William Bernstein
by William Warmus
In 2022 I wrote an essay for the catalog for Billy Bernstein’s 50 year retrospective exhibition tiled: Life Art Life held at Toe River Arts and the Cody Arts center in North Carolina.
Working the Nerve
Just words and images?
Billy Bernstein describes himself as a diarist. But a diary is a book that records the ephemeral on a daily basis. Part of its attraction is that you don’t need to reflect much on those events. Bernstein’s art is more like a journal of subtle personal thoughts and deeper observations, one he has been keeping for at least 50 years. During that time, it has become a place where he can dwell and drill down, expand an experience into a transparent bubble, heat up emotions, color memory. He makes little distinction between public and private realms, no weighty ethical or moral judgments about either. But we live in a world where roots can be shallow, memories short, traditions lost, our observation skills atrophied. Bernstein creates challenging work about this loss, and how work and the simple act of looking carefully can enrich our lives.
The early development of studio glass equipped him well for this research. It had an earthy, hands-on, risk-taking flavor that was profoundly appealing, which he helped to pioneer, and to which he remains true. It is a social art, often requiring teams and collaboration, with roots in blue collar labor. Contrast this with the detached, laboratory-like conditions that prevail in many artist studios today, the clinical and big data analysis of academic art, better suited to portraying the health and demographics of the group than the eccentricities and humanity of the individual. Billy just wants to tell you a story, rather than publish a peer-reviewed clinical study.
Helping him with his project is the way glass handles perspective. Painting developed using rectilinear perspective, placing us and our pair of eyes at the center of the world, which is laid out like a flat map rather than a globe. Glassblowing produces globes, full of curvilinear energy. Lines zip around, leading the eye as well. Curvilinear perspective challenges the idea that we are at the center, makes us think about our place in the world rather than the world’s place in our eyes. Bernstein, as both painter and glassmaker, uses both approaches and this opened him up to telling two very different kinds of stories, enriching the ways he tells both.
Perhaps the greatest challenge to such a fundamentally narrative art is its relationship to time rather than space. We will probably never truly understand why there is a past, present and future. Science is good at defining cosmic time, the time of the universe, and parses it into milliseconds. But we all sense that human time is fundamentally something different from cosmic time. I think the true brilliance of storytelling is that it captures the time of the universe, which flows in only one direction, in webs of narrative and orders past, present and future in any way it wants. In Bernstein’s best work, they can all be compressed into a single moment, the gesture of a hand, the expression on an anguished face.
Why we have moods is also incomprehensible, at least to me. In a series of interviews for this essay, Billy remarked that this exhibition is important to him because “My work has hardly been shown, especially the glass.” Although this is not literally true—he has been in many important exhibitions and his work is in leading museum collections including the Smithsonian and Philadelphia Museum of Art as well as leading European and Australian museums—it suggests his mood. “Speak to me about how I feel when down” he says. He has been depressed on and off his whole life, and is drawn to painting portraits of himself and others when in such moods. And yet one portrait, done in bleak midwinter, during the deepest part of the COVID pandemic, has its subject wearing a funny hat with vegetable decoration including orange carrots. Done in oil paint and stick, with scratchy surfaces, it’s a nuanced interpretation of the complexity underlying any frame of mind. And after all, isn’t that one of the higher callings of art, to frame a mind?
I also wonder, does Billy’s decision to remain in a rural setting mean anything? I too live in the country. It really does change your outlook. There is more time. That’s a good and bad thing: more time to be thoughtful, more in which to be bored, or feel empty like the surrounding landscape. Most 21st century art is urban, political, academic and frankly a little paranoid. Pastoral values are different. Bernstein explores them. And yet his roots are urban, and he tells us that “My family was really lefties.” Reconciling blue collar labor, which is essentially what glassblowing is all about, with the rhythms of country life has become part of his art. Glassblowers sling glass around as if harvesting a crop. There is a lot of urban angst, but suffered by people who wear hats decorated from the farmer’s market.
Location, location, location
Billy’s studio originally had a dirt or gravel floor, in the tradition of early studio glass spaces like those of Josh Simpson and Tom Patti, or the rustic beginnings of Pilchuck. There was a food co-op within walking distance, a craft shop (Toe River Crafts) nearby and the 1000 acre Celo Community, based upon Quaker principles and ideals of land sharing, was within walking distance. The Bernsteins were enmeshed in Celo, and it shaped their identity. There is a school and summer camp, and a strong sense of community pervades the space. Bernstein would demonstrate glassmaking techniques to students at Celo, which was not a utopian community, but an experiment in living rather than an attempt to create an ideal world, not unlike our studio glass ideals. Micro exhibits of Bernstein’s work are scattered around because many members of the community own utilitarian vessels created by him: stemware, tumblers, pitchers and decanters.
Billy’s humble aspiration was to own a log cabin in the woods, and the environment around Celo allowed him to achieve his goal, as notably did Penland, where he was the second resident in the glass program after Mark Peiser. Both were like a “dream come true” in the words of his son, Alex Bernstein. And at first, he showed work in equally humble craft fairs around the region. The tone began to change after Rob Levin, Harvey Littleton, Gary Beecham, the Ritters, John Littleton and Kate Vogel moved into the area: Bernstein was no longer isolated from the studio glass community, they were now his neighbors as well as colleagues. And the increasing success of glass meant more attention by art museums, for example the “North Carolina Now” shows. He began to work and design in Frauenau in Bavaria, invited by his friend Erwin Eisch. Soon enough, because of the presence of Littleton and Penland, the “world came knocking at our door.” Generations of glassmakers have gotten their start at Penland, some settling in the area, and in the last decade Asheville has seen a tremendous revival and influx of art collectors and artists. And yet the region remains true to its rural and pastoral roots. Harvey Littleton’s batch factory was for a time the hub of the village of Spruce Pine, harking back to medieval and 19th century European glass factory towns like Murano, and inspiring Billy to paint “Carnivale at the Batch factory.”
Imagery, Character, Narrative
Billy says that “Half of my imagery has used glass and glassblowers. The way glassblowers move.” The way they move, and the way their art captures movement, spins it out, throws a curveball, colors our emotions. His wife Katie told me that “A lot of the work is journalistic, dealing with family, moods. Not as a reporter, but how you might convey feelings in a journal….I don’t think he thinks of social versus personal, private versus public. It comes from within.” She talked about drawing get togethers with friends as models, that was “how we were living.”
Billy adds that his interest includes “The art I relate to is about the everyday. The relationship between men and women, including when working together on glass. The dynamic.” He also probes the individual, as in his “Portrait of Dave Wilson,” a neon artist who was Billy’s helper for many years. He was “Going for an emotional impact. Sad but not crying. Dave had found the body of a friend and colleague after his suicide.” Another painting, the 1991 “Gray’s Papaya,” captures the scene at the mundane 72nd Street “Papaya King” on the west side of Manhattan. Billy and I both know and love Papaya King: when I was the registrar at Forum Gallery, a stop at the Upper East Side branch frequently became dinner, a hot dog and papaya juice. Definitely worth enshrining as art.
Working and Making
Bernstein has one studio for glass, one for painting. He keeps sketchbooks. Uses different palettes based upon the themes. Prefers oil. He has never been shy about moving from realism to abstraction in the details of a painting or work in glass. And his style has not changed so very much over the years. Bernstein is a minimalist whose aesthetic is based upon dedication to the concepts of honesty, modesty, and humility. Not really influenced by any given trend in studio glass such as Venetian style glassmaking, he has rebelled--his work has more gesture and movement, for example. He asks himself “How do you out your soul into something?” The work is earthy, not finely polished. It has a feel of its surroundings and of the people of the region.
Is there a connection to folk art? “In my ways I consider myself related.” Both deal with the same things: unrefined, unsanitized experience. Appropriately, his painting technique is self-taught. In glass, he made beer trays before custom brewing became a thing, even imagined his own beer label. This was all part and parcel of the early studio glass era of the 1960s and 1970s, a time when Fritz Dreisbach made his iconic Farm, an assemblage of dozens of components representing a working farm, with a barn and silo, tractor, geese, pigs, pond, all surrounded by a delicate glass fence in need of a little repair, as at most farms: it was naïve in the best American way, with a wink, and made without Venetian techniques or the use of a glory hole for reheating the glass. This attitude, “Let’s see what we can do—make a fire truck. It was a dare” and inspirational as well. Fritz and Bernstein often collaborated on work. Billy blended these “unrefined” folk ways with a healthy dose of leftist labor relations, the “glory of the working man” thing, as in the “Jersey Giants” series he made at Wheaton Village (now WheatonArts) in Millville, New Jersey. At 25-30 pounds of glass each and 20 inches tall, they are massive figures made through the heavy labor of the glassblower. His “Convention Piece” alludes to early American glassmaking traditions, but has three Teddy Bears around a television set with rabbit ear antennas and a little train being pulled by a bulldozer. Made after the 1972 convention that nominated Richard Nixon for a second term as president, it’s a political set piece. But also symbolic of childhood, and influenced by a Claes Oldenburg Teddy Bear monument for Central Park, a proposal he thought was very cool.
Although Bernstein’s paintings and glass cover a wide variety of topics—the painting “Floor plan of Dachau” documents a 1980s visit and shows a human figure and next to it a ghost, along with a mundane coffee cup and saucer, but the the green lines are the cell blocks, bringing us back to the reality of the camp—many of his works are about glassblowing. In “Glassblower” from the early 1990s, he asks: “Which is the glass and which is the glassblower?” In some, the glassblower’s face is illuminated by the striking and intense orange light of the furnace. He has portrayed the famed glass artist Gianni Toso at Penland with big muscled arms. In this he took full creative freedom. “The piece is too big, but that is OK.” Influences of a leftist upbringing, WPA art, glorifying the worker. He loves labor, the ways workers move, all that dynamism. What’s not to love? And yet he also adores silence. In another painting, we see Billy seated in a car, turning his head to look through the window, capturing a quiet, contemplative moment in time, as opposed to the louder action works that depict glassblowing.
In his glass, how you handle and respect the material is important. Billy talks about making “early white pieces from a Mark Peiser opal glass recipe. A very gushy glass, soft.” This is essential, recognizing the way the material handles and affects the final artistic composition. Around 1995, he made a glassblower turning into glass. Billy is that person. And he is usually the male figure in his work in glass. The female with yellow hair is probably his wife, Katie. One favorite is a vase with irises, a baseball, Katie in a leotard, some trees. It’s a springtime piece, evoking his son playing little league ball. A small “Floating Figure” vessel from the late 1970s is one he has always loved and kept because of the way it captured motion and pattern. When you hold it up to the light, you realize the colors are transparent colors, made by drawing with a glass cane that is melted into the surface. Like a hot pencil or paint brush.
Legacy
I am drawn to Bernstein’s art because he has remained true to origin, place, and mood, even as origins, places and moods change through time. The minimalist and abstract artist Anne Truitt wrote in her journal about “the strict discipline of forcing oneself to work steadfastly along the nerve of one’s own most intimate sensitivity.” That’s what Billy does, and why his work is so compelling. We all lose our nerve under the right circumstances. We all lose our way. Strict discipline and steadfast work can redeem us. Bernstein can also point us toward possible directions ahead for studio glass during the 60th anniversary year of its founding. Maybe the naïve and earthy era at the beginning should be reconsidered. As Lino Tagliapietra said of those early days: “People had a very primitive technique….But I liked the spirit and the fantasy. Now people try to have more technique than fantasy….the spirit is a little bit less, a little bit chilly.” Bernstein is the opposite of chilly. Maybe we need to take a closer look at his aesthetic, follow along the nerve, dig into the earth and roots.
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.
Note: Unless otherwise noted, quotes from the artist and his family or colleagues are from a series of interviews conducted between January 6, 2022 and April 15, 2022. The quote from Anne Truitt is from the The New Yorker review (June 15, 2022) “How a Sculptor Made an Art of Documenting Her Life” by Megan O’Grady (accessed online on 6-15-22). The quote from Lino Tagliapietra is from Venice and American Studio Glass edited by Tina Oldknow and William Warmus and published by Skira in 2020 (p.50).