her idea of change.
She brings his fierce independence of mind into exile with her. And she brings her apartment too. In the desperate months after the Anschluss of March 1938 Austrian Jews attempted to find ways of fleeing a country that had turned on them, enacting with savagery laws that stripped them of professional life, freedom, possessions and citizenship. The possibility of escape diminished rapidly as quotas for visas were nugatory and dependent on foreign financial guarantees that were hard to find. Rie received her transit visa to England in October 1938. She managed to arrange for crates of her pots and for the Plischke shelves and tables and cupboards to be sent to London. In March 1939 Rie received permission to make pottery. With the help of Ernst Freud, the architect son of Sigmund and another recent emigre, these fittings were reestablished in Albion Mews, the small house in Bayswater in which she was to spend the rest of her life. Her workshop with its potters wheel, electric kiln, buckets of glaze, and the endless plaster moulds for the ceramic buttons which she made to keep herself going during the war, were downstairs. It was in this high-ceilinged studio that she took on other émigré artists as assistants, including the young Hans Coper, who she took on in 1946. Upstairs was her bit of moderne Vienna: careful arrangements of her pots to show to collectors over coffee and cake, a pale carpet on the floor, white curtains. Towards the end of her life Bernard Leach gave her a magnificent white Korean moon jar that joined her pots in this room. There was no excess here.
Rie’s London was full of architects, writers and artists, many of them from similar urbane middle-European backgrounds. This meant that her pots belonged to a distinctly contemporary world, taking their place alongside other arts and within a modern lifestyle. There was no sense of pottery being a lesser art. You can see this self-confidence, this lack of grand-standing, when you look at the pots that she and Coper jointly made in the 1950s.
Unlike the potter Bernard Leach, whose studio in St Ives produced a huge range of green and brown Standard Ware, pots to fill every possible domestic need from casserole, soup bowl, honey pot to egg-baker, the pots from Rie’s Bayswater studio were carefully chosen for a modern life. Rie and Coper didn’t try and make everything. Their coffeepots and cups, with their dense matt black and white glazes, reveal an undemonstrative, urbane and controlled tension. Each pot is careful. Pick up a teacup and look underneath. There is the fine white line of the unglazed porcelain, the glaze stopping in a perfectly controlled way. And then there is a radiating series of very fine lines scratched through one glaze to another below, framing the joint seals LR and HC. All this work for the base of a cup. You could buy these beautifully considered sets in Heals in London or Bonniers in New York. They were perfect for wedding presents for a design-conscious young couple. They were reassuringly expensive in a way that Josef Hoffmann would have understood.They were urbane, reflecting their own accommodation with modernity. In Rie’s pots you see an affection for the city as a place to make, which sets them apart from the deep, English emotional investment in crafts in the country.
To write about Lucie Rie is personal. Lucie Rie was a contemporary of my grandmother Elisabeth Ephrussi, a couple of years younger, born fifteen minutes away down the Ringstrasse. They shared cousins including the artist Marie-Loiuse von Motescisky. Both were Jewish women who had to navigate costive family expectations to create professional lives for them. Both were exiles from Vienna, bringing with them pots or books to start again in England. And both of them shared a sensibility that I associate with the many Viennese émigrés of that generation that I have known. It may be thought of as incisive, the language of Loos and Karl Krauss. To escape a particular world and become independent took a huge amount of courage. You could be hospitable and kind and serve cake to your guests but when it came to the place that mattered most to you—ceramics or poetry—you would say it straight.
Lucie Rie’s pots reveal an instinct for powerful concision, for the paring back of forms, textures, functions: to the essential. Her life reveals someone who was able to get to the point.