Art Glass

Art glass sprang from a revolution in glassmaking in the mid-1800s, when glassblowers began experimenting with colors, patterns, and textures. The subsequent melding of artistry and technique resulted in a wide variety of beautiful handmade objects such as vases, lamp shades, bowls, decanters, paperweights, figural works, and even marbles. One of the most important periods for art glass was Art Nouveau, which began around 1880 in Europe and 1890 in the United States, giving way to the more reductive Arts and Crafts aesthetic at the beginning of the 20th century, which itself was supplanted by Art Deco after the Great War. As a fluid medium, molten glass lent itself well to the flowing, organic elements favored by Art Nouveau artisans. By working their material hot, glassblowers produced designs that resembled feathers and flowers, sometimes as surface decorations, sometimes as the forms themselves. The French were not necessarily the first to bring the Art Nouveau aesthetic to art glass, but Emile Gallé, Daum Frères, and René Lalique produced some of the best examples of the genre. Gallé promoted the idea of revealing the beauty of nature in glass, taking his inspiration from a lot of the Japanese art that was exported to Europe in the second half of the 19th century. Building his shapes out of layers of soft molten glass, and then acid-etching or grinding away certain layers once they had frozen to produce a cameo effect, Gallé’s vases were vehicles for everything from flowers to fruit, dragonflies to frogs. So prolific and respected was Gallé that his studio in the Grand Est capital of Nancy made the town an international center for art glass. Although Gallé died in 1904, his firm continued to produce his designs until 1913. During this period, Daum Frères, also based in Nancy, rose to prominence. In 1893, founder Jean Daum’s sons, Antonin and Auguste, had already shown off their Art Nouveau cameo glass at the Chicago World’s Fair, but the early 20th century is when Daum really took off, as the company successfully transitioned from Art Nouveau to Art Deco after the war. One of its best-known techniques was pâte-de-verre, in which pieces of crushed glass were arranged in a mold, heated until they fused together, and then etched or ground when cold. Inspired by Art Nouveau, but in the end more of an Art Deco guy, was René Lalique, who probably could have put all his energies into perfume bottles and made a successful career at that alone. But Lalique wanted to do more with glass, which is how he ended up also making vases and other decorative objects that were heated in molds via a process he’d learned as a jewelry designer rather than being blown. Lalique also cast hood ornaments for automobiles and figures of horses, elephants, and nudes as decor for the home. Just on the other side of Germany in a region historically known as Bohemia, glass artisans working for such firms as Loetz, Kralik, Moser, and Rindskopf were also employing new techniques to create an Art Nouveau aesthetic. In the case of Loetz and the Phänomen objects it displayed at the 1889 Paris Exhibition, Loetz glassblowers worked their vases and goblets hot to pull horizontal stripes into feather-like patterns. Other times, blobs of molten glass were attached to the surface than pulled to suggest controlled drips. By the end of the 19th century, Loetz was giving the surfaces of its pieces an iridescence similar to the Favrile series produced L.C. Tiffany in the United States (although by then the Bohemians had understood formulas for iridescence for at least half a century). Just prior to the World War I, Loetz introduced its Tango series, whose single-color and two-toned pieces were a hint of what was to come after the war when Art Deco would dominate design. In the United States, at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, two names were most prominent, Tiffany and Steuben. As already mentioned, Tiffany’s Favrile was influential internationally, but Louis Comfort Tiffany also borrowed techniques from his European counterparts, particularly Emile Gallé. As for Steuben co-founder Frederick Carder, in 1903 he introduced a unique type of iridescent glass called Aurene, which was brighter than Favrile. Carder was less enthralled by Art Nouveau, though, than Tiffany, preferring classic shapes and using decoration sparingly. By the second half of the 20th century, new generations of artists around the world were trying to bend this rich history to their own ends, as well as to make sense of the Mid-Century Modern aesthetic that had stripped design to its essentials. The Italian glassblowers and designers working on the island of Murano figured out both admirably, as did Scandinavians working for manufacturers such as Orrefors and Kosta Boda. But the late 20th century also saw the flowering of a studio-glass movement, which grew in places as varied as Železný Brod in the Czech Republic (Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová), Madison, Wisconsin (Harvey Littleton), and Stanwood, Washington, where Dale Chihuly co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School.