Frantisek Vizner
By William Warmus
This essay first appeared in my book Vizner: Glass 1951-2001. New York: Barry Friedman, published in 2001 (ISBN 9788023875539).
The Classics
From the viewpoint of the diffident and drifting opening years of the 21st century, the summits of European classicism appear as remote in time and temperament as the pyramids and the sphinx. The sheer self confidence and massive scale of a novel like Anthony Powell’s twelve volume A Dance to the Music of Time or the collected compositions of Ludwig Beethoven make them seem aloof and yet inevitable, as if they were the products of natural rather than human forces.
Among twentieth century artists, Frantisek Vizner (b. 1936) has defined the meaning of classicism as it applies to art made in glass, a medium much prone to exaggeration and baroque affectation. Beginning in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s and continuing to the present moment in the Czech Republic, he has created a series of vessels that are among the most perfect objects ever made by human hands. Time itself seems to be frozen within the geometry Vizner has sculpted, but the time he has captured is humane rather than mechanical.
The standards of classicism framed by Vizner in his vessels invoke an arsenal of subtle arguments: that the depth of the world can be revealed through quietness, that you can indeed make a fresh start from where you made a final ending, that the natural urge to live intensely needs to test itself against some form of resistance if it is to amount to more than dissipation.
Despite his appropriation of classical ideals, Vizner’s work is never puritanical or severe or unforgiving. Unlike the ancient Greek philosopher Diogenes, who tossed aside his last domestic belonging—a drinking cup—after seeing a boy using his hands to drink water from a stream, Vizner avoids the stoic approach and instead draws upon the image of cupped hands to inspire his entire body of art. But like the Athenian statesman Phocion, who was found brooding before speaking to an assembly because he was thinking about what to leave out from his speech, Vizner seeks a distilled and concentrated essence, all the more forceful for its lack of ornament. A paragraph from his essay in the 1989 Glass Art Society Journal sums this up: “I am a problem-infested loner. I enhance my loneliness quite purposefully. I surround myself with the mass of glass with which I communicate. I cleanse my approach of all that dilutes it. I eliminate a multitude of forms and colors. I tend to stick to forms I deem fit. I cannot accept unjustified changes. I believe in completeness of action….I adore a perfect creation made of beautiful material.”
Minimal Techniques and Constructed Art
Vizner does not work hot and he doesn’t decorate. He does not create hollow vessels by blowing glass bubbles. He does not apply molten bits of color as ornaments, does not attempt to tell a story on the sides of his objects, seldom even signs the work. The restrained shapes of Vizner’s vessels are achieved by a sometimes brutal, sometimes delicate array of room temperature technical processes, most of which are traditional to glassmaking but some of which would be equally at home in a quarry. He makes a drawing. He selects a raw block of solid glass. He rough shapes that block with a grinding stones, diamond tools, drilling and boring technology. An array of fine grinding disks, glass stencils, carborundum powders and hydrofluoric acids are used to tune shapes and cleanse surfaces. The objects that result have sometimes been called “minimalist” but I prefer to consider the techniquesminimalist and the results classic.
Several of the key masters of studio glass have emerged from, and then expanded, existing art traditions. The Czech team of Jaroslava Brychtova and Stanislav Libensky owe much to cubism. The Italian maestro Lino Tagliapietra began by working in the venerable Venetian style of glassblowing and carried those traditions to the United States, where he had a wild influence on studio glass. Dale Chihuly has shown genius in evolving and merging minimalism and color field painting. Vizner has his roots in international constructivism (the European successor to Russian constructivism of 1914), which for a time promised to become the “successor to the old domain of painting and sculpture.” He has written that “My basic approach is constructive. I nurture my talent through architecture, order, and hope, stemming from clarity of form.” But there is also a precise sort of de-constructivism evident in Vizner’s art. He has worked to refine away any artistic affectation until the objects manifest themselves as pure condensations of natural forces into essential shapes.
A Place in the World
Despite Vizner’s self-description as a “problem infested loner,” his work has gone out into the world and achieved widespread acceptance. Most major private collections, from Saxe (San Francisco) to Borowsky (Philadelphia) to Glick (Indianapolis) to Manocherian (New York), have one or more examples, and leading museums from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City to the National Museum in Stockholm and the Decorative Arts Museum in Prague have acquired the work. And Vizner has been lucky with his dealers, ranging from Galerie Na Janskem Vrsku in Prague, where Jitka Pokorna is Director, to Barry Friedman Gallery in New York City. Friedman’s long association with constructivist and modern art made it the logical choice for Vizner, and the gallery has since become the repository of an unparalleled selection of Vizner’s work.
The Peaked Bowl
The greatest example of Vizner’s concentrated classicism is the Bowl with a Peak ( sometimes also called Bowl with a Point ). The idea for this object originated during the depths of the cold war, in 1964 and 1965, with a series of sketches that he hoped could be turned into serial production using glass pressing techniques. Although from 1967 to 1977 roughly 250 of his production designs were implemented, his hopes for mass production of this particular design were defeated. But the will to create the object remained. In 1971 he “cut” the first bowl by himself from a block of smoky soda potash glass cast by the Skrdlovice Glassworks. The surface was finished using gravel pitting (the artist’s term), and it is this 28 cm. (11 inch) diameter object that remains in his collection as the “original.” From 1971 to 1980, Vizner made a set of “replicas” of the original shape, in blue, green, topaz and a crystalline color. The Museum of Applied Arts in Prague acquired one.
By 1977 Vizner had established his own workshop. Writing in the 1984-5 Glass Art Society Journal, he said “This could not have happened sooner—or later---in my life. Fifteen years after finishing school I was sufficiently aware of my strength, my limitations and my place with glass. It’s a strange glass, whose shape changes austerely. The colors are few, and white and black predominate. Variation is more important than exploration of the unique. Its social productivity lies in its stubborn individual search for time-lasting values.”
I asked Vizner’s daughter Ida, now in college in England, what it was like growing up in such a household. She told me that when she was younger, she seldom thought about her father’s profession because it was just a normal thing for her. Later, she couldn't “understand how he could spend hours and hours just cutting some piece of glass, not talking to anyone, and listening to jazz music all the time. [but] As I got older I realized that he just loves his work and that he is giving a shape to his ideas, thoughts and dreams in the way he creates these extraordinary pieces of art. They reflect his mind, they are actually "him". That is why I very much appreciate my dad's enthusiasm for his work. I am always happy when I can see him creating a new object. I love the moment when he comes to me and says: ‘Check this, that is the new piece, what do you think?’.”
By 1985 Vizner had adopted new surface finishing techniques and also began to use a lead glass from the factory in Jablonec. This subtly expanded the parameters of the peaked form, as well as all the other shapes in Vizner’s repertoire. For example he made a green variant with a finely polished (shiny) surface and an opal alternate now in the collection of the Musee des Arts Decoratifs at the Louvre. Simultaneously, he began to employ higher keyed colors: bright red, intense orange and deep green. The extraordinary popularity of the work in the 1990s led to the creation of more variants differing in shape ( some are plumper or “riper” than the lean and brooding bowls of the 1970s ) and size ( variations in diameter seem seldom to exceed more than a fraction of an inch ). The blue bowl in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art represents a certain culmination of this period.
Vizner admits that he is among the “slowest” of the artists working in glass, and his total annual output is small. He is modest, thoughtful, even at times apologetic: “I am sorry, people will hardly ever put apples in my bowls, but my bowls should be familiar to all those who invent and churn out fruit bowls.”
Inevitability
Vizner loves “inevitable ideas” but also says that he is a “poor storyteller.” The certainty of his vessels is not the inexorableness of a well plotted narrative, but rather the absolutism we experience when we encounter nature in her universalist mode. Who can improve upon the shape of a wave on the ocean or the eyes of Greta Garbo? Nevertheless, the inevitable can not be art if it is predictable. Vizner’s fascination with the subtlety of repetition could easily lead him to create boring objects. What to do? “ I use whatever suitable means there are to adorn my object with a sound measure of mystery. ” This does not mean that every work must become inscrutable or impenetrable. Rather, each object is endowed with a specific opacity (or clarity) of character that depends upon the subtle manipulation of the weight, and depth, and feel and texture of the glass.
Some bowls, for example, are plumper than others in the same series. These rotund shapes are surprisingly heavy in the hands, ponderous in temperament, brooding in color. A few plates are bisected by raised ridges, and sometimes these long, narrow ridges are surmounted by concave crowns that are highly polished invitations to the hand: you can slide the tip of your index finger along such a ridge. It will be embraced for a few seconds. The abstract purity of such a plate (basically a flat disk) has, through the addition of such a raised ridge, been tuned to the human scale, but the invitation it makes to the human hand is confined and limited. This much, no more. After all, we are dealing with the border line between the natural (the object) and the human. The exploration of that boundary is a key project of classicism.
Drawing
As Vizner prepares to create a new object, the shape is precisely analyzed in a technical drawing (a sketch). Many of these incorporate two views: plan and cross-section, as in an architect’s drawing. They are stunningly handsome, and some have the quality of finely wrought maps. The drawing that graced the cover of Glass magazine in the spring of 2001 had both the tint and outlines of some ideal coral reef and lagoon, while other sketches look like artistic refinements of sonar wave recordings. These drawings are presented without affectation of any kind. To me, they seem like charts of an immutable truth that Vizner has discovered, but that has always existed. I’m reminded of a few lines from Robinson Jeffers poem Credo: “The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty will remain when there is no heart to break for it.” Once again, it is the boundary between things (the natural world) and people that is being explored and tested: the eternal form challenges the human hand to give it existence in the visual world of humanity.
Color and Edge
Vizner’s use of color has been highly restricted by the materials available from the factory: “I have to accept what is available, there is no chance to choose the color I want.” Until 1980, his colored glass slabs came from the Skrdlovice Glassworks: mostly cool blue, green, and smoky tints, and even these were subject to irregular availability. In 1980 he began to receive lead glass from the Jablonec Glassworks, where there are more than 400 color tones accessible. From this greater range, Vizner has preferred to select warm colors such as orange and red, which he believes look more “optimistic” to the human eye.
Given his restricted palette, can we comment upon Vizner’s contributions as a colorist? The answer is an emphatic yes! During most of the history of art, color has been an either/or: either it is applied thinly to a flat surface, as in painting, or it is coaxed out of a mass, as in stone sculpture. For me, Vizner’s brilliant innovation was to see that color can be both: he found a way to compress and give an edge to color without divorcing it from volume and mass. Perhaps this was an outgrowth of his keen interest in the industrial process of pressed glass, where a molten mass of color is shaped by a plunger of steel. As the pressure exerted by the steel displaces the glass in the mold, the glass escapes and begins to “crawl” up the sides of the mold. Usually, this excess is uncontrollable and is trimmed away later by grinding. But it might also be celebrated as an exquisitely thin flange or edge of delicate hue that is continuous with the thicker mass of which it is a part. When Vizner began to sculpt his vessels by hand, he found a way to control this unpredictable side of the pressing process and to enlist it in support of his art.
There is an “oceanic” aspect of color that is only awkwardly represented in liquid art mediums such as paint or brittle ones such as stone sculpture. The ferocious ocean is immense, and darkly deep, and full of life. But walk along any beach anywhere, and the ocean will gently lap your feet, having stretched itself paper thin and as clear as crystal. How can color, which tints the entire universe, be stretched thin without breaking its connection to the cosmos? How can color be brought down to earth without loosing its poetry?
Vizner’s inspired solution was simply to give color an edge. He has written that the “Gradual removal of the glass (by grinding) creates the illumination of some part of the object, thus strengthening the dynamism of the chosen color.” This has allowed him to create ever more massive vessels with ever more subtle endings. The Bowl with a Point is oceanic: a deep mass of natural color drawn out and up into a splash of tint at the point. In the Bowl with Concave Crown, molten color glowing within the mass is fined out at the edge and the concave lens effect creates an exquisite atmosphere within the hollow, as if the bowl truly contained a marvelously volatile and evaporating mass of liquid color.
The Idea of an Oasis
The classics are easy to attack. They seem so smug, so self assured, so precious and so limited. But think of them another way. They bravely conceal a struggle, they wear an optimistic mask, they whistle in the dark. Vizner truly wanted to make work that would reach masses of people, but was blocked by the political system in place in Czechoslovakia during the cold war. Vizner is a stubborn man. He sought to replicate mass production in a fashion worthy of Kafka: by developing a method that is the opposite of production: slow, laborious, infinitely circumspect. Perhaps that is why his works are mysterious as well as serene: they conceal as much of a struggle as they reveal of a success.
I first visited Vizner at his home and studio, clad in intricately lapped slate tiles, in Zdar nad Sazavou in 1980. In the midst of the decline that was already evident elsewhere in cold war Czechoslovakia (and that was to lead to collapse by the end of the decade) he had managed to create something of an oasis of calm and civility. The aviator Antoine de Saint Exupéry once wrote about such a house in Argentina: “ I dropped down to earth once somewhere in the world….I was far from dreaming that I was about to live through a fairy-tale….What a queer house! Squat, massive, almost a citadel guarding behind its tons of stone I knew not what treasure. From the very threshold this legendary castle promised an asylum as assured, as peaceful, as secret as a monastery….everything had been scoured with zeal. Everything was clean, waxed, gleaming. A strange house, evoking no neglect, no slackness, but rather an extraordinary respect. Each passing year had added something to its charm, to the complexity of its visage…” The same holds true of Vizner’s art: each piece offers a haven, and the passage of time only serves to enrich and deepen the effect.
Vizner’s work suggests a way to revive the classics. Curl up with a book in an easy chair under a cone of light, play some jazz, and let your gaze wander over to the smoky bowl on the table. The creation of such an oasis need not represent a withdrawal from the world: it can be a sign of respect for the fragile successes that appear all too infrequently in life.
William Warmus
Warmus is a writer. As advisor to the estate of the art critic Clement Greenberg. He helped engineer the acquisition of the Greenberg collection of abstract expressionist and color field paintings and sculpture by the Portland (Oregon) Art Museum. He is past curator of the Corning Museum of Glass and the former editor of Glass magazine. His books include The Essential Dale Chihuly and Emile Galle: Dreams into Glass, and his photographs have appeared on the covers of Ocean Realm magazine, The Bulletin of the National Gallery of Australia and in the publications of Portland Press.