It is a powerful image of an artist – Hans Coper in his Hammersmith studio around 1965, coming out of the darkness holding, sacramentally, a simple beaker made for his own use. Around him stand examples of his totemic pots, including a rare large piece encircled by a carination, or collar, of clay that breaks up the form, echoing the ancient proportion known as the Golden Section. The photographer was Jane Gate, who first met Hans in the mid 1950s when she was studying at the London College of Printing and bringing up two small sons alone. They married in 1974, seven years before his death from a rare motor neurone disease. From 1955 onwards, she was to chronicle Hans’s life and work, portraying individual pots as well as marvellously arranged groupings, and shots of the austere interiors of his various studios – ending with a record of his final one, in Frome, looking out on to pasture.
If Jane Gate was a powerful source of love and stability as well as a wonderful documenter of her husband’s work, Lucie Rie was the key to Coper’s career as a potter. His backstory was heartbreaking. He was 13 when Hitler came to power. As the situation worsened in the wake of the Nuremberg Race Laws, Coper’s Jewish father committed suicide, believing the act would protect his family. A safe and sheltered childhood was over; by 1939 Hans was in England. The lonely 19-year-old tried to kill himself in turn but, as he would recall with black humour, there was not enough money for the gas meter. In 1940 he was arrested and interned as an enemy alien, and sent to a camp in Canada, crossing U-boat-infested seas.
By 1941 he was back and in the Royal Pioneer Corps. While interned he had encountered two German artists, Jupp Dernbach and Fritz Wolf, and began to think of himself as a sculptor, taking jobs and working as an artist at night. That he ultimately became a very different kind of artist, a potter, was pure serendipity. In 1946, via the émigré network, he joined Lucie Rie’s largely central-European workforce at Albion Mews in Paddington. He was 26, Rie was 44. His youth may have slipped away, but this was a new beginning. Lucie could match Hans in suffering. She had left Vienna at the end of 1938, seven months after the Anschluss, with its terrifying repercussions for the city’s Jews.
The scenes she witnessed were traumatic and she became a committed British patriot, fiercely independent, determined to rebuild her career as an admired ceramicist, inspired by her adopted country in unexpected ways. And Hans proved a resolute pupil, quickly learning to throw and helping to make the buttons for fashion houses that were then her bread and butter. He also encouraged her to look beyond the neo-Orientalism of Britain’s ceramic magus, Bernard Leach, giving her the confidence to re-examine and develop her earlier Viennese work. Lucie and Hans began with an absolute focus on the thrown vessel, collaborating on perfectly designed tableware, jointly marked with their seals, sparsely decorated with incised lines, the coffee and milk jugs made modern with organic-looking handles.
Their taste was deeply refined but also bold, encompassing Neolithic pottery with complex incised patterns and the whole world of Cycladic sculpture. The artist Jupp Dernbach was to resurface at Albion Mews and the two men made jugs with striated ribs cut white through a manganese glaze and a series of dishes with bold abstract designs of birds. Where the latter suggested Braque’s post-war paintings, Coper made more mysterious pieces, with sgraffito’d lines crisscrossing the body of the pot like maps of planetary movements.
Rie employed an extensive arsenal of ceramic materials, albeit with brilliant restraint. Coper was different. His essentially sculptural ambitions were realised through the vessel form with a limited range of materials: tough T-body commercial clay painted with layers of dark manganese and white slips, scratched and abraded with metal scouring pads. He luted together beautifully engineered thrown shapes to make his ‘Thistle’ and ‘Spade’ pots; he made forms that rested on other forms, articulated with a disc of clay.
In some of his more vertiginous pieces, a Cycladic-style shape narrows to a point, joined by a hidden metal rod to a plinth-like cube or cylinder clay base – a strategy that shocked more conventional potters. Some of the most majestic vessels simply swell forth, rounded and flattened and incised in unsettling counterpoint. Most public of his works today are his six monumental candlesticks on the altar steps at Coventry Cathedral. Coper’s iterative research into form was all- consuming, taking in wall cladding and architectural work. Indeed, he and Rie would almost certainly have contributed to design for industry had they settled in North America or Scandinavia.
Talking to his stepson Kevin Gate, we learn of an atmosphere of harmony and gentleness around his mother and Hans. Her love buoyed up a man unknowable to the wider world. (He burned all his private papers before his death and made only one public statement about his art.) What amounts to a lost realm, remote from the handsome prices paid for Coper and Rie’s work today, is put before us vividly in Phillips’s forthcoming sale, the catalogue illustrated with Jane’s matchless photographs.
The lots are largely from her estate, as well as that of the collector Cyril Frankel. Jane Coper was, in addition, a beneficiary of Rie’s estate, receiving work by both artists, a legacy of swaps reifying hours of unrecorded discussions between them. The sale includes a little porcelain bowl by Rie with lines sgraffito’d through its brown manganese glaze. It takes a while to discern that they curl into letters at the rim to read: ‘For Hans Coper Christmas 1949 From His Boss Lucie Rie All Debts Are Cancelled’. Nothing better sums up the early days of their fruitful epiphany.
‘Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Exceptional Ceramics: Selections from the Estate of Jane Coper and the Former Collection of Cyril Frankel’ takes place at Phillips on 1 November. Details: phillips.com
A version of this article originally featured in the November 2023 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
