Studio Glass 1925-2025

William Warmus

This essay appeared in Glass Quarterly

Fall 2025 Number 180

2025 represents the hundredth anniversary of studio glass, and so deserves a moment of reflection. How did we get here? Where are we headed? And how on earth have I decided that studio glass has its origin in 1925?

1962 is generally targeted as the birthdate of studio glass, with the Toledo workshops and Harvey Littleton. But I have argued that 1942 might be just as suitable, because that is when Littleton made his first work in glass. And in the early 1990s, I also posited that studio glass was complete, in a series of essays that have been interpreted as defining the “end” of studio glass, which is your interpretation, not necessarily mine. Nevertheless, its just possible that the origins of the artist in the studio and the struggle to define that role vis-à-vis industrial production is a moveable target, fresh for revisions.

Let’s take a look at why 1925 might be a good founding date. By 1925, Maurice Marinot in France had been making glass himself in a small factory setting in France for over a decade, and was transitioning to the newer, modernist, cubist influenced style in art. Tiffany in America, Carlo Scarpa in Italy as well as Frenchmen Emile Gallé and René Lalique had been making work we would today consider of studio quality for several decades (Gallé died in 1904 but his factory was still open until 1936). That sets the stage.

In 1925, the French were alarmed that the decorative arts and architecture, which had been so central to art for centuries, were increasingly overshadowed by the so-called fine arts of painting and sculpture, which were now exhibited on pedestals in neutral environments devoid of decoration and architectural identity. New movements in architecture demonized the use of “ornament.” So they held a World’s Fair whose name, The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts (Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes) showcased the avant-garde in architecture and the applied arts, helped to define Modernism, and gave the world the style we now call Art Deco. There were 15,000 exhibitors, and over 16 million people visited the Expo. In short, 1925 was a seminal year in art of the 20th Century, and glass played a leading role, for example the giant Lalique glass fountain near the center of the outdoor spaces at the expo. In Paris this year, opening in October, there will be a grand exhibition at the Louvre to commemorate this landmark event.

Most significantly, the expo represented a debate between handmade arts and the accelerating application of industrial manufacturing processes to the creation of art, a controversy with which we are still grappling in 2025. Epicenter to this argument was the little Esprit Nouveau pavilion, organized by Amédée Ozenfant and Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier had written that traditional decorative art, "as opposed to the machine phenomenon, is the final twitch of the old manual mode, and is a dying thing. Our pavilion will contain only standard things created by industry in factories and mass-produced, truly the objects of today."

My position is that the Paris 1925 expo celebrates the birth of modernism, a style central to studio glass, but also the first high profile confrontation of art, not with craft, but with automated mass production. This at a time when artist’s working with glass like Marinot, Tiffany, Gallé (well, maybe his ghost in his factory), Scarpa and Lalique were grappling with the ideal ways to balance hand made art and “automated” art. As such, why not consider it the birth of studio glass, defined as a confrontation of these two ways thinking about art?

Saving the matter of the end of studio glass and the place of its leading exponents (who include especially Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra, and William Morris) for another essay, let’s also set aside leading 21stcentury fine artists like Olafur Eliasson, who I hope to focus on in the future (as well as his peers including Ai Weiwei). I want to consider as examples here just two artists who have taken studio glass well into the 21stcentury while maintaining connections to the past hundred years of studio glass. There are many others who fit this bill, but space precludes a deep dive.

Matt Szosz is one. In 2017 I wrote in this magazine that “Art has never fully resolved its relationship with the industrial and technological revolutions of the 20th and 21st centuries. The Studio Glass movement sought to take the artist out of the factory and put the furnace into the artist’s studio, while today’s computerized annealers and 3-D printers have made the studio more like the contemporary robot-filled factory.…The dilemma of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, voiced brilliantly by the social critic Walter Benjamin in 1936, remains very much before us more than 80 years after publication.” Szosz’s work addresses the century old machine ethic and art aesthetic brilliantly, producing fresh insights. He would have been all the rage at the Paris 1925 expo.

Nancy Callan is another. In covering her work for Glass Quarterly, I loved “the fresh ways she builds nets and webs and grids of glass cane that ensnare, entrap, and delineate the bubbles of molten glass that form her canvas. As an art historian, I’m grateful for the ways in which her work honors the venerable Venetian tradition in which it is anchored while at the same time it extends that tradition in ways that are purely American.” Callan, like Szosz, represents the best of studio glass in our century, keeping alive the same age old  traditions with which Carlo Scarpa grappled in 1925 while reviving them to address contemporary aesthetic issues, just as Scarpa (notably considered the most important Venetian architect) struggled in the factory in Murano.

The real innovation and excitement in revising the next chapter of our narrative, however, lies with you. What has the contemporary art world of the 21st century, as expressed through glass, revealed from your vantage point? What is unique to art in the 21st century? What challenges are ahead? Colleagues have identified major influencing factors: the universality of the digital world; the rise of social media; the introduction of the iPhone with its glass cover made by Corning; globalization of the art world through proliferation of media and ease of travel; challenges to the "Western" (European and Euro-American) canon; the rise of social practice art; the dominance of the art expos; the growth (and decline and growth again) of the art market particularly in contemporary art; the rise of art within contemporary consciousness and the use of glass by mainstream artists like Eliasson, Koons and Ai Weiwei; the decline of postmodernism and dissolution of the very idea of an “art movement”; a return to figuration especially in art that deals with the underrepresented or marginalized artists or subjects; an embrace and subsequent break away from the era of modernism and hierarchical thinking; art that expands on societal issues: far more women, people of color and LGTBQ are now engaging with the medium.

All of these factors are mixed and stirred together and cooking right now—but into what? Don’t ask me. In such chaotic, complex, but also fascinating times, I turn tail and delve into my beloved past for answers, and return with the idea that studio glass began in 1925. This is consistent with my education in art history and my training as a curator. As curator of Modern Glass at Corning, my charge was to look at and collect glass from roughly 1890 to the present. I have always seen this era as one of continuity rather than discontinuity. I seek connections and commonality. I want our rich world of glass to grow ever larger. Maybe I am a globalist surveying an increasingly siloed world with the charge of dismantling or recycling those siloes.

1. William Warmus is an appraiser, critic and curator. The author or co-author of over 20 books, he is a Fellow and former curator at the Corning Museum of Glass, a consulting curator for the Norton Museum of Art, and advisor to the estates of art critic Clement Greenberg and Paul and Elmerina Parkman as well as a past board member of UrbanGlass.