Ruth Duckworth
Cup & Blade, 1984
smoked porcelain
7 1/4 x 5 1/4 x 3 1/4 inches
opening bid: $6,500
buy it now: $9,500
This piece by Ruth Duckworth is from one of her most iconic and sought-after bodies of work—the Cup & Blades—and was a personal favorite of Ruth’s, having sat in her windowsill for over twenty years. At the base of the sculpture, the porcelain has been smoked, a treatment rare for this series, creating a subtle horizon on the otherwise uniform, hyper-thin porcelain surface. While similar in scale and design to a functional vessel, the blade form bisecting the cup negates its use, a gesture nodding toward Duckworth’s lifelong desire to be seen as a sculptor and not a potter. This work is the last Cup & Blade owned by the Duckworth estate—the rest now belong in institutional and personal collections—and it was only through their generosity and partnership that this work could be made available for the Radius auction.
Ruth Duckworth (1919–2009) was a British sculptor who was best known for her smooth ceramic works of abstract forms derived from nature. Born Ruth Windmüller in Hamburg, Germany to a Jewish father and Christian mother, she was forced to leave the country in 1936 due to Nazi restrictions on Jewish students, studying instead at the Liverpool College of Art in the United Kingdom. She initially worked as a tombstone engraver in England, and in 1964, moved to the US to teach at the University of Chicago. Her works are in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA: and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, among others. Duckworth died in Chicago, IL, where she had spent the last 45 years of her life.
