The Potter's Book of Glaze Recipes by Emmanuel Cooper

He guesses from the demeanour of his mother that his wife has become something dreadful, like a 'dancer': 'My mother shook her head gravely and said, almost mournfully, 'No a craftswomen. In Joseph Roth's The Emperor's Tomb, a novel set between the wars, the hero returns to discover news of his estranged wife. The Wiener Werkstätte was renamed the 'Wiener Weiberkunstgewerbe', the Viennese Vixen Crafts Association.

They were 'daughters of senior civil servants'. There were comments by Adolf Loos about 'Frauleins who regard handicrafts as something one can earn pin money or while away one's spare time until one can walk up the aisle'. Vienna could be toxic for a young woman in the arts. Through her training as a potter in Vienna to her exile in London, and to her creation of a style of making that had no counterpoint in the earthy functionalism of British pottery, she projected a force-field of separation from the expectations of those around her. Born in an apartment off the Ringstrasse into affluent, assimilated Jewish culture, her life was one strong iteration after another of independent thinking. Reading the new wonderful biography of Rie (1902-95) by the late Emmanuel Cooper, I kept thinking of getting to the point as the subtext of the trajectory of her life. She fell into the latter category with some force. There was a divide between émigrés, those who never mentioned Vienna and those who couldn't stop, artists who explain their lives and those who are silent. I would answer your questions today but they would be wrong tomorrow.' She tells students at Camberwell College that their work is hopeless and to try teapots 'for discipline'.

I like to make pots – but I do not like to talk about them. She answers a writer's request: 'I do not want to be in your book. Years later I realise that it was a habit, shared by other Viennese émigrés, of getting to the point. I wanted to write 'direct', but this doesn't capture her ability to speak in a way stripped back from social niceties. E ven in old age the potter Lucie Rie, slight, immaculate in white, could be dauntingly rude.

The Potter's Book of Glaze Recipes by Emmanuel Cooper