The FT has an article on potters Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. I admire this type of collaboration, where like-minded individuals share similar passions and strive to become their best. In academia, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky come to mind. Look Back and Bakuman also depict this kind of relationship in manga drawing, showing how companionship can make an uncertain path easier to navigate.
Excerpts:
As design historian Tanya Harrod convincingly demonstrates in her contribution to the Offer Waterman catalogue, however, the essence of Rie and Coper’s collaboration lay not in their responses to such contemporary trends, or even their mutual influence on one another, but rather their shared ambition to transcend the incidental limitations of culture, time and place.
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In the artist’s statement he wrote in 1969, Coper said that the only pot that had ever really fascinated him was an egg-shaped cup in his own possession from predynastic Egypt. He wrote of his struggles to achieve a similar depth to that ancient, simple thing, comparing himself to “a demented piano tuner, trying to approximate a phantom pitch”.
Rie, for her part, famously kept a Korean moon jar lent to her by Leach in her studio; perhaps it did something to occupy Coper’s place as a constant companion. And like Coper, she mainly kept her own counsel. Edmund De Waal, in an essay reprinted in the catalogue, amusingly recounts the time she told a writer that she did not want to be in his book: “I like to make pots — but I do not like to talk about them. I would answer your questions today but they would be wrong tomorrow.”
She and Coper aspired beyond self-expression; they wanted to make work that would require no explication, no context, a resolution so complete that it seems almost inevitable. To a remarkable extent, each in their own way, succeeded. Is it any wonder historians keep trying to explain how they did it?
P.S. FT on Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock.
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