Raising Glass Consciousness : Artists have developed sophisticated techniques in past decade

Before 1962, glass objects made in America were almost exclusively produced in factories, be they elegantly designed Tiffany lamps and Steuben bowls or the everyday glassware of Libbey and Corning. But in March of that year, several artists gathered at the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio for a workshop on glass blowing, and the studio glass movement was born.

The artist who organized the workshop, Harvey Littleton, was a 40-year-old ceramics professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who had always been fascinated by glass. He had grown up in Corning, N. Y., a town with a history of glassmaking. His father was the director of research at Corning Glass Works and the inventor of Pyrex. And his neighbor, Frederick Carder, the founder of Steuben Glass, had encouraged him to explore glass as an artistic medium.

Otto Wittmann, then the Toledo museum director, knew Littleton and offered to host the workshop. Students were given instruction in kiln construction, glass composition, melting and casting, and finishing techniques. In addition, they handled molten glass for the first time. Dominick Labino, then director of Johns-Mansville Fiber Glass Corp., donated the glass, and Harvey Leafgreen, a retired blower from Libbey Glass, demonstrated blowing techniques.

Encouraged, Littleton undertook a more ambitious workshop in June. “After that, Harvey went back to the University of Wisconsin and started the first glass program in the country,” said Ruth Summers, director of the Kurland/Summers gallery in West Hollywood.

Summers, who has run the gallery since 1982, has been a champion of studio glass. She began showing artists’ work 20 years ago in a multimedia decorative arts gallery on the East Coast. In Los Angeles, she divides gallery space between the continually displayed work of several artists, and the comprehensive exhibitions of an individual artist’s work that change each month. On view in her gallery are 19 works by one of the first studio glass movement artists, Henry Halem.

“A glass company such as Steuben hires designers to design, and then they have artisans create the work,” Halem said. “That was the European method, and in many ways it still is. The system that Harvey started was the total opposite. He said that the designer, the artisan and the technician could be one person. He created the atmosphere that said we could do it, so we did it.”

Halem was a potter in 1968 when he left Washington after an exhibition of his clay works at the Smithsonian Institution and traveled to Wisconsin. There he met Littleton and expressed his desire to learn to blow glass. Littleton was familiar with Halem’s work, and he needed an assistant so he hired him. Halem spent a year at Littleton’s studio.

In 1969, Halem was offered a job teaching glass blowing at Kent State University, where he has directed the glass program since. “I knew one step more than the students did, but I never told them,” Halem said with a chuckle. “We were taken with this hot material and this process that was so exciting. We thought the work we were doing was really fabulous, the greatest contribution to glass art. You look back on it and even though it isn’t really good, there’s a vitality to some of that work.”

“For the first 10 years, a lot of the glass was just sort of body parts,” said Martha Lynn, assistant curator of decorative arts in charge of the 20th-Century glass collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “It was all they knew how to do. If you have a glob of glass on the end of a blowpipe and you blow into it, you come out with this very blobby looking thing, and if you poke it while it’s still hot, you come up with some very vulgar things. It was all part of the process of learning technique.

“Since the beginning of the ‘80s, technique has been nailed down. Artists know how to work different types of glass in all sorts of sophisticated ways. Freed from technical hobbling, glass could be reviewed on an equal footing with the other artistic mediums. Right there you run into a problem because there are a lot of people who are convinced that the only art is art that’s hanging on canvases; wooden panels are OK if they’re pre-1500, but everything else has to be made of bronze or basalt or something like that to be considered art.

“If a piece is really superb and happens to be made out of glass, I would like to call it art. If it’s marginal, it can’t be called art anyway, so it doesn’t matter what it’s made out of. The real truth is, if you’re really good, you are an artist. It doesn’t matter what you work in,” Lynn said.

LACMA began its contemporary glass collection in the early 1980s with the assistance of husband-wife collectors Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser, who began collecting glass objects in the mid-1970s.

“My mother is an artist and she ran a gallery called the Tide Pool,” Greenberg said. “I was weaned on ceramics, beautiful vessel forms with a lot of color. With glass, you get all the beauty of ceramics plus the translucency and light.”

Greenberg and Steinhauser had attended a show of Czechoslovakian glass at Summer’s gallery. “There was one exceptional piece by the husband-wife team of Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova that Ruth said should not leave Los Angeles,” he said. “She told me several curators from the county museum had come to see the show and loved the piece. They wanted it for the museum, but there was no money for it. So we decided to buy the piece for LACMA.”

Since then, Greenberg and Steinhauser have given to LACMA numerous contemporary glass pieces by such artists as Michael Glancy, Dan Dailey, Ann Wolff, Diana Hobson, Colin Reid and Steven Weinberg.

“LACMA has made an extraordinary commitment to historical glass,” Greenberg said. “We wanted to collaborate with the curators to develop a distinctive collection of contemporary glass and give people the opportunity to look at a new and untested art form, to see if it will stand the test of time.”

During his 23 years of working with glass, Halem has experimented with and developed various processes, several of which are represented in the Kurland/Summers show. He was the first of the studio glass artists to cast glass.

“When the students were shot at Kent State on May 4, 1970, I was there,” Halem said. “I saw them shot. That had a profound effect on me. I did a series of May 4 pieces. One of them was a frontal head with the eyes covered over called ‘Ravenna Grand Jury.’ It was my response to the students who demonstrated being put on trial instead of the National Guard that did the killing.

“I gave up casting a few years after that, but just recently I started again. The interesting thing is I’m doing heads again, these everyman heads that are here. And I never even thought about it.”

Since the late 1970s, Halem has been making wall pictures in glass, or what he calls wall panels. Sheets of blown glass with images on the surface have been laminated into bigger sheets of store-bought plate glass. “They aren’t stuck on a pedestal or on a shelf, they hang on the wall,” Halem said.

To create different effects, he liked to sandblast the plate glass “frames,” making clear glass opaque, giving a smooth surface a sculpted negative space, or forming little holes through the glass so that when the light went through, it would cast a shadow on the wall.

Halem’s glasswork can be found in the Corning Museum of Glass, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and museums in Czechoslovakia and Japan. But his claim to fame among his peers has been his work with an opaque sheet glass called Vitrolite. Rolled out and polished in the same way as plate glass, it comes in several colors and contains different chemicals that make it opaque. It was used as a building material from the 1920s until 1958, when architectural styles changed. Halem discovered it in a warehouse where he bought plate glass.

“The guy who owned the place asked me if I knew about it,” Halem said. “He took me to the back and showed me what he had, small pieces that were tan and white. I looked at it and said, ‘That’s glass?’ and he said, ‘Oh, yeah, take it and see what you can do with it.’ Like a drug, I was hooked.”

In the 1980s, Halem tired of Vitrolite’s color limitations, and he began to apply glass enamels to its surface. “A glass enamel is a glass that has been formulated and melted, and then crushed and ground up,” he said. “I mix it with an oily medium, and it goes on just like oil paint. The difference is I then take that sheet of glass and put it in a special kiln. The enamel melts and actually fuses into the surface of the underlying glass so that it’s permanent.

“My totally abstract hard-edge panels gave way to a more painterly surface. And I introduced the human figure into the works,” he said. Several pieces in the current show illustrate this evolution of Halem’s works, including the “Flying Wallendas” and “Mask.”

Shortly after Halem’s show opened, Summers and Lynn took off for Novy Bor, Czechoslovakia, to attend the Interglass Symposium, a conference that occurs once every three years at the Crystalex factory. Summers is delivering a lecture on artists marketing their work, while Lynn will present slides of LACMA’s collection.

“Eighty artists from all over the world come to work with teams of Czech glass blowers,” Summers said. “There will be an exhibition to show the pieces off at the end of the symposium. Henry’s been there before.”

Halem said almost all of the people making glass in Europe have been factory designers. “When the studio movement came along, they took notice,” Halem said.

“We’ve been seeing this happening in Europe,” Summers added. “Individual Czech artists are saying, ‘I want my own studio.’ ”

Lynn is careful to point out that the contemporary glass movement is part of a greater continuum. “Remember, they didn’t have machines to make glass in the medieval village along the Rhine, but they made glass,” she said. “So they knew how to do many of the things that our boys discovered. Glass goes back to Egyptian times. The techniques of glass have been lost and found and lost and found throughout history. Everyone in the contemporary glass field needs to know that they are part of a longer story.”