Lucie Rie - Design Evening Sale New York Tuesday, December 13, 2016 | Phillips

Design Evening Sale

New York Auction 13 December 2016

  • Provenance

    Private collection, America
    Christie’s, King Street, London, “Contemporary Ceramics,” February 19, 1985, lot 142
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Literature

    Tony Birks, Lucie Rie, Yeovil, 1994, front cover and p. 151 for a nearly identical example

  • Catalogue Essay

    The present lot is one of a small handful of known porcelain footed bowls thrown by Rie at this scale and decorated in a matte white glaze with concentric blue lines. She repeated this delicate decoration on the inside and the outside of the form to give the impression that the inlays carried through the body of the bowl. A nearly identical example, very possibly from the same firing as the present lot, was sold at Bonhams, London, on September 23, 2003, and is currently in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. Rie kept that example in her personal collection until her death, and it is illustrated on the cover of Tony Birks’s Lucie Rie (1994).

  • Artist Biography

    Lucie Rie

    Austrian • 1902 - 1995

    Dame Lucie Rie studied under Michael Powolny at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna before immigrating to London in 1938. In London she started out making buttons for the fashion industry before producing austere, sparsely decorated tableware that caught the attention of modernist interior decorators. Eventually she hit her stride with the pitch-perfect footed bowls and flared vases for which she is best-known today. She worked in porcelain and stoneware, applying glaze directly to the unfired body and firing only once. She limited decoration to incised lines, subtle spirals and golden manganese lips, allowing the beauty of her thin-walled vessels to shine through. In contrast with the rustic pots of English ceramicist Bernard Leach, who is considered an heir to the Arts and Crafts movement, collectors and scholars revere Rie for creating pottery that was in dialogue with the design and architecture of European Modernism.

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Property of a Canadian Collector

404

Lucie Rie

Flaring footed bowl

circa 1978
Porcelain, matte white glaze over concentric inlaid blue lines repeated inside and out.
3 1/2 in. (8.9 cm) high, 8 3/4 in. (22.2 cm) diameter
Impressed with artist's seal.

Estimate
$40,000 - 60,000 

Sold for $212,500

Contact Specialist
Cordelia Lembo
Specialist, Head of Sale
+1 212 940 1265

Design Evening Sale

New York Auction 13 December 2016