One of the leading
potters of the twentieth century, admired for her elegant symmetric forms, often tapering widely from a base. I'd like to direct you to some website with pictures to ooh and ah over, but I haven't found anything decent anywhere.
Lucie Gomperz was born in Austria in 1908, and with her then husband fled to Britain in 1938. She was already a world-renowned potter, having opened her own studio in Vienna in 1925 and winning gold medals for ceramics in Brussels (1935) and Milan (1936).
Setting up her studio in London in 1939, she gained importance and was highly influential on many other potters, most prominently her pupil then collaborator Hans Coper, who worked with her between 1946 and 1958. During the war she made ceramic buttons rather than pots. For a short time she was influenced by the orientalist work of Bernard Leach, but she returned to modernism and a more Scandinavian style.
Many of her glazes were subtle and restrained, but at times she filled interiors with vivid deep greens, or did the occasional bright uranium yellow pot. (These are the least successful in my opinion, and rather detracted from a show en masse.) She often experimented with petite edgings of gold, and knotted effects around edges.
She taught at the Camberwell College of Art from 1960. She was awarded the OBE in 1968, made a Doctor of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1969, CBE in 1981, and DBE in 1991. Dame Lucie Rie died in 1995.