WHYTE'S IRISH & INTERNATIONAL ART 26 SEPTEMBER 2016

The McClelland Collection

Dame Lucie Rie (1902-1995)

PORCELAIN BOTTLE, c.1960

porcelain coated with manganese

impressed with artist’s initials at base

10 x 5in. (25.40 x 12.70cm)

Provenance:

Collection of George and Maura McClelland

In the The Hunter Gatherer publication Henry Pim, lecturer in ceramics at Dublin’s NCAD, wrote on the

McClelland Ceramics and Glass collection and describes the present work thus:

“One of my favourites in the collection is a beautiful ceramic bowl by Lucie Rie. Thrown on the potters’

wheel, it is decorated with a pale yellow glaze and has a glossy bronze-coloured rim. Rie was something

of a glaze wizard and developed wonderful surface treatments for her ceramics at a time when many

potters took the view that pots should be brown. Arriving in London as a refugee from Austria at the

start of the SecondWorldWar, Rie set up her studio there. She brought with her, a feeling for Modernism

which made her work stand out in contrast to that of her English counterparts.” (1)

Rie studied pottery from 1922 under Michael Powolny at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule school of arts

and crafts. Three years later she set up her

first studio in Vienna in 1925 and exhibited the same year at the Paris International Exhibition. She

won a silver medal at the Paris International Exhibition (the exhibition for which Pablo Picasso painted

Guernica) in 1937. In 1938, she fled Austria and emigrated to England separated from her husband Hans

Rie around this time. During the war and in subsequent years, she eked out a living making ceramic

buttons and jewellery some of which are displayed at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum along with

the reconstruction of her entire 18 Albion Mews studio where she was based for 50 years. Rie taught at

Camberwell College of Arts from 1960 until 1972. She ceased making pottery in 1990 after suffering a

series of strokes and died in London aged 93. Her pottery is exhibited globally including the Museum of

Modern Art in New York, the York Art Gallery in the UK, and Paisley Museum in Scotland.

(1) Henry Pim in The Hunter Gatherer - The Collection of George and Maura McClelland, The Irish Museum

of Modern Art, Dublin, 2004, p.144

€10000-€15000 (£8550-£12820 approx.)