Author(s): Tony Birks

Craft

Tony Birks' much praised biography was written with the full cooperation of the potter, whose friendship with the author spanned more than a quarter of a century It stands as the only complete account of the life and work of this extraordinary figure in European ceramics Lucie Rie made her first pots in 1923, her last in 1990. Born Lucie Gomperz in Vienna in 1902, she came to England in 1938 to escape the Nazis. Her artistic achievement closely related to the encouragement and personal inspiration provided by a series of men. As Lucie herself said, I am man-made. Simple, yet infinitely subtle and complex, Lucie Rie pots approach excellence not by refinement to an ever purer shape: it is by their sturdiness and their frailty: a combination of opposites, economy and luxuriance, lightness and dark. As a person, she showed the same combination of opposites. Her diminutive size belied her determination, her capacity for work. She received many honours, an OBE in 1968, a CBE in 1981, and was made a Dame in 1991. She was much written about, and was the subject of a BBC film. Lucie Rie died in 1995.