Oliver Watson on Lucie Rie

OW: Yes, Lucie Rie gave this to the Museum after her big retrospective exhibition, and we were absolutely thrilled because her Viennese period stuff is very scarce and difficult to get hold of, and she gave us a group of things which gives us a very nice understanding of her, [of] what it was like before she came here. Though, of course, as with many artists and particularly potters, the pieces she keeps one feels are the ones that didn't quite succeed and that she didn't sell. I'm pretty positive this blotch down here is a mistake and one of the reasons why maybe it wasn't sold at the time.

Rie's often said to be bringing in modernism whereas Leach wasn't, which I think is probably the wrong way round actually in terms of these. [video clip starts] But it rather amuses me that here in the milk jug and in the cup and saucer which go along with it - a very, very flat saucer, very thin earthenware [that is] actually completely impractical - this is not form following function at all, this is pure aesthetics driving the way these things look. [It's] very nicely done, but very impractical. And [it's] even more impractical that she says that she was trying to get a terra sigillata effect, and you see a bit of the glossiness on the outside here, but she got it by boiling the piece in borax after it had been made and she didn't get the effect she wanted and it made the tea undrinkable, that's what she said. [It's] very nice stuff, very, very continental as we would say in England, meaning not British, not English; it couldn't possibly have been made at that period in this country, I don't think. [video clip ends] [It's a] very nice cane handle. And I suppose it gives you some indication of the sort of things that she then went on to become famous for. And these must have been the sort of thing she showed to Bernard Leach, who rather sneered at them and said they were very feminine, before she discovered her other thing. But that very precise way she has with form, [it's] very considered. None of the 'let's see what will happen', either in the throwing or the firing.

MP: What effect do you think this sort of ware had when people saw it in the 1930s?

OW: [It's] difficult to know. I suppose it must have seemed modern. To me now it's got a variety of resonances from it, both Scandinavian and other modernist, [and] there [are] ideas from Central Europe as well. But also it's got quite a strong Chinese red ware look to it, accentuated by the Chinesey handle. Quite how popular it would have been I don't know. Whether if she'd been working in England would she have been... would we in the V&A have bought her or would it have seemed too, I don't know too extreme in one way or another?

MP: What sort of impact did Lucie Rie have when she came to this country?

OW: Well, of course, she came immediately before the war, history is fazing me a bit. She came essentially as a refugee from Fascism and through the war years she was making buttons and other things, her potting was not the thing that made an impact. I think she had a considerable impact in those circles that matter, the taste formers in the 1950s in the tablewares that she was making with Hans Coper. I'm always surprised that whenever I have a friend whose parents were architects you find Lucie Rie tea sets in the back of their cupboards. So it suited certain kinds of contemporary environment where they were found. And that would have been urban design-conscious environments in contrast to Leach or Cardew or others of her contemporaries.

The reaction from Bernard Leach knocked her confidence and there are some rather gross pots that she tried to make in a sort of heavy brown lumpy phase, which luckily she soon gave up and found her own thing. It's very difficult, it takes quite a lot of concentration to work out what actually the impact was in 1950 of someone like Lucie Rie because the kind of subsequent history very much colours one's view of it. ??? used to talk of her as an enormous dominating personality, since both her contemporary work and the success of her work as antiques, as it were, in houses, has given a very different picture by looking back. So you should be interviewing some of those architects that bought it.