Snapshots of Glass

William Warmus

This essay appeared in the catalog for the exhibition “Brilliance” of the Stanford Lipsey collection, which was held at the Burchfield Penney Art center in Buffalo, New York May 12 to December 31, 2023. ISBN 978-0-9977170-5-1. I had known Stan Lipsey and visited his collection, and after his death stayed in touch with his wife Judith. The Lipsey’s displayed their glass collection at homes in Buffalo, NY and Rancho Mirage, CA and gifted it to the Burchfield Penney Art Center. Lipsey was a philanthropist , Pulitzer Prize publisher and publisher of the Buffalo News. U.S. Senator Charles Schumer called Stan Lipsey "Buffalo's true guardian angel" for his impact on the city.

When the United Nations declared 2022 the International Year of Glass, it celebrated “the essential role glass has in society.” As a medium for art, glass has played a central role in furnishing Tutankhamen’s tomb in ancient Egypt, as sacred stained glass windows in medieval cathedrals, and is in every Tiffany lamp. The UN also observed that “it is the main conduit for information in our knowledge-based society. Glass optical fibers…are the backbone of the internet. Glassmakers have given us touch-sensitive covers for our mobile phones, revolutionizing the way we communicate.” Much of this advanced glass technology was invented or perfected in western New York, notably in Corning.

Many significant art movements have also originated or been perfected in New York state, and in glass, Western New York has played a leading role. The Lipsey collection from Buffalo documents one such movement, studio glass, whose founder, Harvey Littleton (represented in the Lipsey collection by “Arc”), was born in Corning, New York and created his first artwork in glass there in 1942, while working for Corning Glass Works (now Corning Inc.). And from the start, studio glass has been about education: Littleton realized that for his dream to succeed, glassmaking as an art needed to be added to the curricula of universities in order to teach artists to work with glass as a sculptural medium. Western New York is home to several of these, including major departments in glass at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where Michael Taylor taught for many years (represented in the collection by “Synoptic Torsion 21”) and at Alfred University. The Studio at The Corning Museum of Glass has also become an international force in glass education, bringing Littleton’s ideals back to his home town. And "Philosophically, the earliest things were closest to Abstract Expressionism" Littleton remarked, also linking the new movement to New York, where Abstract Expressionism was centered and where Buffalo has a major collection of the artists and their work. So the Lipsey collection is about art of western New York origin. And like the studio glass movement, the Lipsey collection grew over the ensuing decades to become a worldwide collection, following the pathways of the emerging movement, even documenting some of its inspirations in Venice and beyond, as with the work of Seguso and Barbini in the collection.

Glassmaking is by nature a precious, specialized art form requiring a substantial investment in tools, furnaces, and training. Teams are frequently necessary to create complex work. For most of its history, glassmaking was an industrial process requiring a vast investment of capital. That changed in the 1962, the official founding date of studio glass, as small furnaces were invented that could fit within an artist’s studio, and with Littleton’s inspiration, educational programs were developed throughout the United States and worldwide. Although glassblowing was central to early studio glass, casting (a process not dissimilar to the way type was cast in order to publish Stan Lipsey’s newspapers before the digital era) has always been important, and gained ascendancy in the 21st century, influenced by the team of Jaroslava Brychtova and Stanislav Libensky in Czechoslovakia, who taught glass casting courses in the United States at the Pilchuck School in the 1980s and 1990s. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that studio glass is not a style of glassmaking, nor does it represent a focus on technique alone. Rather, it is a material and educational achievement that has the potential to encompass all art styles, or as Littleton said: “we were not so involved in technique but with the result when you turned people loose with this responsive material. Studio glass is unified by material rather than by technique."

Early on (1960s-1980s) abstract expressionism, California funk, and minimalism seemed to dominate, as illustrated by the color field sculpture of Harvey Littleton, “Arc,” from his Topological Geometry Series. Minimalism and optical art are literally reflected in the collection by the sculptures of John Healey, Christopher Ries, and Michael Pavlik, among others. The influence of the 1960s West Coast Light and Space movement is evident in some of these glassworks. It favored a cool geometry, oceanic or atmospheric colors, and industrial materials like plastic and glass.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Venetian techniques were introduced to Americans and had a huge impact, largely through the efforts of the immensely skilled maestro Lino Tagliapietra, represented in the collection by “Ascent V.” Tagliapietra came to teach in America through the encouragement of the artist Ben Moore, a leading exponent of Venetian style glassmaking, whose work is both elegant and minimal, as in “Cobalt Blue Interior Fold,” representing design at its best. The artist Dante Marioni became one of most acclaimed practitioners of the venerable Venetian style, as evidenced by his “Green Mosaic Vase With White Polka Dots” using the intricate murine technique, where small squares and rectangles of glass are arranged into a mosaic on a flat surface, heated, and picked up on a molten bubble of glass, fusing together to form an intricate vessel. And working in Europe, Philip Baldwin and Monica Guggisberg carry on those traditions with large scale sculptures evocative of the Venetian waterscape (“Guardiano Orangia Verde”).

Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, glass has also focused on narrative, although its formal qualities may obscure the story it tells, while enhancing its poignancy. For example, Steve Weinberg, whose “Small Boat” sculpture is in the Lipsey collection, reminds us that his work expresses his interest “in ocean and sea themes. Exploring abstract water concepts through the complex use of trailing spheres and suggested motion, [the] early boat forms were inspired by the cross sections of boat hulls.” The Smithsonian tells us that Jay Musler, whose work is in their collection as well as the Lipsey’s: “began making art in response to the violence, crime, and alienation that he found in modern cities. Musler makes work that is fragmented and threatening by shattering glass and constructing shapes and bowls from the broken shards. He takes inspiration from the urban environment, and his constructions often include sharp lattices and cracked forms.” Jeannet Iskandar, in sculpture like ‘Eclipse II,” draws inspiration from music and mathematics such as “the rhythm and repetition in two very different intellectual constructs – the mathematical constant Π (Pi) and Maurice Ravel’s composition Bolero” according to her dealer, Doug Heller. Working abstractly, Sydney Hutter says that nonetheless “My sculptures focus on both the exterior and the interior form of the vessel…I describe volume on the outside, while portraying an interior landscape of color and light.” The artwork of Michael Glancy ( “Undulated Star X”) is as intricately carved and plated with metal as a piece of jewelry, but also reflects the artist’s interests in the way scientists explore the universe with telescopes and electron microscopes, revealing unexpected patterns and lifeforms. Glancy said that “I view the inanimate objects I make as damn near alive.” So even when working purely with form and light and color, glassmakers are generally aware of the potential of their work to tell stories about landscapes, the time of day, changing moods of the ocean, and even the political lay of the land. It’s worth noting that Stan Lipsey was a photographer, and was drawn to collect glass by the shared interests of artists working in both mediums: the play of light, a potential for subtle narrative. Lipsey was ahead of the curve with this: many collectors of glass later became collectors of photography for similar reasons.

So what can we conclude about glass as art in the year of glass? It has advanced many art movements, giving them new life and fresh forms. For example, when many second and third generation abstract artists seemed to have hit the limits in how far they could shape and control the frame of the canvas, glass offered the means to generate a canvas out of thin air by blowing a colorful bubble, turning a flat canvas into a sculpture with curvilinear energy. And through the agency of artists like Lino Tagliapietra, Venetian glassblowing skills, a world heritage, were transferred to America, where they have been preserved and enhanced. In the 21st century, the increasingly availability of artistically forged flat and cast glass, a legacy of studio glass experimentation and innovation, has become the darling of the fine art world: witness the glass atrium by world renowned artist Olafur Eliasson under construction across the street from this museum at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

In an essay about Harvey Littleton, I wrote that glassmakers have been described as the truck drivers of the art world. Glassmaking is sweaty, gritty, dependent upon solid but very fragile objects made with 18th and 19th century industrial tools. “The presence of a furnace in the artist's studio seems anachronistic at a time when fine art has become post-conceptual, pre-post-modern, disappearingly visual and mordantly intellectual. Norman Mailer might have been writing about this relationship in 1969 when describing the first launch for the moon: "Saturn V was a furnace, a chariot of fire. One could witness some incandescent entrance to the heavens. But Apollo 11 was Command Module and therefore not to be seen. It spoke out of a crackling of static, or rolled like a soup can, a commercial in a sea of television...." Harvey Littleton lit a fire in the artist's studio at a time when the artist's studio was becoming a command module for conceptual art and its academic outposts. Molten hot and computer cool never cohabit in the world of technology, but since Littleton they have had to make an accommodation in the world of art.” The Lipsey collection traces the path of that rocket, from its origins in Western New York and around the world.

William Warmus is a Fellow and former curator of Modern Glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. The author or co-author of over 20 books, he studied with art critic Harold Rosenberg and philosopher Paul Ricoeur while at the University of Chicago, and was the advisor to the estate of the art critic Clement Greenberg. His most recent exhibitions include “Venice and American Studio Glass” co-curated with Tina Oldknow for the Stanze del Vetro museum in Venice in 2020, and “Years of Glass,” curated for the Norton Museum of Art in the Palm Beaches in 2022. He was born in Corning, where his father was a glassblower for Corning Inc., and lives in Ithaca.

This essay was written for the exhibition catalog for “Brilliance.” The show of the Stanford Lipsey collection was held at the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York from May 12 to December 31, 2023. ISBN 978-0-9977170-5-1.