Grail glass

Gralglas was the name of a glassworks in Dürnau (Göppingen district) . As Grail-Glas-Werkstätten from 1930 and as Grail-Glashütte GmbH from 1955, Grailglas produced everyday objects and art objects.

history

Karl Seyfang, who opened an art shop in Göppingen in 1904 , founded the Seyfang art workshop in Göppingen in 1918. In 1930, together with his son Rolf Seyfang, he specialized in glass finishing in the Grail glass workshops in Göppingen. The A 50 goblet set from 1932 based on designs by Karl Seyfang and Josef Stadler, who was a partner and designer of the company from 1946, became famous.

In 1939 a branch could be set up in the Bohemian Forest, but it could not start production because of the outbreak of the Second World War .

After the war, a separate glass melting furnace was set up in Göppingen, as the raw glass previously supplied from Bohemia and Silesia could no longer be obtained from there. Glass production was taken over by glassmakers from Eleonorenhain who had left their homeland.

Of the 250 employees the company had in 1947, 90% were displaced . Gralglas now built a second glassworks in Dürnau, which from 1950 worked with a 12-port furnace. In contrast, the Göppingen furnace was shut down in 1951. In Dürnau the construction of the first Grail Glass settlement began in the same year.

An exhibition at the Landesgewerbeamt Stuttgart achieved great success for the products of Gralglas. The company had specialized in glasses and gift items and continued to grow. In 1955 there were 400 employees in Dürnau, almost three quarters of whom were still displaced. It now operated under the name Gral-Glashütte GmbH, Dürnau. In 1959 it was leased to the Leichlingen glassworks near Cologne, although operations had to be stopped five years later because the spatial conditions were no longer sufficient. Dürnau became the headquarters of the company, whose products had been shown in special exhibitions since 1966.

In 1969 Rolf Seyfang received the Federal Cross of Merit, First Class; in the same year the warehouse building was badly damaged by fire. Two years later, the Josephinenhütte in Schwäbisch Gmünd was taken over by Gralglas. After lead glass was introduced in 1976/77 and the company was modernized again a little later, the company went bankrupt in 1982. For the Gralglas company, which had been working with guest workers since 1961, the high wage costs due to the manual labor required in production were fatal. A rescue company continued to run the business until 1987, when it went bankrupt again. Further attempts at rescue could not save Grailglas from final ruin in 1995.

Artist

Artists like Konrad Habermeier and Karl Wiedmann , Livio Seguso , Hans Theo Baumann and Cuno Fischer created designs for grail glass.

Museum and exhibitions

Access to the Grail Glass Museum in Dürnau

In the Grail Glass Museum in Dürnau, exhibits on glass production, the company's history and the product range can be seen. It is located on Bahnhofstrasse in Dürnau in the passage to the remains of the Dürnau moated castle.

Representative examples from the collaboration between Konrad Habermeier and Karl Wiedmann and Gralglas Dürnau were donated to the Frauenau Glass Museum in 1982 by the Stuttgart art historian Wolfgang Kermer .

In 2011 the exhibition was Grail Glass. 1930-1981. An example of German design can be seen in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich . The traveling exhibition was titled Grailglas Dürnau. German design 1930-1981 was shown in the same year in the Museum Kunstpalast in Düsseldorf . In spring 2012 it was presented in the Finnish Glass Museum in Riihimäki and in 2015 in the Göppingen City Museum.

Elementary school Dürnau-Gammelshausen

The window donated by grail glass was in the stairwell of the school. It was designed and executed by Professor Konrad Habermeier and built into the new school building in 1955. An intact family was depicted, surrounded by symbols of teaching and learning, agriculture and the glass industry, the coats of arms of Dürnau, Gammelshausen, Göppingen and Baden-Württemberg. The representation was completed at the bottom by symbols for the four elements according to Empedocles .

The middle of the window was made of transparent raw glass, the frame figures of translucent raw glass. The symbols were ground in. Light and landscape were formative elements. The Grail glass window fell victim to the school renovation in 1992.

literature

• Xenia Riemann, Grail Glass. German design 1930-1981 , Deutscher Kunstverlag 2010, ISBN 978-3422070134
• Franz-Peter Wahrendorf, Das große Glassammler-Glossar , Lulu Pr 2007, ISBN 978-1847531292 , p. 96 f.
• Walter Ziegler , Der Kreis Göppingen , Theiss, 2nd edition 1985, ISBN 978-3806203745 , p. 438

Web links

• Company history
• Numerous illustrations
• Development of the design at Gralglas
• Information about the museum

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Baedeker Allianz Travel Guide Swabian Alb , Ostfildern, 9th edition 2008, ISBN 978-3829711432 , p. 66
2. ^ Alfons Hannes (with contributions by Wolfgang Kermer and Erwin Eisch ): The Wolfgang Kermer Collection, Glasmuseum Frauenau: Glass of the 20th century; 50s to 70s . Schnell & Steiner, Munich, Zurich 1989. (= Bayerische Museen, Volume 9), ISBN 3-7954-0753-2 , pp. 29–30, no. 53–56 with ill. And pp. 44–45, no. 94–98 with ill.
3. ↑ Pinakothek der Moderne
4. ↑ Museum Kunstpalast  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
5. ↑ German Embassy Helsinki ( Memento of the original from March 24, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.