Lucie Rie & Hans Coper - Barbican Art Gallery

Published to coincide with the first major joint retrospective, which opened at the Barbican Gallery on 20 February 1997, this book compares the careers of two of the world's most famous potters and assesses their impact on modern ceramics. Both remarkable and celebrated talents individually, there is a symmetry to the work of Lucie Rid and Hans Coper which is evident to even the inexperienced eye. Since their first meeting in 1946, when Hans came to make buttons for Lucie in her workshop in London's Albion Mews, they were to influence each other for the rest of their lives. From the delicate sgraffito decoration on Lucie's early tableware, to the monumental sculputural forms which were to characterize Hans's later work, there are many common threads which reveal their mutual inspiration. Both emigres, she from Vienna and he from Dresden, they shared a distinctly European spirit of modern design, and together they can be credited with bringing ceramics to the fore as an art form.