A Reflection on the Corning Museum of Glass New Glass exhibition

I curated the exhibition New Glass while at The Corning Museum of Glass in 1979. The exhibition traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, occupying the galleries at the top of the Grand Staircase where Impressionist paintings had been exhibited. It went on to other venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the MAD Museum at the Louvre before ending its tour in Japan.

The essay that follows was published in Glass Quarterly in 2019

A curator looks back at a seminal world survey of glass art

By William Warmus

The 1979 exhibition “New Glass: A Worldwide Survey” had a far-reaching influence. Gallerist Douglas Heller cited his visit to the show as “an epiphany” that helped him make up his mind to deal in new rather than historic glass. In the book Contemporary Glass and the Saxe Collection, author Davira Taragin wrote that George Saxe “specifically attributes the beginning of his own interest in glass” to New Glass and quotes Saxe’s response to the catalogue: It “was very exciting…I had never seen such colors before, nor such forms, all made from such an ordinary material.”

Working on the 1979 exhibition at The Corning Museum of Glass was a great way for a freshly minted art historian to learn about the world of contemporary glass. “New Glass” was the second worldwide survey of contemporary glass undertaken by the museum. The first was “Glass 1959,” and a tremendous change in the world of glassmaking had taken place in the intervening 20 years. Two thousand slides were submitted to the juried competition for “Glass 1959,” compared to 6,000 slides for “New Glass.” Nine hundred and seventy artists from 29 countries applied, and 273 entries by 196 entrants were finally selected. While “Glass 1959” consisted primarily of factory-designed glass, the truly momentous event that “New Glass” documented was the rise of artists making glass in their own studios.

One reason Corning organized these shows was to find great work to add to the permanent collection. I still recall my boss, Tom Buechner, sputtering when I suggested we simply buy the entire show, not so much about the cost as the fact that there was plenty of work he did not feel was appropriate for the museum’s collection. He made me feel that I was being lazy rather than carefully exercising my selective taste, when in fact I was exercising my historian’s muscles by suggesting that we do what the museum had done in 1959 when it bought most of “Glass 1959.” The debate Tom and I had reflected the changes wrought over two decades: By 1979, the world of glass had become so diverse and complex that tastemakers within the same institution were at odds as to what defined quality and innovation. The artists were beginning to define a new medium for art, and we were struggling to define the criteria for understanding that art.

I had to approach these issues when the project director for “New Glass,” Antony Snow, gave me the assignment of writing up guidelines for the jury. The memo I wrote on April 4, 1978, is in the Corning archives: “Selection of objects by the jury: Proposed criteria.”

I suggested that “the value and prestige of ‘New Glass’ will not be increased solely through the wide representation of nations, or the appearance in the catalogue of new, hitherto unachieved technical devices. ‘New Glass’ should serve both as a recollection of the past two decades and as a standard against which to measure the unforeseen changes ahead. As a self-conscious, albeit subjective, summing-up, it will inevitably be concerned as much with the decay of those images first apparent at the end of the 50’s, as it will be charged with the duty of detecting and estimating features of the new.”

Among the aesthetic dimensions discussed in that memo were: care of crafting, superiority of an object within a rank of its peers, innovations that can change aesthetic criteria, an ability to engender a new tradition, and a harmony with the best of contemporary art.

Of course, the jurors for “New Glass” were highly sophisticated and employed their own criteria, so my memo was largely ignored. They were Paul Smith, a museum professional focused on craft as an art medium; Russell Lynes, tastemaker and author of the highly influential book Highbrow, Lowbrow, Middlebrow; Franca Santi Gualteri, editor of Abitare; and Werner Schmalenbach, a German museum director whose father was the influential philosopher Herman Schmalenbach. Reading his essay “On Lonesomeness,” I was struck by the way he described the struggle between history and ontology, and his conclusion that we need to step back and watch what emerges.

This was the “New Glass” critical method in a nutshell: The struggle between inherent quality and external context would emerge as the process progressed. “New Glass” was one step in that process. And ultimately, what emerged surprised us. For example, it became clear that the tour we arranged was even more important than the individual artworks we selected because it got the idea across that glass could be an art form, especially when “New Glass” opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on November 19, 1980. But it also seeded this concept in France, at the Louvre; in England, at the Victoria and Albert; and in Japan. I was especially proud of the space the Metropolitan chose for “New Glass”: in the former galleries for Impressionist paintings, just to the right at the top of the grand staircase. We were no longer in the basement or next to decorative arts; we were in a higher realm.

A few objects in “New Glass” now seem to me like works ahead of their time. Sophisticated in their intense use of narrative, they are more at home here at the start of the 21st century than when they were made at the end of the more formalist 20th. Perhaps, in retrospect, they were “a standard against which to measure unforeseen changes ahead.”

Richard Posner’s flat glass panel, Another Look at My Beef with the Government (1976), is such an object. The artist’s photographic image peers through a window to an image of a person lying in traction in a bed, referencing a back injury he suffered as a conscientious objector while serving as a dishwasher in a hospital during the Vietnam War. Handmade Vietnamese glass was used in the panel, and the decoration also includes beef cattle. It’s the kind of intricate narrative that is impossible to imagine in “Glass 1959,” is a demanding work in “New Glass,” and is right at home in 2019.

Audrey Handler created a fascinating sculpture that also had a story to tell. She reflects:

“I liked working with surrealism and illusion. By casting tiny, sterling-silver figures, I was able to make my glass appear huge by comparison. In Wedding Breakfast, tiny, sterling-silver figures of a wedding party march across the top of a table and around the glass table setting. The illusion of a table is made by inlaying what appears to be a wood tablecloth on the top of the table.

“But … it is only a breakfast for one. So the inner turmoil of life, coming in the future for this wedding couple, is cast in the sculpture. To be honest, I am not sure if I did this intentionally in my beginning concept, but only realized it after the sculpture was completed and it was pointed out to me.

“During the opening of ‘New Glass’ at the Corning Museum, I was standing in front of my work when Tom Buechner came by and told me how much he liked my sculpture because it was a wedding breakfast for one. The realization that what I had created was being recognized by an observer hit me that instant. I was putting my life into my work.”

Handler’s story about Tom Buechner brings back so many memories. Mary Shaffer writes that, at the opening: “I became friends with the Czech artists, with Oldřich Plíva, Marián Karel, and his wife Dana Zámečníková. They were about to take a bus trip across America and had no money. They had brought pieces in their suitcases to sell. I emptied out my pockets and gave them every dime I had, then hitched a ride to get home.”

The artist Josh Simpson drove to Corning, arriving just a short time before the formal ceremonies. He owned two pairs of identical dress shoes, and in his rush he packed two left shoes. With no time to spare, he wore them, arriving at the museum to find it packed with reporters, a film crew, and hundreds of artists and museum professionals. Yet all he could think was that everyone was staring at his feet. In the end, no one was, and for Josh “New Glass” was magical, a validation of his work.

We took a lot of heat for selecting Banded Bronze (1976) by Tom Patti for the cover of the catalogue. Some thought we should have chosen a European or Asian artist, or a detail, or a group of objects, or nothing at all except text. But Buechner and I were enthralled by the work. Its monochrome shades of gray made a nice transition from the similar monochromes of “Glass 1959,” and yet its technique was immensely innovative. Banded Bronze masqueraded as a simple vase but consisted of layers of flat glass that had been fused and then inflated. Patti had combined the two great traditions of glass, flat and blown, into a single process. And the flat glass panels formed a grid that automatically measured the progress of the bubble and displayed the results in the ways in which they were distorted and distended. When you look at the cover, you see that the top of the object displays a nearly intact flat panel (the bumps on the shoulder are the edges of that panel), while the bottom half shows one or more panels, blown out.

Yet all that innovation would be trivial without the inspirational component we saw in the work. In an interview I conducted with Patti in 2010 for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, he said: “I think a lot of my work has what I would call a spiritual component to it.… When I talk about my work, I talk seriously about it. They think I’m talking about the glass aspect of it, the material side of it. But in fact, I’m talking about some quiet essence in the work, that if it possesses that component, it always seems to stand apart from other work.… I always thought that I would personally talk about it in some almost religious way.”

What was to come after “New Glass”? We established the New Glass Review to keep the momentum and stocked it with jurors that included two preeminent figures in modernism, Henry Geldzahler and Clement Greenberg. And I was planning, mostly at the “sketch on a napkin” level, for “New Glass 1999.” (I had always hoped we could lure Susan Sontag onto a jury.) But then I left Corning, and the franchise seemed at an end. Occasionally I would write a letter to Corning, asking about a follow-up to 1979. And then, to my delight, Susie Silbert came on board and revived the series with “New Glass Now,” which opens in a few days. I see it as a step in the long series that started 60 years ago with “Glass 1959.” And I hope that if I’m around, I’ll be invited to the opening of “New Glass 2039!”

WILLIAM WARMUS curated “New Glass” in 1979 and is the founding editor of the New Glass Review as well as a contributing editor to Glass Quarterly.