Lucie rie, vase, 1972, before being transported to sotheby’s. Collections of the Crafts study centre. P.74.112

The Crafts Study Centre is pleased to have loaned work to London: An Artistic Crossroads, an exhibition taking place in Sotheby’s gallery in New Bond Street. The exhibition celebrates London’s role as a vibrant meeting place for artists across the centuries, and the CSC has loaned two standout works by Lucie Rie, a bowl from 1975 and vase from 1972 (left).

Rie made London her home, settling in Albion Mews, near Hyde Park, after fleeing Nazi Austria in 1938. As an emigré with very few contacts, Rie showed remarkable tenacity and determination to succeed in the city, first making her way by producing ceramic buttons, alongside other ad hoc work, returning to making pots once wartime hostilities ceased. London, and Britain, was not always kind to Rie, initial reception of her work was cool, her pots linked to European modernism rather than traditions of Anglo-Orientalism that dominated studio pottery at the time. However, by the 1970s when these works were made, she had been able to develop her own language of studio pottery informed by an acute awareness of glaze and form.

In recent years Rie has been the subject of exhibitions and publications, including Lucie Rie: Adventures in Pottery at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (which also toured to the Holburne Museum in Bath), and the associated catalogue. Her delicate pots are exhibited in Sotheby’s alongside André Derain’s high-colour depiction of barges on the Thames (an artist who also worked with ceramics), and other well-known artists such as Francis Bacon, Piet Mondrian and Frank Bowling who also tapped into London creative energies at various moments in their careers.

The exhibition runs from 25 May to 5 July 2024. Click here for teaser video and click here to gain a deeper insight into some of the regional musuems where the works were loaned from.

As a part of the Open House event accompanying the exhibition, CSC Director Stephen Knott gave a short talk in Sotheby’s Bond Street galleries in early June, alongside the directors and curators of other institutions that lent work. This is now a podcast that can be listened to here. (Knott’s contribution on Rie is 57 minutes into the podcast.)