As the first director of the Crafts Council, Victor Margrie was responsible for positioning the crafts with huge success in England and Wales throughout the 1970s and beyond. Although the word “craft” is open to endless redefinition, Margrie, who has died aged 92, had no doubt that his role was to support, publicise and exhibit the best applied artists – from potters to bookbinders, and textile artists to radical jewellers.
Margrie’s commitment was to innovation – while the conservation crafts were briefly the Craft Council’s responsibility, he saw the rural and vernacular crafts as outside its remit. The so-called craft renaissance of the 1970s and 80s owed him much.
His appointment to a new body initially called the Crafts Advisory Committee (CAC) in December 1971 (arriving with a glowing reference from the potter Lucie Rie) came at a moment of generous funding for the arts under a new Conservative government. The CAC was very much the brainchild of David Eccles, then paymaster general and minister for the arts. Eccles was an aesthete and a collector with distinct boundaries, the crafts offering a reassuring counterbalance to 70s radicalism in theatre and visual art.
The two men, despite their different visions of what craft might be, swiftly established good relations, aided by a high-minded chairman, Paul Sinker, classicist and civil servant. Sharply dressed in pale grey suits, bustling, charming and inquisitive, Margrie was well able to deal with Tory grandees and Oxbridge-educated civil servants.
What might have remained an advisory body soon became executive, offering setting-up grants to young makers, organising exhibitions and demonstrations, reaching out to regional arts associations, working in partnership with the British Council to publicise makers globally, and launching a magazine, Crafts, notable for its editorial and production values, as well as creating an important permanent craft collection.
Margrie was inspired by the high quality of young graduates coming out of British art schools in the wake of the conceptually demanding diploma of art and design courses that had been established during the 60s. Largely because of Margrie’s vision, innovative makers of different generations were encouraged and helped – the ceramicists Glenys Barton, Alison Britton, Elizabeth Fritsch and Janice Tchalenko, the weavers Mary Restieaux and Archie Brennan, and the metalworker Michael Rowe, together with more senior figures such as the radical weavers Peter Collingwood and Ann Sutton. Two disciplines – hot glass and blacksmithing – were given new life through international conferences held in 1976 and 1980.
From 1979 the CAC was renamed the Crafts Council, with a large gallery in Waterloo Place on Lower Regent Street. The Arts Council of Great Britain, and indeed the art world, were generally hostile to the Crafts Council’s vision. Art critics tended not to review its excellent exhibitions. But Margrie knew that his work was important, something borne out by the turn to clay and textile in the art world of recent years and the paradoxical “rediscovery” of figures such as Gillian Lowndes, a ceramicist whom the Crafts Council had supported all along.
His own origins were rooted in practicality. Born in Highbury, north London, Victor was the son of Robert Margrie, who had set up his own clothing business after a spell as an insurance clerk, marking a move into the middle classes sealed by marriage to Emily (nee Corbett), whose father ran an artificial flower factory. After attending grammar schools and enduring wartime evacuation, Victor went to Hornsey School of Art (1946-52), where he specialised in exhibition display and ceramics. He went on to teach in small art schools in and around London.
In 1954 he started his own ceramics workshop making stoneware, by the late 60s turning to exquisite carved porcelain bowls. In 1956 he became head of the ceramics department at Harrow School of Art, married the artist Janet Smithers, and was soon to have three daughters. Margrie was a great joiner and involved himself with the Society for Education Through Art, the Council for Industrial Design (later the Design Council), the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society (now the Society of Designer Craftsmen) and the Crafts Centre of Great Britain (now Contemporary Applied Arts).
In 1963, with the potter Michael Casson, he set up the hugely successful diploma in studio pottery at Harrow School of Art. Its strongly vocational structure demanded that students build their own wheels and kilns, throw fluently, create their own clay bodies and glazes, and understand the finances of a small workshop.
The two-year Harrow course answered a consumer demand for robust, oven-to-table domestic wares as well as being a practical response to the counterculture, offering alternatives to mainstream technology. It flourished, producing gifted students such as Tchalenko, Jane Hamlyn and Sarah Walton.
Subsequently, at the Crafts Council, Margrie, sensitive to changing priorities, baffled some of his former Harrow colleagues by throwing his weight behind the self-reflexive conceptual end of the craft spectrum.
By 1984 Margrie had been at the Crafts Council for 13 years and was tiring of the stream of populist government demands being made of the organisation. He resigned, ostensibly to make his own work, being appointed CBE in that year. Subsequent directors were never quite to match his clarity of vision and the sense of excitement he generated.
A research professorship at the Royal College of Art was short-lived but he sat on numerous craft-related committees to good effect, and wrote reviews and catalogue essays. He later turned to creating private, complex paper sculptures of great beauty. An interview with Margrie is in the Crafts Lives sound archive at the British Library and his work is in the Victoria & Albert museum.
Until relatively recently, his arrival, up from his home in Dorset, where he moved in 2012, would set the seal on exhibition openings and conferences.
His first marriage ended in divorce. He married Rosemary Ash in 2005. She survives him, along with his three daughters, Joanna, Kez and Miriam, and four grandchildren.
• Victor Robert Margrie, ceramicist and arts administrator, born 29 December 1929; died 5 October 2022
