Studio Glass in the Twentieth Century

An overview by William Warmus

Note: from my archive of essays. This is a meditation on the state of studio glass made at the very beginning of the 21st century, written in 2000.

Studio Glass is defined, not by a common artistic style, but by a medium—glass.

The exploration of new materials by artists was a defining characteristic of the post World War II era. In general the materials had few previous artistic associations and were used in combinations: lead and concrete, felt and fat. Many of the materials were of industrial origin.

The exploration of glass evolved along somewhat different lines. Glassmaking has a long and venerable tradition as an art medium—the sculptor Tuthmosis may have made glass in his studio-compound in the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna in c. 1350 B.C. But glassmaking—especially glassblowing—was and remains a difficult skill to attain and the equipment required to make it is expensive and demands constant attention. By the middle of the Twentieth century, the traditions of artistic glassmaking in America were in danger of evaporating: Louis C. Tiffany, the nation’s premier artist using glass, had been dead since 1933 and his work long out of fashion. Glassmaking with artistic pretensions had been replaced by “industrial design” as practiced in factories.

Enter Harvey Littleton, who intensely and obsessively believed that glass could be returned to the hands of artists. In 1942 he fabricated what I consider the first piece of studio glass, a female torso . It is the ultimate artist’s “proof:” Proof that glass could be made by an artist, although the “studio” was a scientific laboratory at Corning Glass Works.

Enter Harvey Littleton, who intensely and obsessively believed that glass could be returned to the hands of artists, and that glass should be made in the artist’s studio. In 1942 he fabricated what I consider the first piece of studio glass, a female torso now in the collection of the Corning Museum of Glass in upstate New York. It is the ultimate artist’s “proof:” Proof that glass could be made by an artist, although the “studio” was a scientific laboratory at Corning Glass Works (now Corning Inc.). It took Littleton until the early 1960s to assemble all the elements that truly launched studio glass: reliable studio scale furnaces and an education program to turn aspiring youngsters (among them Marvin Lipofsky and Fritz Dreisbach) into glass artists. This movement was paralleled in Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) by the pioneering teachers Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova in the 1950s and 1960s. An independent Czech artist, Frantisek Vizner, working under Kafakesque conditions during the cold war era (he was denied his dream to design for factory production and so forced to develop a way of making his work by grinding the shapes from solid blocks of cast glass in the studio attached to his house), succeeded in producing a series of vessels as perfect and elegant as anything ever made by human hands.

Many artists and collectors cringe when they hear the phrase “glass artist” or “glass collector,” preferring to be known simply as artists and collectors. But for the period from roughly 1962-1989, that term fits and is an indicator of the reason glass today is so successful as an art medium. For in 1962, a group of artists chose an unexplored path along the marginal places of the art world, places high art traditionally avoids. In the process, these artists escaped from the standards of official high art and the requirement to conform to those standards. At a time when the avant-garde was being assimilated into academic and corporate circles and Pop artists were making their work look like urban and industrial art (for example Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell Soup cans), glassmakers were literally out in the woods (the most important glass school, Pilchuck, was founded in 1971 in the middle of a 16,000 acre tree farm), where they were building furnaces, seeking to free glass from the confines of industry. Surely, a part of the allure of glassmaking for this generation, raised on impersonal mass-produced design in everything from the public schools they attended to frozen T.V. dinners, was that they were actually making something unique with their own hands.

These early studio glassmakers were idealists at a time when irony and cynicism were infecting the art world, and the earliest objects they made had an honesty and directness—as if “standards” abandoned by the official art press had become crystal clear to these emerging artists

These early studio glassmakers were idealists at a time when irony and cynicism were infecting the art world, and the earliest objects they made had an honesty and directness—as if “standards” abandoned by the official art press had become crystal clear to these emerging artists: criteria that included beauty and skill. Despite the use of glass by subversive artists including Marcel Duchamp (who reveled in broken glass and obscure narratives), the interior hallmark of glass as a medium seemed, to these artists, to read: Clarity, frankness, optimism. Perhaps equally curious was the way the glassmakers seemed to enjoy each other’s company. Glassmaking is primarily a team activity, and it seemed that there was always room to share new knowledge, or help someone in the blowing of an especially large bubble of glass. The pleasure derived from community soon spilled over to those collecting the new medium, and was one of the main reasons that glass diverged from the artworld in general. And of course, it was a main source of criticism. Glass was seen as too inward-focusing, too beautiful, too well crafted, too “nice.” Within the glass movement itself, a trend developed to make glass as ugly as possible, as if that alone could lend work artistic credibility.

But glassmaking isn’t all about beauty and those who make it aren’t always joyful company. Glass breaks, and is worked molten hot, and can hurt you. There are plenty of macho, highly competitive glassblowers. The best glassmakers intuitively realized that glass was a symbol simultaneously for eternal beauty and the fragility of beauty, for strength and weakness, for the joys of community and the overwhelming need to achieve independent identity. Glass may be liquid, free, and warm (read: optimistic). But glass is also wild and loose and brittle and inherently edgy. It can be both simultaneously. At a time when the artworld had abandoned the liquid and free and warm for fear of creating, or being perceived by the critics to be creating, kitsch, glassmakers were so far at the margins that kitsch didn’t scare them, and thy soon discovered that the wild and loose aspect of glass could make an edge that kept kitsch under control and transform it into brashness. The work of Dan Dailey, for example, draws its edge from its nearness to kitsch and willingness to explore humor, sometimes a taboo in the fine arts.

Glassmakers were not working in the glare of the critical spotlight in New York, so they could interpret a style, such as minimalism, in a manner that would have brought them grief if they were working at the center of the artworld—for example, they could make beautiful minimal artworks.

This isn’t to say that all glass is fabulous. Bad art in glass is at least as bad as bad art in other media--except perhaps that bad glass art is not totally useless: it can always be turned into a wedding present. And the outsider aspect of glass allowed the artists to keep certain traditions alive and to extend them in thoughtful and original ways at a time when those traditions had hit dead ends in painting and sculpture. Glassmakers were not working in the glare of the critical spotlight in New York, so they could interpret a style, such as minimalism, in a manner that would have brought them grief if they were working at the center of the artworld—for example, they could make beautiful minimal artworks, as in the work of Dante Marioni. Or, they could extend the American vision of color in painting, linking glass to the watercolor traditions of Winslow Homer and Morris Louis and creating “watercolor sculptures,” as represented in the work of Dale Chihuly.

It might be worth pairing Richard Marquis and Thomas Patti in concluding this thumbnail sketch of the artists who came early and influenced the tenor of studio glass, for they represent two extremes of possibilities inherent in the medium. Marquis succeeded in merging Venetian glassmaking traditions and conceptual art in an amusing fashion in his “Lord’s Prayer” murrine of 1972, when he made all the letters of the alphabet necessary to write out the Lord’s Prayer in glass cane, and then stretched the cane out so the letters and words were almost microscopic, fusing them into a single solid cane of tiny cross section. Patti represents the “do-it-yourself” American approach to art, having evolved his techniques of fusing and inflating glass largely in isolation from the emerging studio glass community, but in close synchronization with the New York art movements of minimalism and post-minimalism. Notice that the layers in his work may also be read as horizon lines, as if these creations compress within their transparent skin multiple layers of the landscape, forming a block that is the scale of the human hand: the landscape in your hand!

By the late 1970s, the idealism of the studio glass movement was dissipating and the movement itself had something of the look of a house whose foundation has been laid but whose superstructure is yet to be built. Enter Lino Tagliapietra from Murano in the Venetian lagoon, among the Twentieth century’s finest glass blowers, who has been responsible—through years of teaching and demonstrations-- for the transfer of skills and techniques to a new generation of glassmakers working in America.

Dante Marioni is among the current generation of artists who has adapted Venetian skills, creating lean, unadorned work that seems to embody a minimalist spirit, although as critic John Perreault observed: “No minimalist would use such gorgeous color.” In his Mosaic Vessels, he fuses exquisite glass lozenges, the size and shape of the keys on my computer keyboard, and through an incredibly demanding process blows them out into a hollow vessel form, a terrific minimalist sculpture.

Recently, a small group of studio artists has sought to re-invigorate the medium with something of the idealism and youthfulness of its earliest decades by combining art, exploration, and technology. Louis C. Tiffany preceded them with his interest in transforming the environment, and they have also adapted some of his media savvy and showmanship skills, adding contemporary doses of risk taking and adventure. Included in the group are Steve Tobin, Catherine Rahn and Dale Chihuly. For me, these artists have taken a cue from the nineteenth century novelist Jules Verne, whose fictional characters (such as Captain Nemo) explored the world with fantastic machines, the interiors of which were furnished with works of art! The contemporary exploring artist is driven to seek wonders and pursue feats of beauty by taking art out into the world.

Art as Exploration shares a similar sense of the scheme of things. If nothing else, it thrives on the "reckless gesture." And so, Chihuly hangs his glass over the canals of Venice; Rahn submerges hers on the reefs of the South Pacific, and Tobin works far afield amidst the termite mounds of Africa or deep within the Retretti caves in Finland. These three artists offer a "third way" of being in nature.

Robert Grant, in a review of The New Patricians by R.W.K. Paterson (TLS 4.23.99) describes the virtues that Paterson champions as " …the fine, reckless impromptu gesture; the contempt for one's personal safety; the good, the beautiful and the true..." Art as Exploration shares a similar sense of the scheme of things. If nothing else, it thrives on the "reckless gesture." And so, Chihuly hangs his glass over the canals of Venice; Rahn submerges hers on the reefs of the South Pacific, and Tobin works far afield amidst the termite mounds of Africa or deep within the Retretti caves in Finland. These three artists offer a "third way" of being in nature, in addition to science and extreme sports. Perhaps art viewed as exploration is a means to re-activate the pleasure of the aesthetically beautiful that has been lost in the tense, deconstructed artworld of the late 1990s.

I believe that optimism is a trait of the best art, and that cynicism and irony—hallmarks of so much in the art of the last few decades—are best left to art critics. The leading studio glass artists have never been afraid to create beautiful work, a hallmark of the idealistic approach that has pervaded studio glass since the first work was created 57 years ago. Glass is a material that lives in the light and dispels darkness, and studio glass artists have never been afraid of exploring in the light at a time when mainstream art has been intent upon an immersion in darkness. Perhaps that is what defines glass as a medium for art.

William Warmus

Ithaca, NY