By Ben Marks — Today the Steuben glass factory in Corning, New York, closed its doors (see local news report below). Although the name was sold for an undisclosed sum to Corning Incorporated, which once owned Steuben, it's unclear if crystal objects such as the Gazelle Bowl (the 1935 example above is from the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) will ever be produced again. When Steuben opened in 1903, its biggest competitor was Tiffany, which introduced its iridescent Favrile line in 1894....

U.S. Studio Art Glass, Before and After Chihuly

By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn — In 2010, we spoke with Seattle-based artist Benjamin Moore (1952-2021) about the origins of the American Studio Art Glass Movement and how it benefited from the combination of traditional European techniques and an American attitude of collaboration and experimentation. : Marvin Lipofsky introduced me to glass while I was getting a bachelor’s degree in ceramics at the California College of Arts in Oakland, California. One day I saw a poster there for the Pilchuck Glass School,...

Loetz Glass Collector Eddy Scheepers on the Pride of Bohemia

By Maribeth Keane — Loetz was a Bohemian company. It was a factory; and the region’s biggest and best glass manufacturer. There were other contemporaries like Kralik, Rindskopf, and Pallme-Konig that produced glass in the same style, made almost in the same way, but not always with the same quality. The glass is covered with vapors of metals, like silver, for instance. Most Loetz glass was not free-blown like most people think; ninety-five percent was blown in molds. Some people think some of the glasses...

Reyne Haines Spills on Tiffany, Chihuly, and Loetz

By Dave Margulius — I started becoming interested in art glass when I moved from Texas to New York, and wanted to decorate my apartment with New York-type things, things I had never seen in Houston. I grew up in Texas, which is a relatively new state. While there’s a lot of money in Texas, we didn’t have a Tiffany’s, we didn’t have a Marshall Field’s, or companies that sold Baccarat or Lalique or Tiffany or Steuben or any of the bigger makers. Nobody in my family really collected anything, and I wouldn’t say...