North Gallery, 10th February–6th March 2010

Glass – a short introduction
It is now twenty years since Thomas Buechner (Founding Director of the New York-based Corning Museum of Glass, established 1951) observed how post-war developments had ‘profoundly alter[ed]’ the three and a half thousand-year course of glass from its traditional base in the domain of utility to ‘a worldwide medium of the fine arts.’ This phenomenon is traced in greater detail by Susanne Frantz in her book Contemporary Glass (1989). As Frantz relates, glass-working was, in pre-Industrial times, the province of artisans. However, the Industrial Revolution ushered in a period of factory-based mass production of glass, as well as a division of labour between the designers and fabricators of glass objects. At the same time, Frantz points out, the employment by industry of fine artists as designers established glass as a ‘true medium for artistic expression.’

Although Frantz acknowledges glass-art precursors who were active in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she notes that hot glass-working took place in factory settings, and that the roles of artist/designers and glassblowers/fabricators remained distinct. In Frantz’s view, the artistic potentials of glass-working remained dormant until the roles of artist and crafter converged in the early 1960s with the advent of so-called ‘studio glass.’

Frantz identifies Harvey Littleton as an early exponent of studio-based blown glass in the United States. Littleton’s stress on the importance of work being conceived and made by the same person set the tone for studio glass-working in the 1960s. Littleton also privileged the ‘idea’ over ‘technique’ – a standpoint that, in the context of Modernism, claimed for glass the status of a fine art medium.