July 1- 7, 2004

art

Blown Away

Tiffany Studios, Pond Lily (1904), 18 1/4 inches high, Favrile glass shades.

The Museum of American Glass' latest exhibition offers a stunning collection from the biggest names in art nouveau glass.

by Robin Rice

Glass under glass! Each vitrine reveals extravagant new forms, patterns and color combinations. Although "Glass Threads" at the Museum of American Glass in Wheaton Village in Millville, N.J., reflects an important work of scholarship on the part of museum curator Gay LeCleire Taylor, visitors will find it difficult to tear their eyes away from the sheer fantastical gorgeousness of it all to read the signage in the show.

The "Threads" of the title suggest both visual threads of multicolored glass embedded and wrapped around glass objects and "threads" of human knowledge, authorship and inspiration connecting four American companies that produced art nouveau glass. Taylor conceived the exhibition when she discovered six previously unknown letters in an archive given to the museum in 1994 by the children of Martin Bach Jr., the manager of Durand Art Glass in Vineland, N.J.

Bach received the letters, five from Emil Larson and one from William Wedenbine, at a pivotal moment in 1924, when one glass company was closing and another opening and three men who had worked together parted, at least temporarily, to go to other jobs. In their letters, Larson and Wedenbine, both highly skilled glass blowers, reflect on the past and express hopes for the future. This information helped Taylor to trace the interwoven histories of the four companies: legendary Tiffany; Quezal (though it was named for the colorful quetzal bird, it's pronounced kwuh-ZAHL) Art Glass and Decorating Company with its factory in Maspeth, N.Y.; Durand; and the Imperial Glass Company in Bellaire, Ohio, a producer of carnival pressed glass.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, son of the founder of the jewelry store, opened Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in Corona, N.Y., in 1892. There's one leaded Tiffany lamp that was shown in the Paris Exposition of 1900, in recognition of the company's legendary contributions in that area, but other Tiffany lamps with blown glass shades outshine the leaded one, at least in this show.

A 1904 multistemmed metal Pond Lily table lamp has, by my count, 11 iridescent fluted gold blossom shades. A cool blue glimmer at the bases quickly modulates to sunshine and champagne at their ruffled edges. A floor lamp, circa 1902, with five bronze pad feet, utilizes a single inverted bowl shade in a green, opal and gold "wave" pattern.

Tiffany was a designer, not a glass blower. His trademark, Favrile, meant that each piece was hand fabricated and unique. He hated repetition and, though he sketched designs for his glass blowers, he gave them plenty of artistic freedom. Tiffany's inspirations, like those of other art nouveau artists, came in two categories: natural forms, mostly botanical in the case of blown glass, and a slew of art historical sources, particularly Japanese, Chinese and Islamic.

Taylor has organized the exhibition around specific design and technical features shared among the four firms. Examples of the classic art nouveau jack-in-the-pulpit vase shape were made by all, though Tiffany's is not only the tallest but the most amazingly colored, with delicate blue-green striations along the flared golden edges of the turquoise-throated flower caused by careful reheating of cooling layered glass.

An Egyptian craze, sparked by the discovery of the tomb of King Tut in 1922, spurred on the fashion for iridescent glass, rich metals and jewel-like colors. A surface pattern in which bands of hot glass in different colors are twisted into regular spirals was named King Tut by Durand, and is still identified by that term today. Variations of this technique produce agate or marbleized surfaces, waves, feathers, vines and heart-shaped leaves and petals.

For "spider webbing," tiny filaments of melting glass are wrapped over a surface hot enough to make them stick but cool enough to allow them to retain their three-dimensional integrity. A "zipper" effect is obtained when threads are laid vertically over a horizontally ridged vessel. The piece is then reheated and enlarged, melting the threads, and breaking the lines of color into squared-off fragments.

Over time, glass devitrifies and becomes opaque. It develops a rainbow iridescence through long burial. Glass makers admired this mutable coloration. By the 1870s, several companies could make lustered glass. Tiffany was able to produce the shimmering surfaces with the aid of emigrant British glass chemist Arthur Nash.

Nash was a commercial coup, but one conclusion which seems to emerge from Taylor's history is that the very best glass was not very profitable. Almost every company which produced it was partly underwritten by idealistic supporters. The one-of-a-kind divisions tended to go out of business or be replaced by mold-blown production lines.

This exhibition and its catalogue offer a rare opportunity to see glass from important private collections. After you see the show, you'll want the beautiful catalogue, fully illustrated with grouped examples and enlarged details as lush and complex as any abstract expressionist painting. Reading at leisure, you won't regret ignoring those text panels in the museum.

GLASS THREADS: TIFFANY-QUEZAL-IMPERIAL-DURAND — Through Jan. 2, Museum of American Glass at Wheaton Village, Millville, N.J.,800-998-4552