Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

 

Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

 In Cambridge on a U3A trip to the Cambridge Arts Theatre on Easter Saturday, after an early arrival, I decided against wandering around the centre in favour of locating Kettle’s Yard where I had spotted, online, that there was an ongoing exhibition of the work of the world-famous potter, Lucie Rie. Kettle’s Yard turned out to be a beautiful location with a generous and imaginative exhibition space plus an amazing shop, always a plus for any museum visit!! I knew my sister, Heather, used to speak warmly of visiting various exhibitions there and, though we spoke of going together, despite our best intentions, we never managed it.

Jim Ede in Kettle's Yard. Late Fifties

Available from the shop at Kettle's Yard.
Vintage poster tea towel, featuring
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Wrestlers 1914 

It is a highly individual space and house so I was intrigued to discover its recent history. Kettle’s Yard is now part of Cambridge University Museums to which it was donated in 1966. It became the home of Jim Ede and his wife, Helen, in 1956 when they moved to Cambridge and, looking for a larger home, discovered four small terraced cottages at Kettle’s Yard. They bought, and the brief for architect, Winton Aldridge, was to convert the four small houses into an interesting larger house plus to create an exhibition space for Ede’s collection of early 20^th century art. Once installed, Ede maintained an ‘open house’ each afternoon with students a special priority for the personal tours of his collection. In 1966 he gave the entire house and collection to Cambridge University but the Edes remained in situ until 1973 when they moved to Edinburgh. Before they left, in 1970 Cambridge University extended the house and added a purpose-built exhibition gallery in a contrasting modernist style designed by Leslie Martin. When the Edes finally moved north in 1973, the main house was preserved as they had left it, providing an informal space for live music and small exhibitions.

Part of the house

The decision was eventually made to further extend Kettle’s Yard and both house and gallery were closed in June 2015 for a major building project. A four-floor education wing was built with improved exhibition galleries, a new entrance area and a cafe. Jamie Fobert Architects also included relatively small modifications which effected greatly improved support services for visitors, like the new courtyard, the welcome area and new shop. The entire project cost £11 million with the Heritage Lottery Fund contributing £2,320,000 and the Arts Council, £3,700,000. It is now a first class exhibition venue with an excellent collection of early 20^th century art plus the original Ede home offering idiosyncratic and artistic space for many activities..

The new exhibition area extends the old space
in similar faultless style

 
The collection itself includes works by Constantin Brancusi; William Congdon; Helen Frankenthaler; Henri Gaudier-Brzeska; Ian Hamilton Finlay; Barbara Hepworth; David Jones; Joan Miro; Henry Moore; Ben Nicholson; David Peace; Winifred Nicholson; Alfred Wallis; Christopher Wood. A litany of the early Twentieth century greats of the art world.

In addition to these formally-recognised treasures, are the famous ‘pebbles’ of Jim Ede. He particularly loved ‘objets trouves’ and fell in love with pebbles from beach and stream and river with a passion, avidly collecting these all his life. Spiral of Stones is an arrangement of 76 circular pebbles, carefully positioned by the creator of Kettle’s Yard himself. This demonstrates the importance of found and natural objects at Kettle’s Yard, which can be seen in

varying arrangements throughout the house. He felt that people make personal connections to the colour, shape or pattern of pebbles or stones that they pick up. He wrote:

“I will discard 10,000 in my search for one whose outward shapes exactly balances my idea of what a pebble is ……. you may search a wide seashore or the reaches of many a river and never find one, then suddenly, it lies before you, an ordered unit, shaped of this order, from the countless vicissitudes of nature’s course…… We find a perfect pebble once in a generation, once in a continent, perhaps.”

Modest footnote:

I have collected pebbles and small stones throughout my life. It must be said, in a much less demanding way than Jim Ede did. His was of a  higher magnitude and standard altogether but, nonetheless, my touchstones were the colour and shape, and overall artistic appeal to my eye. When I moved to Bruges, I had hundreds and valiantly discarded many. Moving to Bury with its significant downsizing has meant the decimation of my lovely collection, now in single numbers. One does not know the magnitude of the difficult decisions of higher ageing until one staggers up there!!

Lucie Rie nee Gomperz. 1902-!995

 Born in Vienna in 1902 to a Jewish medical doctor, consultant to Sigmund Freud, Lucie Rie grew up in an environment steeped in the style and elegance of Viennese Modernism. She enrolled at the Vienna Kunstgewerbeschule in 1922 where she learnt to throw pots, and it was whilst a student that she

18, Albion  Mews
1939-1995

began to develop her in-depth scientific understanding and fascination with glazes – something which stayed with her throughout her life. Rie was establishing a name for herself in Europe, winning prizes for her work at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937 but following the Anschluss and the union of Austria with Nazi Germany, she fled Vienna for London, an Austrian Jewish fugitive from the Nazis. She took all her pots and equipment with her and soon found a tiny studio in a narrow alley of converted garages near Marble Arch in London. Her growing reputation in Austria had vanished and she had to start again. She was declared an enemy alien and denied a licence to work so, between fire-watching and war work in an optics factory, she looked round for creative ways to support herself.

She tentatively began to make buttons, hand-moulded and made from glass and gradually prospered in her efforts to break into the clothing industry. As her fame grew, she began to sell to the fashion industry including prestigious outlets like Liberty and Harrods, which loved the bright, stylish, highly individual adornments to the relatively mundane war fashions available. Soon she was running a button workshop assisted by other refugees from Nazism; her one rule was that only English could be spoken! After the war, she immediately returned to making her beloved pots. Her methods marked her out as different: little use of water; raw glazing and single firing techniques at high temperatures; she worked glazes to the thickness of sauce, and loved accidental flaws, rejected by many practitioners but which she accentuated and incorporated.

Some of the many, many buttons
produced by
Lucie and her refugee
workshop during WW2.

The Britain that Rie had arrived into was a world away from Vienna, both socially and in terms of the artistic environment and the ceramic scene. British studio pottery was dominated by the work and writings of Bernard Leach, [an eventual friend] who looked back to the historic craft tradition or further afield to the Japanese aesthetic. Rie grappled with this very alien approach, and despite her efforts, could not divorce herself from the European and Modernist ideals that she had learned on the continent.

Hans Coper. 1920-1981

Another European emigre, Hans Coper, headed to Albion Mew

when he arrived  in London,  an

Hans Coper vase with ornamental top.

  engineering student who soon, nonetheless, became apprentice and studio assistant to Rie, eventually, establishing what was to remain a lifelong friendship with Lucie. Together they worked on stylish functional ceramics which were sold in leading department stores in London and New York. Coper became a star in his own right, re-defining the concept of studio pottery over the short period of thirty years. Their fruitful artistic relationship lasted until Coper’s death in 1981.

Rie's hands covered in clay

Just as the broader art scene in London shifted in the early 1960s, so too did Rie’s work, with the introduction of new, thick, textured glazes and by the 1970s the introduction of pinks and blues which served to emphasize the elegance of her thrown forms. Rie experimented further with glazes, pushing the boundaries with her fantastically detailed and painterly designs, and her bright and brilliant bowls topped with luscious wrinkled bronze rims many of which are reminiscent of work by Pollock or de Kooning. Unlike most other potters of the period Rie’s works were fired only once, and the glaze was applied by brush when the clay was still raw and unfired. Not only did this make economic sense with only a single firing, but resulted in surfaces, textures and colours that appeared more vivid and alive.

The unbearable lightness of being

Footed fluted elegance

Bowl using Rie's favourite sgraffito

Rie irrevocably changed the landscape of ceramics in Britain, and the works that she produced help to elevate the position of pottery to that of the fine arts, paving the way for later generations and leaving behind a rich and unrivalled ceramic legacy within the British art scene.

Lucie Rie: The Adventure of Pottery. Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge. April – June 25^th.

I knew the name but was quite unprepared for the array of tiny islands on spindly tables, of slight bowls and long-necked vases, speckled and splashed, re-shaped while wet from round to oval to fluted. The overall feeling in this Lucie Rie exhibition is one of calmness, serenity, a pale quiet beauty that draws in the observer so entirely that the world outside fades.

Lucie Rie footed bowl. 1965.

In a totally understated way, this Lucie Rie collection silently proclaims the person. Such creativity; such artistry; such quiet finesse. Several pale creations, some smooth, some porous, some like lava, some of mixed, united double clays to which she allowed free reign, seemingly float above their little display stands, almost untethered. Never have I seen before an exhibition which so clearly and calmly evokes the artist responsible. There is a video available at the exhibition, from

Prototype cups made for Wedgewood in 1963.
Sadly, not taken up by the commercial pottery firm,
deemed too complex to mass-produce.
They are seriously covetable!

  an Omnibus programme in 1982, showing Rie at the wheel and her hands and lower arms are all encased, dripping with the flowing clay she is working and she is almost becoming part of the wet clay she is forming with such concentration. Instead of the ‘L’Etat, c’est moi’ of Napoleon, the observer can almost hear the murmur of Rie’s ‘L’argile, c’est moi” or even, possibly, “La terre, c’est moi!” She was, undoubtedly, the Compleat Potter, the Exquisite Potter, an unlikely conqueror of a world title which she no doubt, never sought. Lucie was surely the most superlative potter of all time though she would never have mentioned it had she even noticed it!

Kettle's Yard, Cambridge.

There is a Rie quote in the excellent article, The God of Small Things by Ali Smith in the New Statesman 14-20 April, 2023: “The spirit of this country is a great influence. -- it is everywhere – in small things and in big things and it makes one feel very humble.” Written in 1951.

Another small miracle.

Meanwhile, Jane, Hans Coper’s wife wrote ,” It has been a huge gift to Britain that Lucie chose England as her home when forced to leave Vienna”. I do like the mutuality of hope and twinned compliment with acknowledged comfort and reward, received and given, expressed here.  Ali Smith suggests that entering the exhibition is rather like entering a still life. A perfect encapsulation of the experience.

Lucie with one of her later masterpieces.

What the Dickens?

Dickens, on stage, reading from his works

The trigger for this blog is the fact that I shall be visiting, eating and drinking at, the Angel Hotel in Angel Hill, twice this week when normally I never go there. Last evening I met an old, old friend, visiting Bury St Edmunds with her two daughters, for a mini-break. She and I have been good friends for over thirty years so it was a real pleasure to see her after several years. We decided she had last visited me in Bruges just before Lockdown! They, and I,  were impressed by the excellent quality of the staff at the Angel, and by the food! And this lovely evening, reinforced by a subsequent, delightful champagne afternoon tea with my local grand-daughter also at the Angel,  prompted me to check on the history of the place.

I knew of the strong Dickens’ connection already; there is a blue plaque, installed on the 200^th anniversary of his birth in 1812, on the front facade proclaiming the fact but I hadn’t known how strong that connection had been. Dickens first encountered the hotel in 1835 as a journalist for the Morning Chronicle, staying in Room 11. In both 1859 and 1861 he returned

The commemorative Blue Plaque with a view of part of the Angel facade

to read The Pickwick Papers and A Personal History of David Copperfield to delighted audiences in the Athenaeum nearby. It was then that Dickens began to stay in Room 215, now named The Charles Dickens Suite and still available to guests. It is decorated as it was in his day, with green-patterned wallpaper and red floral curtains.

The Charles Dickens' Suite today still presented as it was

 Delightfully, the Angel itself and Bury too, feature in The Pickwick Papers. "And this,” said Mr. Pickwick, looking up, “is the Angel. We alight here, Sam.” What a beautiful little piece of literary history to commemorate a hotel still functioning today after trading for over 250 years. And small wonder that both hotel and town savour the strong Dickens' association,.

Dev Patel as David Copperfield during filming in Bury

  Thhotel, one of the best-loved buildings in Bury, was built in 1780 and was a coaching inn for people going to and from London, at least until the railways were built in the mid 1800s. The archway from Angel Hill through which cars now go to the Angel car park on Angel Lane, would have been the one used by coaches and horses in earlier years. The Hotel was originally the town house of Lord Sidney Godolphin who was First Minister to three monarchs and reputedly one of the finest Ministers ever.

Filming of David Copperfield outside the Angel Hotel 2018

This historic hotel has been featured in a number of period films. Scenes for Armando Ianucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield, based on Dickens’ novel, and starring Dev Patel, were shot in front of the Angel in July 2018. Fittingly, the film was released 185 years after Dickens stayed there

Its ground floor refurbishment in 2019, drew inspiration from the past, according to the owner, Robert Gough and features some wonderful nods to 

Dickens including quotes on mirrors, Dickens’ books on display in the lounge and artwork featuring the great novelist. It also tips its hat to Charles D. with signature Dickens-inspired cocktails: Great Expectations using Suffolk dry gin; martini dry; Ardberg with a lemon twist; A Tale of Two Tipples with Chase vodka, lemon juice, Prosecco and sugar; The Artful Dodger featuring Kraken Spiced Rum, lime juice, ginger beer and angostura bitters. The Copperfield Cocktail, including vodka, grapefruit and thyme, was added to celebrate the release of the film in 2020.

Dickens’ visits to the Angel came around two decades after he wrote his seminal Christmas Carol which single-handedly revolutionised Christmas in England. Indeed many of the traditions associated with our Christmas were invented by Dickens; so much so that reputedly, a barrow girl selling fruit and vegetables in Covent Garden reacted to news of his death with the anguished remark, “ Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”

Victorian illustration of A Christmas Carol

Dickens at his desk, 1858