Hans Coper was born on 8 April 1920 in Chemnitz, eastern Germany. Coper fled his homeland and came to Britain to escape Nazism in 1939, three years after his Jewish father committed suicide to ease the plight of his non-Jewish wife.
Coper served as a conscientious objector in the Non-Combatant Corps from 1942, before being hired by Lucie Rie in 1946. Following the ceramic buttons that Rie is so well-known for, Coper went on to experiment with solid abstracted heads in the 1950s, before abandoning this as he discovered the magic of the wheel. Coper left Rie’s studio to establish his own at Diswell House in Hertfordshire in 1958, by which point he was already successful in his own right, as he continued to work and went on to also teach pottery in the 1960s at the Camberwell School of Art, and the Royal College of Art.
From the beginning, Rie and Coper worked side by side and developed their own distinctive style. During the 1950s when the pair worked from the same studio, Rie was invited to supply tableware for the Heal’s department store and was also asked to exhibit at the Festival of Britain in 1951. Later in the decade saw the real development of both Rie and Coper’s signature style: as Rie’s focus remained on modern functionality and experimenting with a spectrum of colours and glazes, Coper’s work became increasingly sculptural. Coper executed his pieces in a visibly restrained range of glazes and stuck to a distinctly natural palette of browns and whites, experimenting with texture and form.
Hans Coper’s legacy cannot be understated. His modernist ceramics have come to be synonymous contemporary studio ceramics that we know in Britain today. Before the Second World War, the ceramics industry in Britain was dominated by the Leach Pottery under Bernard Leach, however Coper brought an experimental, avant-garde yet quiet and graceful modernism to the table. His timeless and ethereal works are held in major international institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
