Studio glass movement

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The founding of the American Studio Glass Movement ( English : Studio Glass Movement ) is fed back to the year 1962, specifically on two workshops that the glass artist Harvey Littleton (1922-2013) in the Toledo Museum of Art conducted in Ohio. He showed how glass art can be produced in your own studio , independently of glass manufacturers.

This movement has spawned international artists whose works made of glass can be seen in art museums around the world, such as the Corning Museum of Glass , the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

The beginnings: Harvey K. Littleton

Harvey K. Littleton grew up in Corning, New York , a city in which the glass industry had been established since the mid-19th century. His father was a physicist in the research department at Corning Glass Works. As a college student, Littleton took a summer job at Corning and observed the handling of glowing glass. In 1947 he graduated from the University of Michigan with a major in industrial design.

He would have loved to open a laboratory in the Corning Glass Works, in which new techniques and concepts can be tested for all other departments. But the company's management rejected his proposal.

Littleton had the idea that new ideas and products should arise from the examination of the material, that the concrete handling of glass would set the creative process in motion. However, management stuck to the traditional view that design is desk work and that designers shouldn't mess with the material. The separation of design and manufacture was the rule. The designers made their drafts on the drawing board, then these were implemented in the production by experienced glass workers. Glass was considered an industrial material that can only be processed in the vicinity of systems.

At first Littleton turned away disappointedly from the material glass, which apparently did not allow individual handling, and turned to ceramics. He completed his studies in this field in 1951 with a Master of Fine Arts. He began teaching at the University of Wisconsin. In the same year the Corning Museum of Glass was opened.

Workshop 1962

In 1957 Littleton traveled to Europe to study ceramics. In Murano near Venice he visited numerous glass factories, tried his hand at glass blowing and bought tools. In 1959 he built his first glass furnace.

He got the chance to realize his ideas in 1962: The Toledo Museum of Art made it possible for him to carry out two experimental workshops in which the participants were supposed to melt glass in the furnace and work as glassblowers. The practical implementation was unsuccessful, however, as it threatened to fail due to technical problems. One of the participants was the engineer Dominick Labino , who worked in the glass industry as head of a research department. He had developed applications of glass fibers for heat insulation in space travel. With his help, the furnace was improved by providing industrial glass beads with a low melting point as a starting material. This finally made glass blowing in the workshop possible. The first results were poor despite all the enthusiasm of those involved. But the proof that glass artists with small furnaces could realize their individual works in their own studio was provided.

The studio glass movement

As a result, Littleton did his best to spread and gain recognition for the new movement. He was able to free up funds and establish contacts with students and artists. As a professor at the University of Wisconsin, he introduced the first glass course in the United States in 1963. One of his students, Marvin Lipofsky , headed a course at Berkeley University in 1964. Another student, Dale Chihuly , now an international glass artist, first studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later headed the glass department there. In 1971 he helped found the Pilchuck Glass School, Washington.

In this way, the studio glass movement spread throughout the US and became increasingly an international movement during the 1970s. Glass artists in the USA could usually only look back on a past of industrial glass production. Some of them therefore traveled to Italy, Germany, Sweden or Czechoslovakia to familiarize themselves with the European tradition.

Littleton himself traveled to Europe again in 1962 and at the end of August visited the town of Zwiesel in Germany , one of those places in the Bavarian Forest that, like the neighboring Frauenau, can look back on a great glassmaking tradition. There he saw a freely formed vase by Erwin Eisch , which prompted him to visit Eisch immediately in Frauenau. In his family's business, the Eisch Glashütte, he had been trying to realize his own artistic ideas since the 1950s, i.e. glass objects that no longer corresponded to traditional ideas of functionality and good form. After this first encounter, there was no contact for two years until Erwin Eisch received an invitation from Littleton in 1964 to take part in the first World Congress of Craftsmen (WCC) in New York. Eisch made further visits to the USA, including as a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin. Littleton also traveled to Frauenau again and again. In 1965, Eisch built a small studio glass furnace on the ground floor of the family glassworks, which was used for almost ten years, not only by Eisch himself, but by other artists from the studio glass movement, especially from the USA. Today Eisch is considered one of the pioneers of the European studio glass movement.

In 1963 , Volkhard Precht built Europe's first studio glass oven in Lauscha in the GDR, completely independent of these developments, and without knowing each other .

Dale Chihuly traveled to Venice in 1968 and got to know glass creation in teamwork at the Venini glass factory in Murano . He practiced the way in which several glass experts are involved in the creation of a glass work of art in his own studio in the USA. Sam Herman , a student of Littleton, is believed to be one of the founders of the studio glass movement in Britain. In the early 1970s, he introduced studio glass to higher education with the establishment of a glass department at the Royal College of Art in London. In 1974 he showed his first solo exhibition in Germany, curated by Wolfgang Kermer . In France, in the mid-1970s, Claude Morin began experimenting with a self-made stove in Dieulefit .

Museums began to be interested in the new contemporary glass art. The 1972 exhibition Glass Today - Art or Crafts in 1972 at the Museum Bellerive in Zurich made a significant contribution to making the studio glass movement known in Europe . At the associated symposium, u. a. Harvey Littleton, Erwin Eisch and Dale Chihuly attended. The Wolfgang Kermer donation in the Frauenau Glass Museum documents the beginnings of the studio glass movement and its international development .

Museums and collections with studio glass

Germany

Switzerland

  • Musée Ariana , Geneva
  • Mudac (Musée de design et d'arts appliqués contemporains), Lausanne

International

literature

  • Wolfgang Kermer: Sam Herman. Galerie Günther Galetzki, Stuttgart 1974 (exhibition catalog).
  • Susanne K. Frantz: Contemporary Glass. A world survey from the Corning Museum of Glass. Harry N. Abrams, New York NY 1989, ISBN 0-8109-1038-1 .
  • Alfons Hannes: The Wolfgang Kermer Collection, Frauenau Glass Museum. 20th century glass. 50s to 70s (= Bavarian Museums. Vol. 9). With contributions by Wolfgang Kermer and Erwin Eisch . Schnell & Steiner, Munich a. a. 1989, ISBN 3-7954-0753-2 .
  • France Kermer , Wolfgang Kermer: Claude Morin, Verrier de Dieulefit, glass designer from France. Arnold, Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-925369-33-3 (German and French).
  • Clementine Schack von Wittenau : New glass and studio glass. Selected objects from the Museum of Modern Glass. = New glass and studio glass. Schnell and Steiner, Regensburg 2005, ISBN 3-7954-1619-1 .
  • Joan Falconer Byrd: Harvey K. Littleton. A Life in Glass. Founder of America's Studio Glass Movement. Skira Rizzoli, New York NY 2012, ISBN 978-0-8478-3818-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harvey K. Littleton, 1922–2013 ( Memento of the original dated December 29, 2013 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. . Toledo Museum of Art. Retrieved December 27, 2013. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.toledomuseum.org
  2. ↑ Joan Falconer Byrd: Harvey K. Littleton. A Life in Glass. Founder of America's Studio Glass Movement. 2012, p. 93 (English).
  3. ↑ Harvey K. Littleton (1922-2013) | Light Blue Extended C shape

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