THE VENETIANS   1919-1990

by William Warmus 

This essay first appeared in 1989 in The Venetians: Modern Glass 1919-1990 (ISBN 0-9624585-0-3) published by Muriel Karasik Gallery as the catalog for the exhibition I curated at the gallery in New York City. It included 231 artworks, including major objects by Carlo Scarpa, Napoleone Martinuzzi, Thomas Stearns, Dale Chihuly, Lino Tagliapietra and Richard Marquis.

Il Giornale Dell’Arte called it “The most important exhibition of Italian glass ever organized in the United States” and The New Yorker said that “The American Dale Chihuly’ s are the wildest by far.”

Jim Oliveira, writing for an auction sale at Wright in 2022, noted that:

“Of all these catalogs, one in particular stands out: The Venetians: Modern Glass 1919-1990. Staged in the fall of 1989 at the Muriel Karasik Gallery in New York City, this exhibition and sale contained at least a dozen of the rarest and most valuable pieces of 20th century Murano glass in existence. A number of these were by the American artist Thomas Stearns, who at the time was relatively unknown, including The Sentinel of Venice and the five Facades of Venice which have collectively gone on to sell for millions of dollars…..

Above all, the Karasik catalogue and sale are important to Italian glass scholars and collectors because of the people involved and the exacting standards which they imposed on the presentation of the objects. By 1989 a great deal of scholarly research had been done on the history of 20th century Murano glass. The fact that Franco Deboni, a pioneer in the field, was deeply involved in every aspect of the Karasik sale is significant. As a scholar, author and critic, the efforts of William Warmus were also crucial to the success of the exhibition, and his introductory essay established a clear context for 20th century Murano glass in terms of world art.”

The story of the exhibition I curated has a lovely ending, as much of the Karasik collection is now housed in the collection of Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu in upstate New York. According to an interview published in the Observer ( Elisa Carollo published 11/08/25):

“They began collecting in earnest between 1993 and 1994, when they gained access to an important trove that would become the heart of their collection….Through a chance phone call with a friend, she learned that a warehouse in the Hamptons held an entire collection of Murano glass that had just become available. She and Spanu, guided by friends from the Barovier family, visited and found themselves “like kids in a candy store,” discovering what turned out to be the collection of Muriel Karasik.

With her New York gallery, Karasik had introduced Murano glass to American collectors and artists alike. “Warhol used to go to her store. She was also a photographer and had started a great collection of Mapplethorpe. In fact, Mapplethorpe started collecting Murano glass thanks to Muriel, who showed it to him for the first time,” Olnick explains. Acquiring that group of works marked the true beginning of their deep engagement with glass.”

The Venetians: Modern Glass 1919-1990

By William Warmus

Upon hearing his report, she went silent and pale, staring at me. I told her I knew

what she had to say was not good news, but I wanted her to tell me exactly what

she had been told. This is how she explained what the grand master said: "For

weeks you have stood over us like a bird. We have worked for centuries to create

a perfect symmetry in glass. Now you bring your ideas, which have no symmetry,

to insult us. You don't speak our language, either in Italian or in glass. Go

away!"

Thomas Stearns, the first American to design for Venini, did not go away. As his

reflections on his time in Venice reveal, he persisted with a vision of what

glass can be, won and lost a gold medal at the Venice Biennial, and finally

gained the hearts of the glassworkers at Venini.

The history of Venetian glass in the twentieth century is many things: a story

of recalcitrance in the face of innovation, fabulous skills wasted on baubles

for tourists, a flirtation with dark melancholy in the aftermath of World War

II. The story of Venetian glass in our century is equally a tale of pioneering

individuals: the designer-artists Paolo Venini, Napoleone Martinuzzi, Ercole

Barovier, Carlo Scarpa, Fulvio Bianconi, Thomas Stearns, and Dale Chihuly, and

the grand master glassmakers Arturo Biasiutto ("Boboli"), "Checco" Ongaro, Lino

Tagliapietra. The brilliance of their collaboration is evident in the fabulous

objects they produced, some of perfect symmetry, others (like Thomas Stearns')

achieved through symmetry denied.

The story of the Venetians begins around 1921, with simply shaped vases and urns

inspired by depictions of blown glass in the Renaissance paintings of Titian,

Veronese and others, and made by Vetri Soffiati Muranesi Cappellin-Venini &

Compagnia, a four year alliance between the young attorney Paolo Venini

(1895-1959) and the antiques dealer Giacomo Cappellin (1887-1968), with Vittorio

Zecchin (1878-1947) as artistic director. (1) This brief period now seems like

an intermezzo, a pause for breath between the excesses of previous Italian

historical revivals --dragonstem goblets tinted in garish colors and destined

for the tourist trade-- and a new, refreshed, exuberant modernism.

In 1925 the alliance split into Cappellin and Venini, each company profoundly

influenced by the presence of a new breed of designer-artists: architect Carlo

Scarpa (1906-1978) at Cappellin until its shutdown in 1931 and at Venini from

1932 through 1947 (2), and at Venini architects Tommaso Buzzi and Gio Ponti

together with sculptor Napoleone Martinuzzi (1892-1977).

Scarpa was to emerge in postwar Italy as a major architect, designer of the

Brion Tomb, and was instrumental in establishing the curiously contradictory

flavor and ambitions of Muranese glass--Murano is the island in the Venetian

lagoon that became the setting during the Renaissance for the Venetian glass

industry. Scarpa was at once a procrastinator, a gazer endowed with the

gardener's sense of time and priorities, and an architect-designer, required by

trade to work with others and adhere to complex schedules. This duality

manifested itself as "a perverse dialectic between celebration of form and the

scattering of its parts, between the will to represent and the evanescence of

the represented, between the research of certainties and the awareness of their

relativity..."(3). The tug of war is effortlessly resolved in Scarpa's

glasswork, most emphatically in the murrine plates made for Venini (plate 32)

that fuse fragments everlastingly into a whole, a whole that carries forever

within itself, because of the precious fragility of glass, the possibility of 

further fragmentation.

By 1925 the work of Venini had become more daring, more experimental in

character. If Scarpa's work is characterized by extraordinary refinement of

sensibility and a crystalline awareness of the contradictions that drive

contemporary culture, then Napoleone Martinuzzi's work at Venini from 1925 to

1932 represents the equally Venetian tendency toward exuberance of form and

masterly playfulness--in Ruskin's words from The Stones of Venice: "such

fantastic and fickle grace as the mind of the workman can conceive and execute

on the instant. The more wild, extravagant, and grotesque in their gracefulness

the forms are, the better." We need only witness his potted plants  and animal

figures to confirm that this is not tourist glass. Here is hot glass manipulated

with sure skill and effortless finesse into living, almost surreal forms.

Ercole Barovier (1889-1974) of Artisti Barovier, later Barovier and Toso, was

the other major force in Italian glassmaking between the world wars. Vases such

as the one I call the Atomic Vase  are both daring-- heavy glass was at the time

something new in Murano--and exhibit a love of unforced, fluid form; one design

won a prize at the Paris International Exhibition in 1937. Barovier's unusual

murrine vases  reveal him as an innovator: individual rods of glass have been

sliced, arranged like a mosaic, and blown out into a bubble while in a molten

state. The cross-sections of rod, shimmering with a dusting of aventurine,

compose a grid that dissects the hollow space within the vase and maps the

expansion of the air bubble as it presses outward.

Detail of murrine vase by Barovier, c.1930 (Photo: George Erml)

Venetian glass of the late twenties and thirties must today be seen through the

dark clouds of World War II. Within this context, Scarpa's little lattimo (milky

glass) bottles seem inspired, almost prescient, their surfaces clotted with

"infinitely luminous and hazy mists." Like Micol's antique lattimi in Bassani's

Garden of the Finzi-Contini's, they are harbingers of the future, places where

"she could let her gaze wander among the luminous mists of her beloved lattimi:

and then sleep, imperceptibly, like a Venetian high tide, would return slowly to

submerge and annihilate her. (4)

World War II failed to annihilate the functionalist style that predominated in

the decorative arts in the twenties and thirties. Nevertheless, that great

upheaval profoundly changed the rules of society and culture. Postwar Europe was

left to brood over its excesses; no longer the central arena for political

action, it was free to work out what a post-political society might look like.

Italy reveled in this unexpected freedom, release, and open-endedness, and the

fifties and sixties became something of a high-water mark for Venetian glass.

The duality represented by Scarpa and Martinuzzi was reworked, yielding to a

"clear-obscure" state that emerges in the engraved glasswork of Venini as well

as Thomas Stearns' The Facades of Venice . Such a state was not incompatible

with, indeed favored the development of, Fulvio Bianconi's (1915- ) singular

creations in a sometimes darkly humorous, Pop art style. Handkerchief vases

became at once the badge of Muranese elegance and a caricature of past glories.

Venetian glass of the postwar period was built upon ancient techniques, and much

of its vitality came from adapting these processes to contemporary ends. It is

difficult to believe now, but as late as the 1960s major factories on Murano

were still operating with wood-fired furnaces, laboriously stoked by apprentice

glassmakers who had to keep the temperature exactly right or risk ruining the

glass and filling the blowing room with acrid smoke. While oil and gas furnaces

slowly replaced the wood fired ones, the basic steps in glassworking have

remained essentially unchanged since the time of the Roman empire. Molten glass

is still extracted from the furnace on the end of a hollow metal rod, the

blowpipe. Anyone who has ever removed honey from a jar with a wooden stick will

be familiar with this process, although he will lack an appreciation of the

intense heat that pervades the glass factory. The blowpipe is continually

rotated to keep the gather of glass centered--as with our glob of honey.

Eventually, the gaffer or master breathes air into the pipe, forming a bubble

within the molten mass of glass at the opposite end. By shaping this bubble on a

metal table, the marver, and with simple wooden or metal tools at the

glassmaker's bench, the gaffer and his team of assistants can coax an amorphous

mass of glass into an infinity of shapes and sizes. Once the glass becomes

something--a vase, for example--a solid metal pontil rod is fused to its base

and the blowpipe is removed from the opposite end. The gaffer is then able to

open up the bubble and form the neck. If handles, a foot, or some form of three

dimensional decoration is required, an assistant can bring a specially shaped

solid bit of hot glass to the gaffer at the bench, where it is fused to the

object being made and cut off with scissors. One gains an appreciation for the

short working range of glass as a leftover portion of the bit, red hot and soft

enough to cut like butter, solidifies in mid-air and crashes into fragments upon

hitting the factory floor.

To prevent the vase from crashing apart, the gaffer will often hand his blowpipe

to an assistant who takes it to a furnace for reheating, where the rapidly

cooling glass is softened and made ready for reworking. When the entire process

is judged complete, the finished vase is cracked off from its pontil and goes

into another kind of furnace, the annealer, where gentle high heat slowly gives

way, over a period of hours or days, to room temperature, and the stresses that

have built up in the glass from all the reworking are relieved and diminished.

A majority of the pieces in this catalog were made following these ancient

processes, but with astonishingly different results. Compare Carlo Scarpa's

corroded relief vases with Dale Chihuly's Venetian vases and the work of Abimo,

Bianconi and Barovier. In Scarpa's 1936 work, hot bits of applied glass meld

into and become part of the structure of the simply blown vase: the old

unity-amid-diversity theme. The handles of the 1950s Corbusier vase by Abimo and

Bianconi's vase for Venini are blown hollow, connecting effortlessly into the

body of the vase itself and confusing the handle with the handled; in Barovier's

single hole Barbarico vase, handle and vase are one, the hollow blown space that

is usually within the vase turned inside out in a maneuver worthy of a

topologist. By 1989, Chihuly's exuberant solid bits become overwhelming handles

that threaten to replace the hollow vessel they adorn.

If the glassblower takes time in preparing a bit of molten glass, it is possible

to stretch that bit out like taffy to many times its length so that it reaches

from one end of the factory to another. The result is a slender thread, rod, or

cane of glass that may be cut up into short segments. If canes of different

colors and shapes are bundled together, reheated, and the stretching process

repeated, the resulting cane will reveal an intricate cross section when sliced

into thin tablets or murrina. Murrine vessels  result from the fusion of many

such murrina. The Facades of Venice of Thomas Stearns, and certain details of

The Sentinel of Venice, likewise result from an arrangement of lengths of glass

rod that is fused to the molten glass bubble as it is pressed into the rods and

rotated. Filigree bottles and bowls are the result of an intricate multi-layer

pick-up process, working with extremely slim threads or rods of glass. Thus this

one process, exquisite in its simplicity, maddening in the difficulty of its

execution, has offered generations of artists the basis for highly personalized

interpretations. It could even be argued that the lovely Venini inciso

(engraved) vases, with surfaces the texture of old phonograph records, were

inspired by filigree vases, the hollowed out grooves but a memory of the

colorful and intricate threads of glass.

 Space does not allow a full exploration of the variety and endless combinations

of techniques employed by the Muranese masters. Their creativity inevitably led

them to introduce parallel tendencies in the fine arts, for example abstract

painting, to the glassmaker's stylistic vocabulary--Thomas Stearn's brooding

cylinder vases and certain highly colorful Venini vases come to mind.

Stearns forms the crucial pivot linking late abstract expressionism to the

emerging craft movements of the 1960s. It is a testimony to the continuing power

of these postwar works that many anticipate the styles of glassmakers working

today: one 1950s bubbly glass urn might be mistaken for a spun glass bowl by

Toots Zynsky if not for its conventional shape; the best of the inciso vases

have a subtlety that might not go unappreciated in the work of the Czech

glassmaker Frantisek Vizner; Handkerchief vases surely share a kindred spirit

with Dale Chihuly's baskets and seaforms of the late seventies and eighties, and

the murrine dishes of Venini might have inspired the work of Klaus Moje. Indeed,

many artists have worked in Murano and been influenced by what they experienced,

including Chihuly, Marquis, Zynsky, Marvin Lipofsky, Robert Willson, and Raoul

Goldoni.

The democratization of objects that was at the heart of functionalism--the idea

that anyone might own something beautiful--was expanded from the 1950s onwards:

Venini under the direction of Ludovico de Santillana opened its doors to foreign

artists while pioneers like Harvey Littleton in America devised ways to recreate

small factory furnaces suitable for artists' studios; and a mass audience, long

attuned to such common craft activities as cooking or gardening, began to make

"craft-art" at home. Craft, since the industrial revolutions more a product of

the technologically advanced factory than the studio, now also appeared in the

art school and shopping mall craft fair.

As the democratic horizons of functionalism expanded in the 60s and 70s, the

utilitarian functions inherent in the style were increasingly subverted. Craft

became, or rather its practitioners wanted it to become, art. The Stars and

Stripes Cup  with four letter word murrine by Richard Marquis is a poignant

reminder that the democratic right to free speech was at last at large in the

craft world.

By the 1970s Murano was faced with a decline in skilled glassblowers (office

workers made more money more easily) and the rise of a new historical

revivalism: the post-modern. Excesses of the postmodern form the background

noise from which the best Venetian-style, although frequently not Murano-made,

glass of the period must be isolated: the works of Chihuly, Dailey, Marquis and

Tagliapietra, made sometimes in America, sometimes in Venice, always owing

allegiance to the best Venetian traditions and ideals: Integrity of craftwork

coupled with the comradery of teamwork redeems these objects. Their work stands

in relation to the postmodern as the work of Cappellin and Venini stood in

relation to the excesses of Salviati's ornate goblets.

Emerson writes about the inscriptions on the gates of Busyrane: "Be bold". On

the second gate: "Be bold, be bold, and ever more bold". On the final gate: "Be

not too bold." That in essence is the artistic legacy of the Venetians, now

passed along to America: achieve symmetry, fear symmetry. Deny craft, never

stray far from the love of craft. Delight in balancing the pungent with the

pure.

William Warmus 

Endnotes: 

1. Ada Polak. Modern Glass. London: Faber and Faber, 1962. Pages 54-69.

2. Francesco Dal Co and Giuseppe Mazzariol. Carlo Scarpa: The Complete Works.

New York: Rizzoli, 1985. Page 183.

3. Fumihiko Maki in Carlo Scarpa. Tokyo: a + u Publishing Company, 1985. Page

207.

 4. Giorgio Bassani. The Garden of the Finzi-Contini's. New York: Harcourt Brace

Jovanovich, 1977. Page 86.