The exquisite pottery of Lucie Rie

Lucie Rie had no time for high-flown talk about the art of ceramics. ‘I like to make pots – but I do not like to talk about them,’ she’d say. ‘I am not a thinker, I am not an art historian, I just do.’ It was her profession, she would maintain.

Her distaste for people preening about her craft went a bit further too. ‘I don’t like pots, I just like a few pots,’ she stated. When I interviewed her for the Sunday Telegraph back in 1988, she even said: ‘It’s extraordinary but I hardly like any potters – Hans Coper and then finish.’ She was absolute about her inferiority to Coper, whom, unlike herself, she considered an artist. ‘I have colours and I have easier shapes. Compared to him, I am vulgar, more vulgar, so I am more likeable. You don’t agree?’ she asked me.

She was a formidably severe interviewee, our encounter having got off to an alarming start when I thought it a good idea to confess my inexperience with ceramics, before telling her how much I loved her work. ‘You can’t interview me now, so what will you do?’ she retorted, before I had reached the good bit. Later that afternoon, though, she made me a bowl with a wonderfully tactile, matt white glaze as a gift.

Since Rie’s death in 1995, at the age of 93, the singularity of her genius has become ever clearer. Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery, at Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge and then at the Holburne Museum, Bath, offers a tidy conspectus of her whole career, from the already distinctive work she made in the early 1930s to one of her last pieces, an exquisite, almost erotic porcelain bowl, flushed pink, with incised lines, from 1990.