1980 Czechoslovakian Diary

By William Warmus and Thomas Buechner

In July of 1980 I made a visit to Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) during the cold war to select art for a special exhibition at the Corning Museum, where I was the curator of Modern Glass. I kept a journal (a lifelong habit) that become the basis for this essay, which was published in 1981 by the Corning Museum of Glass, and again in 2025 in the Fall Art Alliance for Contemporary Glass newsletter. The essay was co-authored with Thomas Buechner, the founding director of the Corning museum, whose photographs were used as illustrations. In the AACG version, they used recent images of Czech works from the Corning collection.

It was an incredibly busy and demanding trip, navigating cold war politics—we were given a grand dinner party in Prague by the U.S. ambassador to Czechoslovakia, which while wonderful also made us subjects of special interest to the secret police. Our hotel rooms were bugged, leading to a few amusing moments, which I could not write about in my diary.

We visited 23 artists in ten days, drank toasts at all hours of the day and night with the artists, enveloped in cigarette and cigar smoke, losing our way on remote rural roads, enjoying it all immensely. A real vignette of the era. I kept a detailed diary of the trip, and this was published by the museum along with images Tom took of the artists and artworks. The manuscript of my handwritten travel diary is at the Rakow Library.

Note:

The exhibition that was the basis for the trip was Czechoslovakian Glass 1350-1980 (The Corning Museum of Glass, May 2 - November 1, 1981). The diary is arranged in the order of the visits to those artists whose work was included in the exhibition.

Czech Diary 1980

“FEW RELATIONSHIPS, professional or personal, have been as rewarding and as pleasant as those with our colleagues in Czechoslovakia. Begun years ago in the process of acquiring pieces from the exhibition “Glass 1959,” this association also made possible the great glass sculptures by Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtova which dominate the entrance lobby of the new Corning Museum of Glass. The key figure in turning our dreams into realities both with the lobby sculptures and with the current exhibition is Mr. Miroslav Nogol, Department Manager of Art Centrum, the official government agency for the export of work by Czechoslovakian artists.

This magnificent spirit confronted every obstacle with an optimistic “we shall see.” As a matter of fact, Mr. Nogol’s agency abounds in kindly competent people: Dr. Hubert Matejcek, President of Art Centrum, began our amazing tour with a splendid dinner, prophetic of the indigenous delights to come; Mr. Jindrich Cernohorsky, Vice President of Art Centrum, spoke eloquently about the Corning relationship at a grand dinner party given by Ambassador and Mrs. Francis J. Meehan for some of the major glass artists; and Mr. Karel Dubec (Art Centrum Director), another old friend, gave more time and help than we had any right to expect from the first meeting at the airport to the last farewell toast.

Czechoslovakian hospitality is as overwhelming as the variety and quality of her glass. We visited twenty-three artists in ten days. We drank with all of them and ate with most. Under any other circumstances it would have been a thoroughly satiating experience, but the people we met and the work we saw-thanks to Mr. Nogol’s planning—left us eager for more—and eager to return.

The Czechoslovakian educational system with its emphasis on maintaining the great traditions of glassmaking in Bohemia has created a vast fraternity of glass artist/ designers and craftsmen. Students take qualifying exams for entrance to the glass training schools in Zelezny Brod, Nový Bor and Prague; if their talents warrant, they go on to the Glass Atelier of the School of Applied Arts in Prague. As virtually everyone comes out of these few schools to work in a centralized industry with good communications and high visibility, they soon know one another.

Although most seem to have designed for commercial production, all are encouraged to develop unique ideas on a personal basis. These works are offered for sale domestically and abroad to the direct financial benefit of both the artist and Art Centrum. Although life styles and living conditions varied consider-ably, it was our opinion that both the educational and economic system were successful in building an increasingly impressive group of artists/de-signers and craftsmen, a major force in the evolution of glassmaking.

The Kepka brothers, Zdenëk (b. 1930) and Vlad-imír (b. 1925), form and decorate glass in an immense sand blaster of their own construction. In the adjacent barn that contains their work space and showrooms is the compressor-made from the engine of a World War II German tank.

Although they do decorate flat glass in large sheets, it is their three-dimensional sculptures— leafy, fossil-like forms the texture and color of beach glass— that are particularly arresting. Simultaneously fragile and brutal, these pieces have an anatomy of their own.

Behind the barn, chunks of glass lay in the weeds-waiting for seasonal changes to separate the poorly annealed from those stable enough to withstand sandblasting. At one end is the engraving studio of the eighteen-year-old son, youngest in a family of glassmakers stretching back 250 years. There is something almost institutional about this family that has survived so much and yet continues to pioneer in the direct forming of glass.

René Roubicek (b. 1922) and his wife Miluse Roubicková (b. 1922) are among the old masters of the glass renaissance in Czechoslovakia.

Two rooms in their country home contain an overwhelming panorama of their creativity. Although the glass forms vary, two themes seem to domi-nate: first, affection for the fluidity, thinness, and reflectivity of blown glass-highlights glitter from every corner, stacking up to make chains, pulling out to form flower stems, rolling over and under in spheres and drops of all sizes; the second theme derives from an obvious appreciation of natural phenomena and the simulative qualities of glass. René uses it like ice and like water; Mi-luse makes Botticelli-inspired bouquets of flowers—even sponge cakes. In their garden a glass gourd hangs from a tree and various organically shaped glasses appear to grow out of the ground; even the newest pieces that we saw in the Prague studio look like a variety of giant vegetables in human form. There is overall a sweetness about the Roubiceks’ vision and a sense that the secret garden in which they work is safe from the aesthetic shocks of the outside world.

Ivo Rozsypal (b. 1942) is a lively, witty man living with his young family in a brand new house in Nový Bor. Books dominate the large living room, but in the basement and attic􀀁 workrooms we saw his paintings as well as designs for glass.

The former are large powerful representations of human figures, De Kooning-like in their spontaneity, but more monolithic in their emphasis on silhouette. He told us that the interior of a Steinway piano had influenced his imagery and, indeed, the structure of his designs often involves taut wire-like concentric and parallel lines.

Rosypal’s animals appear to have been carefully dressed by an elegant butcher to show their mechanical skeletons. Like his teacher, Stanislav Libenský, he favors extended oval shapes apparently cut and polished, but arranged to suggest an invented anatomy rather than the abstract stylization of familiar subjects so much a part of the Libensky idiom. The striking but subtle use of strong enamel colors in contrast with areas of refractive transparency is a unique characteristic.

We saw slides of a large glass door depicting the Czech theologian, Johann Amos Comenius; the preparatory drawings were distinguished works of art in themselves, but unfortunately, the door had been damaged and we did not see it. In fact, we saw no new glass at all of Rozsypal’s, evidence either of his great popularity or limited productivity. An impressive design-in-development, based on a bicycle rider, is eagerly anticipated for the Corning exhibition.

Antonín Drobník (b. 1925) had tastefully arranged a small group of his pieces around a “Swedish Modern” apartment in Zelezny Brod where he lives. Made over the last twenty-five years, they seemed widely varied in form and function, but rather consistent as examples of Mr. Drob-ník’s interest in solid three-dimensional subjects.

From a heavy cut vase with a raised relief of flowers made in 1955 to a life-size head done in 1977, the work has a heavy massive quality, as if it were rough-hewn from solid blocks of some semiprecious mineral. The head, in a blue tinted glass, is striking in its austerity; with a minimum

of detail and none of the usual cliches endemic to the representation of anonymous twentieth-century man, it seems to parody some of the official styles of our time while remaining uniquely human. This piece, like many of the large-scale sculptures in glass which we encountered, has an aspect of architectural ornament. It might easily be imagined adorning modern apartment houses in Prague— as do its stone and stucco predecessors so delightfully on turn-of-the-century buildings around the city.

Brètislav Novák, Sr. (b. 1913) and Brètislav Novak, Jr. (b. 1952) are major figures in modern glass. Both live in Zelezny Brod. We first visited the father in his apartment where the dining room table and the top of the book shelves were arranged with his pieces. Contrary to the art-based origin of most contemporary artists working in glass, the elder Novk began as a craftsman, cutting the designs of others. By the late 1950s he was doing pieces of his own. Not influenced by design idioms current at the time, he pioneered in the area of optics, replacing the sharp cuts and facets derived from eighteenth-century England with an undulating, fluid-like surface of great subtlety. His objects—usually bowls, plates, and vases of almost magical refinement—have inspired a whole new generation of glass artists, not just in Czechoslovakia, but in the rest of Europe, in Japan, and in the United States.

Not least among these is his son. Extremely successful although not yet in his thirties, the younger Novak has gone adventuring with the optical subtleties well-learned from his father.

The results are very much his own-extraordinarily sophisticated, innovative, and beautifully made. We saw two recent pieces standing almost two and one half meters tall in the barn where he works beside an automobile mechanic. Unlike his earlier pieces which were ground and polished from massive precast forms in yellowish glass, these were from thick sheets of gray, green, and blue-tinted plate glass, silhouetted, shaped, and combined into giant abstract flowers. Handsome full-scale drawings for each piece again affirmed the discipline taught to (and practiced by) so many of the glass artists of Czechoslovakia.

Incidentally, this preoccupation with the flower as a subject is a reflection of its dominance in Czech society. There are flower gardens everywhere with bright pinks and reds dominating.

The theme is used in architectural ornament and repeated in window boxes, dress fabrics, and up-holstery. Novak’s use of the flower in glass—so serious, so totem-like, so symbolic-suggests the depth of feeling which the Czechoslovakians have for it.

Stanislav Libenský (b. 1921) is the teacher of glass in Czechoslovakia. He and his wife, Jaroslava Brychtová (b. 1924), are also preeminent in the field of glass sculpture of architectural scale.

In the former role he is head of the glass atelier of the School of Applied Arts in Prague; in the latter, he and Jaroslava have their house and studio in Zelezny Brod and work at the Zeleznobrodské Sklo-Works, Cyril Dufek, Director.

Visiting the Libenskys in Zelezný Brod was like coming home. Since our first meeting there six years ago, he has been in Corning several times to plan and install the sculptures commissioned for the entrance lobby of the new museum. We are now old and good friends although we share few words which both of us understand. Coming into their slate-clad house, the living room literally filled with family and friends, being treated to the most delicious food and drink, looking at slides and new work in the spacious studio, sharing ad-miration, affection, and laughter, all combined to make the evening particularly special.

The importance of their work lies in a certain grandness of conception both sculpturally and optically. By dealing with interlocking convex ob-longs-sometimes behind each other-structures are created which magnify their own inner texture while gathering and concentrating ambient light. These pieces almost seem to be sources of illumination themselves. Although subjects remain literal and somewhat classic within the socialist repertory, their treatment by the Libenskýs is original, sincere, and enthusiastic—but the explosion of their optical sculpture into space is obviously the first order of excitement.􀀁

Stanislav conceives as a painter, visualizing in two dimensions and actually producing canvases in color, often full scale; Jaroslava is a sculptress (her father was Jaroslav Brychta who created humorous lampworked figures and fantastic animals in glass). She sees the work in the round, builds in clay, makes the molds and supervises the pourings. It is a grand combination of talents—two strong artists who continue to invent new roles for glass in architecture.

Jaroslav Svoboda (b. 1938) is that extraordinary phenomenon—the manager-artist-designer. Director of the glassworks in Skrdlovice (a post he has held since 1969), he occupies a large modern office enhanced by a rich array of recently-created pieces. The taste, vitality, and efficiency demonstrated during our interview (not to mention the hospitality) were impressive by any standards.

Unfortunately, we arrived too late in the day to see the factory in operation. About seventy-five workers are employed, with six designers responsible for developing the line of products for public sale. As the factory also functions as part of the Center of Arts and Crafts, these designers (and Mr. Svoboda) are encouraged to develop new pieces of their own work to be offered in a gallery rather than sales room context. Such pieces are usually made by the factory’s craftsmen in the blowing room under the designers’􀀁 supervision and then completed by the designers themselves.

Most of Mr. Svoboda’s pieces, for example, are very carefully shaped and finished on grinding and polishing wheels—work he does himself. This means that such work is artist-made, not craftsman-copied, and so represents the highest potential originality, spontaniety, self expression, and adherence to concept.

The Srdlovice factory also plays annual host to a glass symposium during which eight glass artists will work on the floor with the factory’s craftsmen over a four-day period. The unusually spontaneous results are often exhibited abroad and do much to enhance the reputation for vitality of the Czechoslovakian glass industry.

Frantisek Vizner (b. 1936) lives in a pastoral setting in Zdar nad Sazava and makes containers of monolithic simplicity and subtlety. His striking new house in a wood by a pond is sided as well as roofed with intricately cut and lapped slate tiles, an indigenous tradition happily still alive. Inside, the drawing room is literally that, with a large drawing table against the glass wall overlooking the pond. Against the walls and separating the handsomely appointed living area are shelves containing single examples of his work. The well-ordered workshop in which he painstakingly grinds the cast blocks into their final shapes is adjacent to the house.􀀁

There are no short cuts, no fast solutions in Mr. Vízner’s art; time itself seems to be frozen within his handmade geometry. Pressing the glass piece hard against rotating abrasive wheels, he grinds away, bit by bit, centering, correcting, measuring by eye until the finished piece sits seemingly per-fect, but strangely unmechanical. Light filters through the thin places in contrast to the dense darkness of the thickest. These bowls, plates, and vases have the presence and preciousness of ceremonial vessels.

Jan Exnar (b. 1951) is both painter and sculptor in glass, one of several young artists whose highly personal imagery promises a rich future for Czechoslovakian glass. Working in a huge white studio converted from part of a complex of barns in the country near Havlikuv Brod, he paints and leads windows, predominately in grays, orchids, and blues. Their Kandinsky-like linearity—the lead lines quite independent of the painted areas— give way to the representation of human frag-ments, often faces and hands, drawn quite flatly with respect for the plane but with a skill and humor quite uniquely Mr. Exnar’s. A series of large solid glass household articles —pencil stub, tube of toothpaste-suggested that the work of Claes Oldenburg is not unfamiliar.

Marian Karel (b. 1944) and his wife Dana Zámeníková (b. 1945) live in a grand, elaborately decorated apartment in Prague. The eclectic array of furniture, paintings, toys, models, antique glass, and bits of current nostalgia (not to mention an ancient stuffed lion) forms an appropriate background for the work of two particularly urbane and sophisticated young artists (we drank pink Russian champagne in appropriate elegant old glasses). Mr. Karel cuts optical-quality glass by hand into geometric or seemingly geometric forms. He plans his pieces with paper models and has them precast to shape about one centimeter larger than the finished object is intended to be. He had only two pieces to show us, an indication of the popularity of his work in view of the other signs of success surrounding him.

Cut optical-geometric pieces form a special group within Czechoslovakian glassmaking-as they do in Europe, Japan, and the United States. It is easy to confuse the work of one individual with that of another or even to ignore someone entirely because of superficial similarities with someone else’s work in this impersonal genre. But closer inspection does reveal the individuality of the maker: the way an edge is rounded or sharpened, the undulations in seemingly flat surfaces and, most important, the concept itself. Mr. Karel’s work denies the absoluteness of pure geometry— his pieces seem off balance—as if the molten interior were escaping under the pull of gravity.

Dana Zámeníková makes three-dimensional pictures by painting, etching, collaging on sheets of glass laid one over the other and held together in a frame. The subjects have a humorous, somewhat metaphysical nature and suggest the artist’s broad knowledge of the history of art. As each sheet of glass diminishes visibility to a certain degree, her pictures become space boxes with no apparent back wall, only a series of floating subjects.􀀁

Václav Cigler (b. 1929) is mysterious; he deals in optical magic of an extremely subtle order: opaque surfaces suddenly become transparent, first reflecting then transmitting not just light but images of the environment. Color and motion are caught up in these “lenses,” seemingly passive objects that teem with the life they trap. Looking into one piece, a truncated double lens with a thin layer of metal sandwiched in the center, you see yourself, but almost simultaneously you see a miniature garden—a distortion through the work to a view of the garden behind the apartment. Mr. Cigler estimated that he spent 700 to 800 hours working on the object. It is this precision, this extreme care, with which the most common of glass’s attri-butes— transmission and reflection— are turned into active reagents of exquisite preciousness.

Perhaps the father of the optical geometrical gen-eration, Mr. Cigler continues to perfect his image; his newest piece, still in progress when we saw it in his Prague apartment, is a large cast-cut block with a smaller cube attached; the time expended to date on this one piece is estimated at 2500 hours.

Vera Lisková (b. 1924) has a penthouse studio in Prague, full of big airy spaces inhabited by huge plants and the almost-as-huge fantasies in glass which she creates. Unlike most of her colleagues, Ms. Lisková works hot glass herself-not on the blowing room floor but in her studio using a flame to soften and work the glass tubes and rods with which she builds. Originally a designer for Stephen Rath of Lobmeyr when the firm’s work came to the studio at Kamenický Senov and subsequently for the Moser Glass Works at Karlovy Vary, she specialized in elegant table glass production and achieved eminence in that field.􀀁

In the 1960s, Ms. Lisková began to concentrate on lampworking as described above. Unlike the usual ornate miniature ships and tiny dressing table animals with which this craft is associated, her pieces were big, imaginative, and often humorous. Porcupines, hedgehogs, owls, lions, and a variety of cats poured forth to delight customers all over the world. In recent years, very large pieces devoted to such abstract themes as music, joy, and flight have appeared. Their size and fragility alone are awe-inspiring. Conceptually, they are gentle, harmonious, and happy, and like their creator, the essence of sweetness.

Jirí Harcuba (b. 1928) is generally considered Czechoslovakia’s foremost artist engraver, if not the world’s. Unlike most fine copperwheel engravers, his work is not a demonstration of technique but rather of a unique approach to portraiture for which copperwheel engraving is ideally suited. His studio, overlooking Prague from the outskirts, has two floors: the high ceilinged, huge windowed upper one for drawing, the lower for stone and copperwheel engraving. His drawings are very large and show the evolution of the subject’s particularities into an anatomy of ovals and cuts ideal for translation into the typically shaped marks made by rotating wheels. He is obviously an experienced artist; his work gains strength from the elimination of all but the essential and from the spontaneous certainty with which he realizes each portrait.

Oldrich Plíva (b. 1946) belongs to the optical geometry group and, like the best of his colleagues, has his own unique and subtle way of dealing with cut and polished surfaces. His pieces-again very few-were arranged on a white table before the single window in his simply furnished bedroom. Essentially asymmetrical prisms, the work is immaculately elegant with an aspect of delicate scientific instrumentation.􀀁

The work of Professor Libensky’s current students comprised an impressive exhibition in the gallery of the School of Applied Arts in Prague—an extraordinary opportunity to gauge the coming generation.

Jaromír Rybák (b. 1952) works in flat and cast glass; his figurative panel included some of the traditional agrarian socialist symbology but with unusual vigor and imagination.

Ivana Houserová (b. 1957) another Libenský student, works in the familiar tubular convex/ concave idiom. In her work, these forms become precise geometric fingers, cut into glass plates to establish force lines in tangential directions across the brilliant disks of crystal.

Dana Vachtová (b. 1937) fills a very small apartment in Prague with very big pieces. They are remarkable, not only for their scale and boldness but for the two facts that they are thinly blown, with little or no finishing, and emerge from or rest on carefully formed dark metal bases which become integral parts of the sculptures. Although the glass shapes appear to be amorphous at first glance, they have been partly blown in a mold of complex configuration. With so much emphasis on cold-working techniques and on solid castings in glass, Ms. Vachtov’s blown work has great individuality.

Dalibor Tichý (b. 1950) is currently residing with his parents in Prague (for reasons of health). In their attractive, efficiently arranged living room, we saw three distinctly different approaches to glass: first, a novel technique in which the glass appears to have been pulled up from a molten puddle by a ring of some sort so that the piece resembles a kind of crown of tiny tentacles; the second, a laminated sphere of cut disks made during Mr. Tichý’s military service; resembling a blossoming flower, it had none of the glued look of most laminates but seemed rather to have been cut or engraved. The third was a solid cylinder of striated red glass of varying translucency, cut at the top in waves around a circular depression— an efficient ashtray, a remarkable sculpture.

Blanka Adensamová (b. 1948) works with blown glass usually made at the Nov Bor Glassworks and based on molds she prepares. Generally in the form of transparent human heads, these objects are enameled, presumably by her, and sandblasted at the handicrafts center where one can rent space. Full of complex symbology, one head resting in a silver collar contained a flowering tree, a wreath, and various lines and ornaments gilded and sandblasted; these represented moral values, different human conditions, and evolutionary cycles. Profound as Ms. Adensamová’s intentions are, the piece itself has a chic airy style, like a smart hat.

Pavel Hlava (b. 1924) is one of the most important forces in the glass world of Czechoslovakia, both as an industrial designer and as an artist.

Appropriately, our last evening was spent at a dinner party at his home surrounded by his family and such mutual old friends as the Libenskýs, Vera Lisková, Karel Dubec and Miroslav Nogol.

The house is big, new, and both gracious and efficient; its veranda overlooks the city of Prague and Mr. Hlava’s well-tended rose garden. On the top floor, his studio contained just two pieces of glass—both large, both among the

most recent of his series of simple transparent containers enclosing complex interactive forms. His is really a unique idiom— the interrelation of inside and out—which, coupled with a special sense of color, makes his work identifiable despite its variety.

Although usually blown and quite glassy in their intricate form, the two pieces in the studio were evidence of increasing control over every detail of their contents, including cutting and the addition of engraving-perhaps a trend throughout Czechoslovakia, if not the world. Consider Pavel Hlava’s statement in the CSSR Glass Revier, Vol. 34,1979: “I find fortuity evermore repellant... since it leads to superficiality and is something which cannot be controlled.”