Coper, the most influential studio potter of the second half of the twentieth century, was born in Germany in 1920. He came to England in 1939 and was arrested the following year, as an alien, and sent to Canada. A year later he was returned to England, and had a short career in the British Army.

After the war Coper joined Rie's studio to help make her tableware. Coper stands out in post war studio pottery as a figure owing almost nothing to conventional ceramic traditions. He rapidly developed his own repertoire of distinctive forms: his pots can be described as a process of formal concentration, where one form would be worked on until a series had been exhausted. They were often left unglazed but had oxides rubbed into the textured surfaces: thus they have qualities in common with abraded stone or other materials. His pots were often constructed from disparate thrown elements to produce complex forms, yet though they were meticulously made they are never fussy.

My concern is with extracting essence rather than with experiment and exploration...The wheel imposes its economy, dictates limits, provides momentum and continuity. Concentrating on continuous variations of simple themes I become part of the process: I am learning to operate a sensitive instrument which may be resonant to my experience of existence now - in this fantastic century. Practising a craft with ambiguous reference to purpose and function one has occasion to face absurdity. More than anything, somewhat like a demented piano-tuner, one is trying to approximate to a phantom pitch.

catalogue statement from Collingwood/Coper exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum 1969

In 1958 he became a naturalised British subject, and in 1959 set up his own studio in Hertfordshire. He returned to London in 1963 teaching at the Camberwell School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London. In 1967 he moved to Frome in Somerset. Coper died in 1981 after a seven-year illness