In Praise of Small Pots
Walking through the Louvre for the first time I am reminded that artists have always used scale to impress. I am confronted by the physicality of paintings I have known all my life as reproductions. Delacroix’s Liberty in all its tour de force towers over us taking the gallery by storm. It is then delightful to find that the Mona Lisa, one of the most famous images in the world, is quite diminutive.
In 1969 I visited a major exhibition by Hans Coper at the V&A Museum London. In the catalogue he wrote about his feelings for a small pre-dynastic Egyptian pot. He describes it as “humble, passive, somehow absurd” but also “mysterious, sensuous”. He concludes that it “seems to contain and reflect its maker and the human world it inhabits, to contribute its minute quantum of energy.” Two years later I was visiting Lucie Rie and found in her flat, above the studio she once shared with Coper, a small cylindrical pot he had made. This unassuming vessel fascinated me. Rie noticed my concentration and asked what I thought. I have never forgotten her genuine interest in the
