"Lisa Sainsbury's collection of modern pots had its origins in the purchases she and Sir Robert Sainsbury made from Lucie Rie, beginning in the 1950s. Their friendship with the potter stimulated an interest in contemporary ceramics, which led them to make their most important acquisition, in 1982, of forty-three pots by Hans Coper that he had kept in his studio until his death. Thus the foundation of the collection was provided by the works of these two potters - highly individual even in their collaboration - who were the dominant influences upon British ceramics in the second half of the twentieth century. Hans Coper was the outstanding potter-sculptor of the age, whose late abstract forms bear comparison with the sculptures of Brancusi, while Lucie Rie brought to the potter's art a refinement whose origins can be found in the Viennese modernist tradition, with which she was originally associated."--Jacket.