2001 Matthew Kangas on Robert Willson

Here's an example of writing on glass from 2001. The year was filled with academic views on glass as several writers stepped in to fill the need for a critical voice that had been asked for the previous decade. In 2001 Matthew Kangas was asking for glass artists to move beyond decoration. Kangas and James Yood were writing reviews of glass art from their perspective as accomplished art critics which used that particular language and voice of authority. Robin Rice was working as a critic in residence at the Creative Glass Center of America. These writers integrated glass with art in their writing. Was it because they believed in it's potential as artist's material? Was it because they wanted to document, defend and champion a new art movement? Motives aside, Matthew Kangas' book "Robert Willson Image Maker" is one of the triumphs in glass writing for the year.

2001 Matthew Kangas:

"Willson was one of the first Americans to work on Murano, the island of Venice famous for glassblowing. There he collaborated with maestros believed to be the best in the world. He was preceded by Americans Eugene Berman and Ken Scott in the early 1950s. Later Thomas Sterns, in 1962, and the first representatives of the studio glass movement--Dale Chihuly in 1968 and Richard Marquis in 1969--went to Murano to learn about glass. Unlike Willson, these Americans designed for the Venini glassworks, and their collaboration lasted but a year or so. Richard Marquis was the only one among them to make a substantial body of his own work on Murano.

Other aspects of Willson's work, and his approach to it, strike me as meaningful in the context of glass. I say 'in the context of glass' because it is clear that Willson was attracted to other materials, such as clay, bronze, and watercolors, even though glass was his favorite. I find it interesting that he moved so easily between two and three dimension, developing a lasting relationship with glaass and watercolors[...]

Kangas, M. Foreward to "Robert Willson Image Maker." 2001

[...]Willson took the vaporetto across the lagoon each morning to Ars Murano. From his early days at Toso with two, three, or four pieces completed per year, Willson progressed after 1981 to as many as one or two dozen works each summer. Again, [Luciano] Ravagnan [Ravagnan Gallery on St. Mark's] remembers the warmth of affection toward Willson once he stepped off the boat: 'On Murano, he was such an open man. One day I took the boat with him and it was amazing, everyone greeted him, but everyone!'

'We called him sempreverde,' [Elio] Raffaeli smiled, 'because he'd return each year with all new 'leaves' or ideas for us. He was like a tree, the sempreverede, or evergreen.'[...]

During these years, Willson developed and refined four major themes. The female figure, the landscape, the sphere, and the animal were devised and repeated wit Raffaeli from 1985 to 1997. Selections from each category demonstrate how Willson's final period matured into a ravishing and impressive body of work. Like Matisse, he accomodated and adapted to old age and infirmity. Because he was not required to do the actual construction, Willson was able to participate as actively as he wished during the creation of each work, to oversee refinements, try out new ideas, and, eventually, embark on entirely new projects--his glass-and-steel sculptures, the crowning achievements of his career.

Willson's favored version of the human figure, the big-breasted female, has roots in his Calithump woodcuts of 1934 and in Mesoamerican art, specifically the Tlatilco culture. Willson's glass figures are quite close in size to seated pre-Columbian terra-cottas, partly due to the exigencies of the hot shop (larger work could not fit through the oven doorway) and partly in an attempt to approximate the devotional character of the Mesoamerican religious figures.

[...] Ruins of Early Venus (c. 1985), a combination lower female torso and rocky landscape, can be traced to several early undated drawings and was made in several versions. The open-topped loin forms surround inner organs suggestive of ovaries or a womb (similar to an idea in Creation [1976]) above a blood-red center, common to all versions. Fecundity is the underlying theme of these works, with the clear quality of the glass acting as a water metaphor and underscoring the maritime origins of the goddess Venus. The work was perhaps influenced by the female glass sculptures of Jean Arp that Willson saw at Costantini's La Fucina degli Angeli Gallery.

[...] In his memoir, Willson said, 'I would like to see the use of glass in larger standing sculptures and in relief walls made of assembled parts of heavy glass.' One of the advantages of longevity is the chance to fulfill long-held dreams that require time. Willson's patience must have been enormous. Considering that he began working in Italy at the age of forty-seven, he may have rushed to make up for lost time. By 1986, when he was seventy-four, he devised and supervised construction of his first large-scale 'relief wall,' Fiesta: Everybody Come and Play, acquired by the Texas Military Institute, a private secondary preparatory school in San Antonio. The eight separate panels are set into an 8-foot-high open steel frame. Three of the panels depict stylized male and female figures , while another three show Willson's characteristic psuedo-petroglyph stick figures in jumping and dancing poses. Three glass spheres adorn the panel's tops, like carnival or fiesta decorations. Fiesta: Everybody Come Play sets in motion a series of large-scale constructions that are among the artist most important works.

[...] Door for All the Horses and the People is even more ambitious, a single see-through 'door' with rectangular and square poured panels of glass set into steel frames. (Hank Murta Adam's wall-mounted Map [1996], made of cast glass and sharing Willson's frontal positioning and imagery, is an interesting parallel by a much younger artist.) [...]

[...] Witness to the Mexican Revolution, veteran of World War II, expatriate American in Cold War Italy, and artist influential in reviving the artistic credibility of Murano glass, Robert Willson made art that is accessible, open-ended, and resonant with complex as well as simple meanings. He attempted something few others achieved: creating solid glass sculpture that qualified as art. His rich legacy will be the benchmark for those who come after."

Kangas, M. [excerpt] "Robert Willson Image-Maker" Pace-Wilson, San Antonio. 2001. pp 90.

Archives of American Art: Littleton Interview

Joan Falconer Byrd interviews Harvey Littleton in 2001:

"MR. LITTLETON: We spent most of our time digging holes for these 100-foot poles. And if you had to dig a hole for a 100-foot pole by hand – and they were quite big around, because a tree that long – it was something. So we spent most of our time digging holes or ditches and not very much time going to school. We once passed the word down the ditch we were digging. And, we found there was 1,200 years of college education and teaching experience in that ditch. It was quite a place.

Well, finally, after six months of that nonsense, I was shipped overseas to the 849th Signal Intelligence Unit in North Africa. So we landed in Oran in March or April 1943. And we were shipped then by train in the, literally, the "40 and 8 cars." That is, they're freight cars, which would handle either 40 men or 8 horses. And they didn't clean them out in between. It took us two days to go from Oran to Algiers, only a couple hundred miles. It was amazing.

Well, the war was still on in North Africa, so I got a battle star from that, I think. At the headquarters we did some more training. And I remember I sort of misbehaved a bit. I got sick and when I came back from the hospital to the outfit, I told the duty sergeant that I had gone back to work. And, I told the sergeant at work that I was on duty. So I got – finally, they caught up with me after a couple of weeks, and I got my strength back digging a garbage pit. Four feet by four feet.

So, you see, I wasn't really a good soldier. However, I had a nickname in that outfit [Smorgasbord]."

Oral history interview with Harvey K. Littleton, 2001 Mar. 15, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Accessed April 5, 2009. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/oralhistories/transcripts/little01.htm

2001

In this time line I pull quotes to illustrate a thread in popular and scholarly writing and criticism about glass. Here we will see current glass artists defending their art against the accusations and separating themselves from these stereotypes and, hopefully, find out how and where the now-common opinion was born. Fundamentally, the general thesis seems to be born of the question, What Is Art? This question I will leave to others to answer, here I am only documenting the written history of a popular way of thinking and a popular taste.

2001 Sylva Petrova:

“It appears that means (craftsmanship and technology) themselves become the goals and therefore many glassworks lose one aspect that everyone pretends to include in them: artistic expression… It may be this fact that makes some of modern art’s world renowned personalities convinced that glass as a whole does not deserve their attention.”

Petrova, S. Czech Glass. Gallery Prague, 2001.

2001 Sheila Farr:

"Tacoma is building a $63 million Museum of Glass, scheduled to open next summer, and with a name like that, you'd expect the first show to be, well - glass, right?

To that director Josi Callan has a prompt reply: "Don't forget the colon."

That colon precedes the rest of the museum's title: International Center for Contemporary Art.

And one of the museum's opening exhibits will have nothing at all to do with glass. Expect that kind of programing to continue.

At a walk-through of the site yesterday, Callan and architect Arthur Erickson unveiled a glimpse at a bold structure that will offer more than a place to display and create glass art. It's evolving as a wide-ranging institution that could offer strong competition to other regional museums, including the nearby Tacoma Art Museum.

It's a long way from the seven-year-old original concept as The Chihuly Center for Glass, Callan said.

"We don't use the words `glass art' or `glass artist' here," she insisted yesterday. "We feel that it marginalizes the artists." Although glass impresario Dale Chihuly was associated with the original idea, he plays no role in the museum now. "He's just a good buddy, a good friend," Callan insisted."

Farr, Sheila. "Museum on the rise Tacoma building has art of glass ... and more. " The Seattle Times (Seattle, WA). (Sept 7, 2001): B1. General OneFile. Gale. Seattle Public Library. 1 Apr. 2009. Gale Document Number:CJ78021210

2001 Matthew Kangas:

"Two artists of differing styles and materials, Hank Murta Adams at Elliott Brown Gallery and John Moilanen at Two Bells Tavern, offer their versions of representational art. Both condense and abbreviate recognizable imagery, but with distinct results.

Adams, 45, lives in Troy, N.Y., but has long ties to Seattle and the Pilchuck Glass School, where he studied in 1981 after graduating from Tennessee Tech in Cookeville, Tenn. He also spent significant time (1988-1994) as head designer at Blenko Glass Co. in Milton, W.Va., and has had solo exhibits of his cast-glass sculptures in New York City, San Francisco and Vienna.

Adams' status as a major American glass artist has a lot to do with how he handles a perplexing problem: how to bring up the size and scale of work that tends to be diminutive due to technical details such as the size of glass-furnace openings. Unlike Pilchuck artists Dale Chihuly or William Morris, Adams is not a glassblower but a glass-caster. In his new work, he attempts once again to complicate people's expectations of what glass can be. He does so, this time for his fourth Seattle show since 1986, by combining cast-glass elements with cast-plaster ones, and assembling them all with copper staples and wires.

Although all the new works share this material combination, there is no sense of the usual unending series approach, where glass artists do the same piece over and over. Instead, some of the works are wall-mounted, some pedestal size. Some employ found objects for which molds have been made before the glass or plaster is poured. Not wholly original, Adams is borrowing his found-object idea from better-known glass artists like Howard Ben Tré, Richard Posner and, above all, the late Italo Scanga, but he brings to the process his own identity.

In a few of the wall pieces, such as "Isolate," "Block Trinity" and "Knuckles," black and white glass and plaster shapes are in symmetrical compositions closer to design than abstract art.

The pedestal pieces fare better, mixing references to antique American glass bottles, ornamental Jell-O molds, animal decoys and even perhaps a well-known Swedish vodka bottle. In these, the Philadelphia native faces a bigger challenge for sculptors — how to make the front and back of the sculpture equally interesting. Despite silhouettes reinforced by black and white colors, Adams falls short of fully addressing this crucial problem. "Podsticksweetie Cluster" and "Spindlecluster" overcome it, however, and pass the 360-degree, walk-around test: Everything looks good from every angle.

Even better, "Bombcluster" and "Can Call" transcend the arbitrary look of many of the assemblages and suggest, respectively, spent nuclear-waste storage containers and a pile of ominous, portable explosives. If Adams could make his art more issue-oriented — a big order for business-as-usual decorative glass — and build on the strengths of "Bombcluster," the evidence of technical fabrication could be outweighed by deeper meaning."

Kangas, M. "Painter, glass artist break out new works." Friday, November 2, 2001. The Seattle Times.Accessed April 22, 2009. http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20011102&slug=visart02

2001 James Yood:

"Many art media concern themselves with color and light, but at the end of the day these are the trump cards of glass. In no other medium do color and light so suggestively interweave, shifting, changing and endlessly cross-pollinating. Among the most nuanced seekers after the eternally sensual and elusive mysteries of light and color in glass is Stephen Rolfe Powell, whose upbeat vessels for more than a decade have bubbled, blistered and erupted in fugues of chromatic suggestion. He can be seen as an accomplished color-field painter, though he neither paints nor makes color-fields. Instead, his world provides globular prismatic bursts, an irrepressible ebullience of hue and a tintinnabulation of tincture that maintains, as Van Gogh put it, that "color expresses something by itself."

But what's the point of color without form? The pointillist play of Powell's blots of pure color is tremendously energized and reinforced by the very shapes they come to sheathe and define. He makes vessels, round and bulbous, curvaceous and ribald, replete with generous Intimations of the sensuality of the human body. Their lobes and swellings inevitably suggest buttocks or breasts or testicles, the soft and vulnerable zones of sexuality, in a warm eroticism heightened by the fantastic color scheme. The weight of these lobes, the sense of their being pulled down by gravity, is countered by the exquisite tension of Powell's attenuated and elongated necks, which strain upward in some Parmigianino rhythm, as if these vessels were simultaneously bulb and sprout. Through these forms Powell makes color volumetric, enhancing its possibilities[...]

[...]There have been subtle shifts in his work, as Powell tries to push the edges of his process and explore new strategies. The necks of his vessels, which a decade ago were modestly tapered, have recently been stretched close to breaking point and often are as long as the bodies they surmount. He has tried to create larger murrine to ease the transition from neck to body, to have the color of the neck ooze into the body in some handsome attenuation. And his color too is intensifying, as he shifts from translucency to opacity within the same piece.

His titles exude the "keep-on-truckin"' amiability that is at the core of his work. Usually three words long, these curious names-Tangerine Cheeks Smith, Piranha Gasp Johnson, Purple Zippy Mania, Naive Laughing Cheeks, Undulating Groan Jones, Purple Aloof Cleavage, Pyronic Marilyn Monroe- are important to Powell for their free-and-easy patter. A word or two in a title does describe some aspect of the piece-a shape or color or feeling-but the total effect recalls the 1970s sensibility in which this artist was formed.

Things are good for Powell-his work is successful in the marketplace, he enjoys teaching and lives with his wife and two sons on a 44-acre farm outside Danville. He recently co produced a documentary on the Muranese glass master Lino Tagliapietra's visit to Kentucky and is looking forward to an exhibition of his own work at Galleria Rossella Junck in Venice next year. There is not an iota of fatigue or closure in his commitment to his quest, to have color sing again, to create in glass some vestige of the pursuits he sees in artists such as Mark Rothko, Claude Monet, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Georges Seurat. Colorists, it is sometimes observed, are born not made Their pursuit of subtlety and beauty, their search for the optical exhilaration that begins where language ends and taste begins, certainly stretches as far as Stephen Rolfe Powell's cooling pools of breathtaking color in Kentucky."

Yood, J. "Stephen Rolfe Powell." American Craft. June/July 2001. http://www.stephenrolfepowell.com/articles/amercraft/index.html
Accessed April 23, 2009.

2001 Robin Rice:

""The end result is what I aim for -- not the perfection of 'Wow, what an amazing technical feat!' " explains Beth Lipman, a fall, 2001 Fellow at the Creative Glass Center of America. Nevertheless, Lipman undeniably wows viewers with the glittering virtuosity of her three-dimensional recreations of 17th and 18th century still life paintings, each incorporating 50 to 100 pieces of glass.

Much of Lipman's earlier work dealt with abundance and excess and, especially, food, which she values as a "universal known thing." An early collaboration with a fellow student combined real food like melted sugar and jelly beans with glass images of lobsters, bread loaves, and fish. The paintings which serve as models for Lipman's current series, "The Still Life Revisited," are rich with meaning and sensuous surfaces. On one level, still life painting traditionally pays homage to the bounty of nature, God's gift to humanity. More superficially but inescapably, these paintings recorded the affluent circumstances of the artist or patron who commissioned them: fine linens, crystal and fresh, abundant food, the stuff of life. Countering this show of vanity, many historic still lifes were vanitas paintings, reminders of the brevity of life, which emphasized fleeting material pleasure as a contrast to infinite, ineffable spiritual joy.

Representations of decadence, decay and waste are reminders of mortality. They include tipped-over wine glasses, insects and the damage caused by them, as well as broken stems and bruises. Split melons in John F. Francis' Still Life with Fruit, one of the works Lipman is recreating at CGCA, seem almost eviscerated, while cascading grapes hang like bloody gobbets. Just as the bloom on a peach fades, so does youth and life. These paintings remind us that though life may be pleasant at the moment and possessions plentiful, "You can't take it with you." Yet, paradoxically, although the subjects of the paintings, their owners, and authors are dust today, the represented scene remains vivid and fresh for our contemplation.

At a third remove from the original living fruit, Lipman's glass versions are even more ambiguous. Glass is solid and almost imperishable, though fragile by definition. Moreover, representing painted objects in clear glass, as she does in her reconstruction of the Francis painting, perversely dissolves solidity in an optically challenging maze of reflections and transparencies. "It's about the essence of the lusciousness of what's going on," Lipman says.

She chose the Francis piece because, John Francis (1808-1886), the most famous American still life painter of his day, lived and worked in Philadelphia where Lipman plans to show this sculpture at the Mangel Gallery in early 2002. For this show, she's also basing sculptures on works by another important Philadelphia still life artist Raphaelle Peale (1774-1825).

The subject of still life attracted Lipman in part because it has always been considered a secondary or lower form of painting -- not as elite, challenging or content-driven as portraiture or "history painting," for example. Glass and fiber (Lipman's other primary medium), are often considered second-class materials for fine arts; so she sees them as akin to still life.

Furthermore, Lipman explains, "I'm a woman working in a material (glass) that 30 years ago a woman wasn't allowed to touch." Her observation reminds us that for centuries aspiring women painters were not allowed to work from the nude (to protect their "modesty"), but still life was considered a suitably ladylike subject and one which was not overly challenging.

Nevertheless, Lipman's glass still lives are challenging and labor intensive. Transcending the pejorative "crafts" label, she presents her work as a consummate complete sculpture. In the hot shop, Lipman works almost expressionistically, knifing a gather of soft solid glass on the end of a metal rod into rugged facets to suggest rather than represent individual, life-size grapes and turning out dozens of peaches in short order. "I'm striving for drawing in glass, not an academic rendition but a translation of objects in my voice and my material." She is not bound to functional perfection when making the props like baskets, spoons and sugar bowls. Lids lack flanges, baskets lack symmetry and slumped spoons are a little flat. In the finished work, they will not be handled. The carefully calculated arrangements of glass objects are permanently mounted on tables built by woodworker Richard McCoy to Lipman's specifications.

An admirer of outsider art, Lipman describes herself as a "craft child," who frequently helped her mother with tole painting and other similar projects. At one time, she disdained the decorative "country" craft aesthetic, but now she respects "the humility of making utilitarian decorative objects" and freely borrows useful techniques. For example, she painted crosshatch tole stokes in fire-on enamels to give a basket in the Francis work a sense of texture.

The most ambitious piece she began at CGCA was a version of Wolfgang Heimbach's Table Still Life with Maid behind a Window. "This piece will be a summary of how I feel about the viewer interacting with the work," she explains. The glass fruit in the McCoy's wooden shadow box will again be clear. In the painting, a maid behind a cracked window eyes the fruit, perhaps covetously. In Lipman's version, the window will be a mirror reflecting the viewer's contemplation of her three-dimensional banquet, a frozen ghostly array of glittering overabundance in which food and consumption have political and social implications. Though it has plenty of intellectual content, Lipman's sculpture is powerfully seductive. When the viewer is literally part of the picture, it is complete and instantly contemporary."

Rice, Robin. "Beth Lipman" Wheaton Arts, NJ. Creative Glass Center of America. 2001. website accessed May 2, 2009. http://www.wheatonarts.org/creativeglasscenteramerica/criticresidency/robinrice/lipmanbeth