Shattering expectations

IT was 1986 and Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser were 10 years into their passion for collecting glass art. Their home was lined with the kinds of works they loved.

That was when Stephanie Barron, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, called to suggest that they look at an unusual piece at Margo Leavin Gallery in West Hollywood. Titled “MI,” it was a thick twist of sand-cast glass with a roughened texture reminiscent of glass unearthed from ancient sites. Even more unusual, the artist was Lynda Benglis, better known for avant-garde sculpture and performance and video work.

It was as if glass, as an artistic medium, had reached a critical juncture. “A whole group of artists who were not part of the glass movement but who worked in glass suddenly appeared,” Greenberg says.

He and Steinhauser viewed “MI” with puzzlement at first, then respect and finally appreciation. “This was part of our learning experience,” he said. “It expanded our horizons.” The couple helped LACMA purchase the piece.

“They’ve been prime movers in support of our glass collection,” says Barron, now LACMA senior curator of Modern art. She has worked with them for more than two decades, especially on acquisitions of objects by artists not known for glass, such as Benglis, Sherrie Levine, Tony Oursler and Kiki Smith. “I think those acquisitions have pushed the envelope as to what we have in glass.”

Just how far that envelope has been pushed is revealed in “Glass: Material Matters,” at LACMA through Dec. 10. Co-curated by Howard Fox and Sarah Nichols, it is the first major exhibition of contemporary glass organized by LACMA and one of the few museum shows to feature the gamut of the material’s versatility, including decorative pieces, sculpture, conceptual art and architecture. Just as the tastes of Greenberg, 65, and Steinhauser, 55, evolved, so has the medium, from one relegated to the quaint and the decorative to one that does what other art forms do -- express personal vision, social and philosophical ideas and even spiritual depth.

We have a natural fascination for this endlessly malleable material, says Fox. “Even though we think of glass as a manufactured and industrial substance, it has so much organic nature, it’s got this almost primal quality to it.”

With more than 100 works made in the last two decades, “Material Matters” posits a thesis: that glass has broken through the aesthetic barrier, crossing from craft to art.

Glass, of course, can be functional and decorative, as in architecture and architectural details, represented in the show with video glimpses of Rem Koolhaas’ glass-encased Seattle Public Library and Dale Chihuly’s floral ceiling for the lobby of the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.

And glass can be representational, as with Dan Dailey’s whimsical bust of a coiffed dandy, “Pompadour,” or Flora Mace and Joey Kirkpatrick’s equally whimsical blown fruit in a bowl, “Zanfirico Still Life.” But glass can also be abstract, as in Vera Liskova’s sculpture “Music,” a delicately linked crown of blown and lamp-worked shards that dance up and down like sound waves. Music also seems to be captured inside Harvey Littleton’s “Red / Blue Combination Arc,” with its swirls of red and blue inside a sinuous curve.

“Littleton was one of the people who helped found the studio glass movement,” Fox notes.

Alternatively, glass art can be Surrealistic, such as Rita McBride’s “Chair” made of curved rods of amber glass held together at the joints by plastic wrap to emulate a bentwood chair. But this chair has no seat and is breakable and so echoes the wryly nonfunctional objects Surrealists championed: Marcel Duchamp’s urinal in a gallery, Meret Oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup and saucer.

Or glass works can be conceptual, such as Smith’s “Tombs,” made of panels of eerily mirrored glass set on two rows of wall shelves. Or Levine’s “Crystal Newborn” and “Black Newborn,” appropriations of Brancusi’s sculpture.

“Glass can assume an extraordinary range of physical properties and appearances,” says Fox. “I can’t think of any other material that can present itself in that many forms.”

In addition to the pieces they’ve given LACMA, Greenberg and Steinhauser have loaned works from their collection and helped to underwrite the show. In the living room of their Brentwood home, they’re surrounded by glass works as well as traces of their newer interest, photography. They’ve donated a collection of photographs to the J. Paul Getty Museum, on view in “Eliot Porter: In the Realm of Nature” through Sept. 17. The couple enthusiastically talk over each other and finish each other’s sentences. They want to mention every artist in the room. About 30 are represented on shelves and in showcases throughout the house. And this is just a fraction of their holdings; more than half is in storage.

What drew them to glass?

“Light, generally light attracts you to glass,” says Steinhauser, an attorney. “What light does to glass, especially if it’s in color.”

“Its transparency,” says Greenberg, head of Electro Rent Corp., a technology equipment rental company. “It’s an object you can hold. It’s fascinating.”

“I think we really got started in 1975,” says Steinhauser. “And then it was contemporary glass I especially liked. It was new, no one else had it, it was cutting edge, you were supporting a new art form, you got to know the artists -- it was relatively inexpensive.”

They became regular visitors to galleries that specialized in glass and learned much from Ruth Summers of the now-closed Kurland / Summers gallery in West Hollywood. They also dropped in on del Mano Gallery in Los Angeles, Heller Gallery in New York, William Traver Gallery in Seattle and Caterina Tognon Arte Contemporanea in Venice, Italy. They read books and subscribed to magazines. They traveled to fairs, a favorite being the Sculpture Objects & Functional Art expositions (SOFA) in Chicago and New York. They befriended artists.

Over three decades, they’ve purchased about 500 pieces of glass art, beginning with a budget maximum of $100 for the first two years, and increasing to recent pieces in the five figures. About 100 of the works have been donated to museums.

The Czech connection

IN the early ‘80s, Summers had a show of Czech glass artists, and she mentioned to the couple that several LACMA curators had looked at the pieces with great interest. Greenberg and Steinhauser arranged a meeting with one, Tina Oldknow, an expert in ancient glass and now curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York state. They proposed to buy contemporary pieces for the museum, the beginning of their support for LACMA’s glass collection.

Today, two Czech works have pride of place in an alcove of the collectors’ living room. These are hefty pieces -- a geometrically constructed egg by Ivan Mares and an enigmatic pyramid by Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtova. The LACMA exhibition dramatically highlights a Mares work, the giant “Nautilus,” which stands 3 feet high and is cast in a pale green glass with internal swirls that look like frozen ocean. Libensky and Brychtova, husband and wife who work together, are represented by two massive pieces: “Arcus I” and “Green Eye of the Pyramid.”

The Czechs “always had two very good schools that specialized in glass,” Steinhauser says. As a result, “They’re probably the best sculptors today in glass.”

Another favorite of the couple is Michael Glancy, who makes urns and platters out of engraved blown glass that he dresses in casings of copper and gold. In 1984, Greenberg saw his work at the Heller Gallery and ended up buying one, in green. Greenberg calls it their first serious acquisition, and today it sits in a display case at home with several other Glancys. The exhibition includes three works by the artist, all on loan from them.

Sylvia Levenson is a more recent favorite. In the show she’s responsible for “Pink Cinderella,” a pair of glass slippers that look innocent enough -- until you see what’s inside. A single tack rises from where one’s heel would sit -- a painful reminder of the Cinderella story and a wry comment on female accouterments. At home, Greenberg and Steinhauser have a new Levenson, a black-and-white photograph of the artist as a crawling baby -- upon which she has adhered three-dimensional pink flowers made of glass. “A perfect transitional work,” Greenberg says, laughing.

“We’ve always believed as we’ve grown the collection that you have an obligation to share the work, “ says Steinhauser, “whether you have people come into your house or help underwrite catalogs or shows like the one at LACMA or loan pieces to other museums.” Although LACMA is the favored recipient of their largesse, they have also given glass works to the Corning Museum, the De Young Museum in San Francisco, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta.

Greenberg says, “The only thing more fun than buying this art is giving it away.”

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‘Glass: Material Matters’

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays, Sundays

Ends: Dec. 10

Price: $5 to $9

Contact: (323) 857-6000; www.lacma.org