The Groundbreaking Art Of Lucie Rie

Ali Smith at The New Statesman:

On yet another of the many days we’re living through in which our government sends out poisonous, divisive and powermongering rhetoric about disallowing entry in the UK to refugees, especially those endangered people brave enough to arrive in small boats, I went to see the Lucie Rie exhibition, “The Adventure of Pottery”, at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Rie, an international prizewinner when she was only in her thirties, had been ploughing an original furrow against the grain of ceramic design expectations in Vienna in the 1930s. She trained at the city’s Kunstgewerbeschule but made work like no one else, based on her own experiments on ancient Roman pots she’d seen in the vineyard of an uncle, and in her determination to make and use glazes her tutor had told her were impossible.

She arrived in England from Vienna as an Austrian Jewish fugitive from Hitler’s fascism in 1938 with a suitcase full of the pots she’d made wrapped in her clothes.

more here.