It’s hard to get excited about looking at glass. Looking at glass is like looking at trees, the night sky or your kid — familiarity breeds blindness. But witness a cypress tree standing in black swamp water, a shooting star tracing the blackness or your kid laughing hard, and trees, stars or kids magically reappear — I can see!
Murano: Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design lets us see glass again. That old, mysterious, manmade material is transformed following its journey through the 2,000 degree kilns on the Italian isle of Murano. The alchemic fusion of sand and heat that makes the glass in our windows and cars and office buildings is the same stuff glass makers use — and have used, for 700 years — to make Venetian glass. The difference is in the eyes of the designers, and the hands of the men blowing life into that molten blob at the end of the pipe.
This is blown glass — vessels, vases, bottles and bowls. With that description, these objects part company with the ordinary. The glass on display here is dated from the early 20th century into the early 21st century. The pieces follow a 100-year chronology, arranged in transparent plastic cases, each object standing at waist level. Running through the decades, the pieces subtly show their age in styles ranging from early century Traditional era, to the Barely There Bauhaus 30s, through the 60s late Lava Lamp period, on to the present day, turn of the century Post Modernist What the Hell Is That Thing era. We could attribute styles, object by object, with the decades of the century, and perhaps develop a thoughtful historical parallel with concurrent art historical movements, but that would be… oh, I don’t know… boring?
Let’s just look at the glass. “Mosaic Footed Vase” (1914) by Artisti Barovier is a glass chalice. It’s shaped like a goblet balanced on a bell. From top rim to mid-torso, translucent red lines spiral down a yellow background. The red lines on the front face traverse the red line on the back face, producing the illusion of movement reminiscent of a barbershop pole. The center of the belly of the chalice is translucent light blue, overlaid with two horizontal cobalt lines resembling lips baring dark purple teeth. Tiny yellow amoeba shapes float between the teeth. The bottom of the chalice is nestled into the top of the bright red bell-shaped pedestal base. It’s just a piece of glass.
All these words. The object wastes the words. This little piece of miracle glass, seen here, in your backyard, at Aunt Millie’s or atop the coffee machine at the Exxon station — seen anywhere — this object would arrest breath and give pause to any biped with a brain. This piece of glass by any measure — qualitative, verbal, historical, artistic — is beautiful beyond words.
But let’s keep trying. “Pulcini (Chicks)” by Alessandro Pianon and “Pulcino” by Peter Pelzel are five glass vessels atop wire chicken legs. Like Anzolo Fuga’s “Flowers” in the next case, these are quirky, whimsical and, compared with the other glass here, a little hallucinatory. These pieces chirp out their era: We’re in the 1960s.
One chick is shaped like a spherical tear drop, his pinched beak poking through a glass bocce ball of speckled skin the color of a lucid orange peel. Another blue pulcino is shaped like a dolphin floating upside down, his pale blue body cradled in orange stripes, his glass body heavy, irregular and mottled. These pieces — the chicks and the flowers — convey the familiar Murano attributes of surface clarity and vibrant colors, but their coy and self-conscious frivolity look forced among their cousins. It’s like seeing a beautiful face fall to pieces with a goofy smile.
For about 2,000 years, the man who wielded the blowpipe was also the designer of the piece. Around the mid-19th century, artists, architects and designers were drafted by owners of the Venice glass factories to design new, inspiring and more marketable designs. The medium also attracted artists who wished to stick their hot inquisitive hands into the seductive, 6,000-year-old medium. The initial relationship between the hands-off designers and the skilled artisans — the men who were intimately familiar with the difficult artistry of production — was often strained and unproductive. Things changed, compromises and partnerships were forged, and in the last hundred years, the greatest stylistic and technical breakthroughs have been realized by these unions. This show is largely the fruit of new ideas and old hands.
The fusion between Thomas Stearns, a poet, sculptor and philosopher from Oklahoma, and legendary Italian maestro Francesco Ongaro of the famed Venini line was silent, soulful and ground-shattering for the world of fine glass. Stearns spoke no Italian, but his close communications with Ongaro produced a peculiar magic. “La sentinella di Venezia” (1962) is a tall, off-axis, closed container shaped like an off-kilter missile. This piece deviates from Murano tradition by shape — it is clunky and asymmetrical — and by surface treatment, which is ruddy, rough and expressionist. In an essay from the catalogue, Susan Sacks relays that Stearns “saw Venice melting because of acid rain from the mainland. The air and water pollution evident everywhere concerned him deeply.” “La sentinella” is an early alarm to the hazards of industrial production, which reasonably included white hot glassmaker furnaces. Artists can be conflicted.
Stearns’ early environmentalism, his infusion of abstract expressionist sensibilities and his humanist take on the vitreous, luminous material changed Murano glass for the many who would follow him to these famous furnaces.
The youngest piece in this show is “Flames of Water” (2000) by Giorgio Vigna. Extravagant, eccentric and funny, this piece is a perfect entry for Murano glass into the new millennium. Copper or steel stems sprout from a thick clear glass vase the shape and size of a rugby ball. I say copper or steel, but I have been tricked by material illusion before — the stems could be glass, graphite or epoxied licorice sticks. On the copper, stems bloom petals with bright red stamens buried in the center hull of the blossoms. The faces of the flowers are torn spiral discs of thick glass, organically asymmetrical and slightly cupped, opening up to the viewer. The clear fat glass of the vase and petals reflect the color and light of the objects — walls, pedestal and people — behind the piece. Its structure and surface change as you circle the sculpture. It’s the perfect rendition of a vase of flowers constructed from a completely incompatible material. That’s what strikes me as funny — it’s an alien rendition of a natural phenomenon produced with materials seemingly unavailable on this planet. Virtual flowers for the new millennium.
Welcome to the newest Murano century.
The exhibit Murano: Glass from the Olnick Spanu Collection will be on display through December 31 at the Mint Museum of Craft + Design, 220 North Tryon Street. Call 704-337-2009 for more info.
This article appears in Aug 3-9, 2005.
