Dame Lucie Rie

Lucie Rie was born in 1902 in Vienna, where she studied at the Kunstwerbeschule under Michael Powolny from 1922 to 1926, and made her first pots in 1923. In 1937-38 she moved to London with her husband due to the worsening conditions in Austria and remained in England until her death in 1995. Although Lucie had something of a reputation for her pottery in Europe, this counted for nothing in England. Up until the end of the Second World War, her pottery was largely confined to the production of buttons and hatpins but her meeting with Hans Coper in 1946 changed all this. Coper was also a refugee and, although he had no pottery training, Lucie took him on as her assistant at her pottery and button-making workshop,. It was really his encouragement that freed Lucie to make the pots that came naturally to her and helped her become one of the important figures in the world of art in the 20th century.

Her earliest London exhibitions, starting in 1949, were at the Berkeley Galleries (many of them shared with Hans Coper), and from 1954 she exhibited in New York, Minneapolis, Göteborg, Rotterdam, Arnhem, Hamburg and

Dusseldorf, as well as in a number of British galleries. Retrospective exhibitions of her work were mounted by the Arts Council of Great Britain in 1967 (in London, Nottingham and Bristol) and at the Sainsbury Centre for the Visual Arts, Norwich and the Victoria & Albert Museum in 1981. Galerie Besson opened with an exhibition of her work in April 1988 and has continued to hold regular exhibitions ever since.

She taught at Camberwell School of Art from 1960 to 1971 and in 1969 received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art. She was made an Officer of the British Empire (OBE) in 1968 and a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 1981. She was created a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1991. (The “Most Excellent Order of the British Empire” is a British order of chivalry established in1917 by King George V.)