A Ceramic History by Edmund de Waal

1. Clay and Process
2. Pioneering Definitions 1900-1940 The Studio Pot
3. European Influences: Lucie Rie and Hans Coper
4. Art Schools: A New Ceramics?
5. Teachers: Who Taught You Then?
6. Altogether Elsewhere: Cultural Diversity and the Studio Pot
7. Painterly Surfaces?
8. Does it Pour? Function in Studio Pottery
9. Necessary Pots? Unnecessary Pots?

3. European Influences: Lucie Rie and Hans Coper

The dominant Orientalist influence of Bernard Leach within studio ceramics was challenged by the appearance of two émigré European potters. They showed a divergent sensibility. Rather than Leach's interest in integrating medieval pots or Chinese Sung wares into a new approach to making domestic pottery, Lucie Rie (1902-95) and Hans Coper (1920-81) shared an interest in contemporary architecture and design. Rie was born in Vienna and studied with the eminent designer Josef Hoffmann. Hoffmann was renowned for his interest in the' complete environment': the way in which architecture, furniture, textiles and ceramics could work together to provide a complex visual experience. What Rie brought to British ceramics was this sense of a highly developed understanding of modernism: that pots could express the same kinds of concerns as architecture could. She arrived in England in 1938 and established a studio in London, in which she worked until her death. Her work is best characterised as 'urbane' rather than the 'ruralist' Leach school. For instance in her coffee and tea sets made during the 1950s and 1960s the forms are thrown in an exact rather than a spontaneous way. Glazes are used in conjunction with sets of parallel banded lines of inlay or deeply scribed lines that cut away to reveal other colours. No brushwork of flowers or other kinds of pattern-making disturb the austerity. Rie's palette of colour was also different from that of the English contemporaries: It was a wider range and included bright mustard yellows and cerulean blues. Her influence was great in that she provided a completely different model of working (urban, small-scale) and enlarged the circles of those collecting pots.

A young German refugee engineer called Hans Coper joined Rie's studio to help make her tableware. Coper stands out in post war studio pottery as a figure owing almost nothing to conventional ceramic traditions. He rapidly developed his own repertoire of distinctive forms: his pots can be described as a process of formal concentration, where one form would be worked on until a series had been exhausted. They were often left unglazed but had oxides rubbed into the textured surfaces: thus they have qualities in common with abraded stone or other materials. His pots were often constructed from disparate thrown elements to produce complex forms, yet though they were meticulously made they are never fussy. Coper, like Rie, was a potter who responded to contemporary architecture and he was commissioned to make the monumental candlesticks for Basil Spence's Coventry Cathedral of 19xx. Towards the end of his life he made a series of very small forms that seem to relate to Cycladic sculpture. Coper wrote only one short text about his work. Here is an extract:

My concern is with extracting essence rather than with experiment and exploration...The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process: I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which may be resonant to my experience of existence now - in this fantastic century. Practising a craft with ambiguous reference to purpose and function one has occasion to face absurdity. More than anything, somewhat like a demented piano-tuner, one is trying to approximate to a phantom pitch. [catalogue statement from Collingwood/Coper exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum 1969]

Amongst Coper and Rie's students are some of the foremost sculptural potters of today. Their influence is not so readily recognisable as that of Leach (there is no 'Coper School') but is perhaps best seen in the valuing of work that has no ostensible utility and whose significance lies in more abstract formal values. In looking and handling a pot and seeing and feeling it as a matrix of different sensations and proportions we may be seeing it not so much as a vessel for something but as a vessel that is something. This is not the territory of the 'ethical pot' where how the pot was made matters, but that of the 'abstract vessel' where the process of its making is absent. No finger marks here.