The character arc of Lucie Rie
A life drawn by Character Arc from the public record
Born Lucie Gomperz on 16 March 1902 in Vienna, the youngest child of a Jewish doctor who consulted for Sigmund Freud. Between then and her death sit a brother killed at the Italian front in 1917, an uncle collection of excavated Roman pottery, enrolment at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule in 1922, a studio of her own in 1925, a silver medal in Paris in 1937, flight from Nazi Austria in 1938, a small mews house that was her home and studio for the rest of her life, years of making ceramic buttons to make ends meet, a young assistant with no ceramics experience who became her partner, a first solo show in 1949, thirty years of teaching, and a damehood. The line below draws the whole story.
Drag along the line to move, pinch or use the buttons to look closer. Tap the line to pluck it, or any mark for its card. Drawn from the public record of her life; the sources are at the foot of the page.
Who was Lucie Rie?
She made buttons to pay the rent. The buttons taught her the glazes.
She was the youngest child of Gisela and Benjamin Gomperz, a Jewish doctor in Vienna who was a consultant to Sigmund Freud, and she had a liberal upbringing. Her brother Paul was killed at the Italian front in 1917. An uncle on her mother side had a collection of Roman pottery excavated from the suburbs of Vienna, and that collection is where the interest started.
She enrolled in 1922 at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, the arts and crafts school associated with the Wiener Werkstatte, and studied pottery under Michael Powolny. She set up her first studio in Vienna in 1925 and exhibited that same year at the Paris International Exhibition. She married Hans Rie, a businessman, in 1926. In 1937 she won a silver medal at the Paris International Exhibition, the one for which Picasso painted Guernica. By thirty five she had a studio, a reputation and a medal.
In 1938 she fled Nazi Austria for England. She settled in a small mews house in London, 18 Albion Mews, a narrow street of converted stables near Hyde Park, and lived and worked there for the rest of her life. She separated from her husband around the time she emigrated and the marriage was dissolved in 1940. For a while she put up another Austrian emigre, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger.
And then the part that matters. During and after the war, to make ends meet, she made ceramic buttons and jewellery for couture fashion houses. Exactly matching a ceramic button to the colour of the cloth it was going on is an exacting, repetitive, commercially driven piece of work, and it is precisely what sharpened her experimentation and accuracy with glazes. Some of those buttons are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. In 1946 she hired Hans Coper, a fellow emigre and a young man with no experience in ceramics at all, to help fire them. He wanted to learn sculpture, so she sent him to a potter who taught him the wheel. They exhibited together in 1948, he became a partner in her studio until 1958, and they were friends until his death in 1981.
Her first solo show as a potter came in 1949, at forty seven. She was a friend of Bernard Leach, the dominant figure in British studio pottery, and was impressed by his views on the completeness of a pot, but her brightly coloured, delicate, modernist work stands apart from his subdued, rustic, oriental style. She taught at Camberwell from 1960 to the early 1970s, was appointed OBE in 1968 and later Dame Commander, and worked for about sixty years, developing inventive kiln processes along the way. A show of her work in Tokyo and Osaka in 1989 drew large numbers of young visitors and opened ceramics exhibitions to a new audience. She stopped making pottery in 1990 after the first of a series of strokes and died at home in London on 1 April 1995.
The moments
Lucie Rie's timeline.
The 1900s
Born in Vienna
Everyday. A doctor house in Vienna, and a liberal one.
The 1910s
Her brother is killed
Setback, and it changed everything. Fifteen years old, and her brother did not come back.
The 1920s
Roman pots in a collection
Milestone, and it changed her direction. Pots dug out of the suburbs, two thousand years old.
The Kunstgewerbeschule
Milestone, and it changed everything. Twenty years old, at the best craft school in Vienna.
Her own studio at twenty three
Milestone, and it changed everything. A studio and an international exhibition in one year.
The 1930s
A silver medal in Paris
Milestone, and it changed everything. Thirty five, established, and decorated.
She leaves Austria
Setback, and it changed everything. Thirty six years old, and everything left behind.
Give up the pots, or take the button work
Crossroads, decided.
The paths laid out: make the buttons, taken, or hold out for the studio work. The glaze accuracy the buttons forced on her is exactly what her pottery became known for, and her first solo show followed in 1949.
The 1940s
Buttons, to make ends meet
Setback, and it changed everything. The work she took for money is the work that taught her.
Schrodinger in the spare room
Everyday. One refugee putting up another.
She hires Hans Coper
Milestone, and it changed everything. She hired him to fire buttons and sent him to learn the wheel.
They exhibit together
Milestone, and it changed her direction. The assistant became the partner, and then a friend for thirty five years.
Her first solo show
Milestone, and it changed everything. Forty seven years old, and her first show of her own.
The 1950s
Not Leach, and she knew it
Milestone, and it changed everything. She admired the dominant figure and did not copy him.
The 1960s
Teaching at Camberwell
Milestone, and it changed her direction. Twelve years of teaching, alongside the work.
OBE, and later a damehood
Milestone, and it changed her direction. The country that took her in, saying so.
The 1980s
Japan, and the young
Milestone, and it changed everything. At eighty seven, she brought a new audience into ceramics.
The 1990s
She stops
Setback, and it changed everything. Sixty years at the wheel, and then it stopped.
She dies at ninety three
Setback, and it changed everything. They rebuilt her studio inside a museum.
Her studio was taken apart and rebuilt inside the Victoria and Albert, and Japan gave her a major retrospective thirty years after her death. What she set moving is the least romantic lesson on this site, which is that the work she did for money, matching glazes to cloth, is the work that made her great.
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Lucie Rie: frequently asked questions
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Sources
- Lucie Rie, English Wikipedia biography.
- The Victoria and Albert Museum ceramics gallery, where her studio is reconstructed.
- The Lisa Sainsbury Collection at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich.
- The 2025 retrospective at the National Crafts Museum, Kanazawa.