The Essential Potness
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is exhibiting ceramics in the Klaverblad made by the potters Lucie Rie (1902-1995) and Hans Coper (1920-1981). The museum owns thirty-seven pieces by Rie and twenty-six by Coper. They will be on display for six months. In 1967 former curator Dorris Kuyken-Schneider invited these two potters to Rotterdam for the first time to give a combined presentation. Since then the work of both these artists has become part of many elite museum and private collections all over the world.0Lucie Rie and Hans Coper are considered to have been the most eminent British potters of the second half of the twentieth century. Yet neither was born in the United Kingdom. Both fled from the growing menace of the Nazi regime at the end of the nineteen-thirties. Lucie Rie was a fully qualified and accomplished ceramicist when she emigrated from Vienna to London in 1938. In 1939 Hans Coper was a young man of 19 when he fled Germany, where he was born. His career as a potter started in 1946 as an assistant to Lucie Rie. It was the start of close friendship and cooperation.0Exhibition: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Netherlands (8.2.-21.9.2014).