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Lucie Rie & Hans Coper brown…
Sale Title:
Auction House:
Auction Location:
Melbourne
Date:
24-Mar-2024
Lot No.
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Description:
Lucie Rie & Hans Coper brown earthenware dish, stamped with both of the artist's monograms, 18.5 cm diameter. Lucie Rie (nee Gomperz, 1902 - 1995) and Hans Coper (1920 - 1981). Dame Lucie Rie, Dbe was an Austrian-born, independent, British studio potter working in a time when most ceramicists were male. She is known for her extensive technical knowledge, her meticulously detailed experimentation with glazes and with firing and her unusual decorative techniques. Lucie Gomperz was born in Vienna, the youngest child of Gisela and Benjamin Gomperz, a Jewish medical doctor who was a consultant to Sigmund Freud. She had two Brothers, Paul Gomperz and Teddy Gomperz. Paul Gomperz was killed at the Italian front in 1917. She had a liberal upbringing. She studied pottery under Michael Powolny at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule, a school of arts and crafts associated with the Wiener Werkstatte, in which she enrolled in 1922. She set up her first studio in Vienna in 1925 and exhibited the same year at the Paris international exhibition. She was influenced by Neoclassicism, Jugendstil, Modernism, and Japonism. In 1937, Rie won a silver medal at the Paris international exhibition (the exhibition for which Pablo Picasso painted Guernica). Rie had her first solo show as a potter in 1949. In 1938, Rie had fled Nazi Austria and emigrated to England. She settled in a small mews house in London where she lived and had her studio for the rest of her life. Around the time she emigrated, she separated from Hans Rie, a businessman whom she had married in Vienna in 1926, and their marriage was dissolved in 1940. For a time she provided accommodation to another Austrian emigre, the physicist Erwin Schrodinger. During and after the war, to make ends meet, she made ceramic buttons and jewellery for couture fashion outlets. Exactly matching ceramic buttons to the colours of the clothing to which they were to be attached stimulated Rie's experimentation and accuracy with glazes. Her buttons are now displayed at theVictoria and Albert Museum. In 1946, Rie hired Hans Coper, a fellow emigre, a young man with no experience in ceramics, to help her fire the buttons. Although Coper was interested in learning sculpture, she sent him to a potter named Heber Mathews, who taught him how to make pots on the wheel. Rie and Coper exhibited together in 1948. Coper became a partner in Rie's studio, where he remained until 1958.Their friendship lasted until Coper's death in 1981. Coper was born in Chemnitz, Germany, to a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, and fled to the UK in 1939. He was interned as an enemy alien, and held in Canada for two years. On his return to Britain in 1942, he served as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps. Coper's work was widely exhibited and collected even in his lifetime. Today, it is found in the collections of major museums around the world, including the metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, Museum de Fundatie, the Sainsbury centre in Norwich UK, and York Art gallery, as well as in private collections worldwide.
Estimate:
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Price:
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Category:
Ceramics: Australian Themes & Other Makers