Un Casco di Banane

Banana chandelier
designed by Stefano Faoro
produced by Simone Cenedese of
Linea Vetro Murano.
2007

Photo Credit: http://www.promovetro.com/portal/concorso/blog_tot.php

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.

Rachel Spence on innovation in Italian glass

A comprehensive article by arts journalist Rachel Spence about trends in modern glass affecting it's birthplace. She has many great articles over at Financial Times.

2009 Rachel Spence:

"If the island of Murano wants to survive, it must turn its back on drinking glasses and embrace the vogue for contemporary sculpture in glass. Since the first workshops lit their furnaces nearly a millennium ago, the island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon has been synonymous with the finest glassware in the world. As aesthetic styles evolved over the centuries, the glassmasters kept pace. Their wafer-thin Renaissance goblets, baroque chandeliers and modernist vessels were in demand across the world.

Recently, however, the island’s fortunes have plummeted. A tide of cheap glassware from Asia has torn into profits. The pre-eminence of Murano’s masters has been challenged by glassmakers from elsewhere, such as the late Czech sculptor Stanislav Libensky, and Dale Chihuly, the Seattle-based figurehead of the American “studio glass” movement whose other stars include William Morris and Toots Zynsky. Although Chihuly learnt much of his craft on Murano, the island’s own furnaces have been slow to innovate.

The latest recession has swept the industry close to the abyss. Sales have dropped by an average of 40 per cent. According to FILCEM-CGIL, the union that represents the artisans, more than half of its 900 workers are on government-subsidised home leave. A further 100 have been laid off entirely.

Yet visitors to the Venice Biennale this autumn could be forgiven for thinking that Murano has never been in better shape. A clutch of exhibitions has been devoted to glass with many new works realised on the island.

Historically, the most significant show is in the Venice Pavilion in the biennale gardens. Built in 1934 to showcase local decorative arts such as glass, ceramics and lace, the pavilion was abandoned in the 1970s and only re-opened in 2007. This year it is showcasing artists who work on Murano.

Ferruccio Franzoia, the show’s curator, says: “The Veneto region [which owns the pavilion] wanted to show that there is still extraordinary creativity on Murano and remind people of Venice’s history as a crucible of decorative arts.”

Yet to describe many of these works as decorative is a misrepresentation. The austere slabs of Laura de Santillana, their opaque surfaces disturbed by iridescent ripples, have the quality of ancient archetypes. The organic forms of Cristiano Bianchin, their impenetrable surfaces sheathed in woven fabric, are charged with mute, expressive potency. Long fascinated by marine biology and astrophysics, Maria Grazia Rosin has created a multimedia installation where trailing LED-lit threads sway like jellyfish to a moody techno soundtrack above a video projection of a black hole swirling with mercurial liquids. Surely these works possess the metaphysical power of fine art?

“The distinction between decorative arts and fine arts is becoming increasingly artificial,” agrees Franzoia. “These artists use glass as other artists use bronze, marble or wood.”

Rosin, who studied painting at the Fine Arts Academy in Venice, says: “I started using glass after I became interested in the idea of three-dimensional colour on canvas. You could paint in marble but it’s not the same thing at all.”

Rosin’s gallerist in Venice, Caterina Tognon, was one of the first to specialise in glass as fine art. “I could see there was little future in artisanal production,” says Tognon, who opened her first gallery in Bergamo in 1994. “At first, it wasn’t easy but now art critics are opening their horizons.”

Rosin has recently enjoyed a run of solo museum shows, in Venice, Pittsburgh and, next month, in Seattle. Another of Tognon’s regular artists, the late Stanislav Libensky, broke auction records for glass when one of his sculptures sold for $400,000 at Bonhams in 2007. Meanwhile, a recent show by Toots Zynsky, whose exquisite glass-cane sculptures appear to have been carved from spun sugar, was a sell-out: “We sold everything and had to ask her to produce more,” Tognon says.

Tognon has gone a step further with her current exhibition. She invited two artists who have never worked in glass before, Venice-based painter Maria Morganti and Roman installation artist Bruna Esposito, to realise their new pieces on Murano.

By layering small squares of clear and coloured glass with gold and silver leaf, Morganti has created a vast, glowing checkerboard that pulsates with visceral, painterly power. Esposito has created an installation that uses different materials – tiny balls of straw, clear glass cylinders enclosed by metal propellers – to conjure a poetic lagoon landscape. In subordinating the material to just one aspect of an ensemble piece, these works signal a new approach to glass.

A similar vision animates Glass Stress, an exhibition of 45 artists at Palazzo Franchetti. Here, glass is cast into replicas of car tyres by Robert Rauschenberg, blown into amethyst-hued pigeons and their droppings by Jan Fabre, washed with acid in Kiki Smith’s constellation of black eggs, and carved into a table complete with witty, incised place settings by Silvano Rubino. The material proves itself as versatile as the vision of each artist.

Many of the newer pieces in Glass Stress were made in the Murano furnace of Adriano Berengo, the show’s organiser. “I am interested in offering artists the possibility of using glass when they want to in the service of their art,” says the Venice-born entrepreneur.

After a slow start – “the art world was sceptical about glass and the glass world did not approve at all” – Berengo’s business is one of the very few on the island to flourish. He has four showrooms in Venice, more than 6,000 collectors, and relationships with 150 artists.

If Murano is to survive, more furnaces must build relationships with contemporary artists from across the spectrum. Meanwhile glass art is extending its appeal beyond Venice. Earlier this year, Bonhams dedicated its first sale to modern and contemporary glass.

Last year, Berlin saw the city’s first gallery dedicated to the genre open in the heart of its contemporary art scene. Owned by Nadania Idriss, whose passion for glass was sparked when she studied in Seattle, the current show features one of Berengo’s artists, the Lebanese-Canadian Marya Kazoun. Looking at Kazoun’s spectacularly ethereal installation in Glass Stress, it’s easy to see why Idriss is feeling confident."

Spence, R. "Glass conciousness." October 9, 2009. Financial Times. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/ffa13f62-b3c9-11de-98ec-00144feab49a.html

Jessamy Kelly in UK Times

Sometimes you come across articles that state that glass making is a dying art, this is one of them. Previous posts in this blog include a video on Murano hot shops losing business, and a semi-serious article on the top jobs you should go see being performed before they are lost (including glassblower and elephant washer). "There are very few studios left in [Scotland]," Kelly says in the article. And visiting glass artist Karel Novak lamented to me that several large glass factories had closed recently in his country, the Czech Republic, putting a lot of glassblowers out of work. Those involved closely with glass don't see it as an anachronism, with several U.S. cities, towns and regions adding glass as a tourist attraction (Tacoma, Louisville, Hampton Roads) glass is all but a dying art here. However, the growing number of glassblowers and glassmaking facilities doesn't preclude inferior technique, skill, and innovation. A surface glance of glass here in the U.S. would show that glass is flourishing, but a deeper look, such as this article takes in only a few paragraphs, is necessary.

2009 Rachel Devine:

"It’s a rare thing to look at a cocktail and be equally seduced by the shapely glass as the liquid it holds. Jessamy Kelly’s designs, however, are the kind of glasses that could throw a party all by themselves.

Simple and elegant in style, each piece of “art glass” is a limited edition — the sculptural and sensual forms are inspired by the contours of a soft landscape and the curves of the human body.

“It’s all about the material for me,” says Kelly. “I’m very focused on the qualities of material and how I can bring out the best in them.”

Kelly, 30, took her bachelor of arts degree in glass and ceramics at the University of Sunderland before studying for her master of design degree at Edinburgh College of Art in 2002, which included a valuable placement at Edinburgh Crystal as a student glass designer and apprentice.

“There are very few glass blowing studios left in the country,” she says. “What I picked up at Edinburgh Crystal really cemented my passion for glass making.”

Last week she handed in her PhD on glass practices, a comprehensive study of traditional and contemporary techniques, which should make her a “doctor of glass” by the end of the year. She has also been appointed artist-in-residence at Edinburgh College of Art where she will pass on the skills she has learned to other students.

Already a specialist in her field at such a young age, Kelly’s clients include Edinburgh Crystal and the television designer Kevin McCloud’s homeware brand Place.

It’s not difficult to see why her unique, high-end designs are so much in demand. She uses traditional techniques such as kiln casting, fusing and glass blowing to create the complex scultpural [sic]forms.

Kelly channels light by cutting away or manipulating the materials to expose the inherent qualities of glass and ceramics (she often combines the two materials in one piece). The refining process is also a mix of traditional handcrafted techniques such as engraving, diamond cutting and sandblasting.

“Glass and ceramics are materials with many common qualities; processed in similar ways, they are transformed into functional or decorative objects,” she says. “They are however, not often combined in artistic practise. The translucent blend of glass and ceramics intrigues me, when light passes through the materials to reveal an inner beauty and luminosity.”

These are techniques that are slowly dying out, but Kelly hopes her published research and artist-in-residency will help pass them on to a new generation of glass makers.

“A lot of the techniques are very specialised and can be very time consuming when you’re first learning them,” she says. “Unfortunatety, the crystal glass industry has been dying for a while and all those techniques are in danger of being lost. But a few people are still practising and I keep going with it because I enjoy it so much. I’m very much about sharing.” "

Devine, R. "Glassmaker's cutting edge design for life." The Times Online. October 11, 2009. Accessed October 12, 2009. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/architecture_and_design/article6869312.ece

Mona Hatoum in Art in America

2009 Faye Hirsch:

"Mona Hatoum, who exhibits a tableful of her crystal Murano-made grenades in 'Glass Stress,' is present (like many of the other artists in the show) at another venue, in this case a non-biennial exhibition at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia (through Sept. 20). 'Interior Landscape' is a retrospective of 29 works from the past 12 years that are, like the grenades, lovely and ominous in equal measure. The motorized rotating brass lantern in Misbah (2006) casts stars and soldiers, cut out of its surface, as spinning light silhouettes on the walls; suspended barbed wire forms a minimalist cube (Impenetrable, 2009) that builds danger into abstraction. A large globe glowing fiery orange (Hotspot III, 2009) enflames the nations of the earth, traced out in wobbly neon lines. There are also small objects, such as balls of human hair and a silicone rubber brain, which have been placed in glass vitrines alongside the museum's decorative art objects, like moody intruders at a fete galante."

Hirsch, F. "Be afraid, be in love: collateral exhibitions in venice." Art in America, September 2009. p. 113.

Spazio Berengo

2009 Brooks S. Mason:

" Dealer Adriano Berengo, who organised “Glass Stress”, an official collateral exhibition at the 53rd Venice Biennale (until 22 November), is opening a private museum dedicated to glass this November on the island of Murano. The Spazio Berengo will house his permanent collection, as well as travelling exhibitions, in an 18th-century glass factory with a projected cost of €1.5m.

“Glass has been underappreciated and I see this new museum as part of my ongoing efforts to elevate it to fine art,” says Mr Berengo, who has three galleries in Venice, four in Murano and one in Arnhem, Holland. “Peggy Guggenheim inspired me to create this new initiative, and the glass I focus on has nothing to do with design or with the American studio glass movement.”

Over the past 20 years, Mr Berengo—who owns a glass furnace that he permits artists to use on a regular basis—has accumulated a number of prototypes by artists including Kiki Smith, Tony Cragg and Fred Wilson. He has 900 examples in total, spanning the late 1980s to today, and many will be on display. He also has a vast amount of archival material including drawings and videos.

“I think his new space will be a wonderful forum for contemporary glass, especially for Murano, and it should infuse new life into both the island and the medium,” says Tina Oldknow, curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum of Glass in New York state.

Mr Berengo purchased the 12-room building seven years ago for the museum, which will also contain a bookstore dedicated to glassware."

Mason, B. "New private museum on Venice's Murano island." The Art Newspaper. July 1, 2009.

1941

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.

1941 Darrel A. Diehn:
"Glass, one of man's oldest known materials, steeped in centuries of romance, violence and thundering drama, today is one of man's most useful products, and, despite its antiquity, is in many ways as new as tomorrow's newspaper. This magic material, its remarkable characteristics unmatched by any substance known to civilization, was discovered long before the time of Christ.

Its exact "birth" is a subject of scientific difference of opinion, but popular tradition, based on the writings of Pliny, Italian historian, dates it back to a day 5000 years ago when a party of Phoenician sailors debarked to prepare their noon-day meal on a sandy beach of the Mediterranean sea.

There being no rocks on the barren shore to construct a fireplace, the sailors brought cakes of nitrate (sodium nitrate) from their ships, and when the embers of the fire had died down, the sailors beheld a strange new material, a glittering transparent mass never before seen by man, a crude form of glass formed by the fusing of the cakes of nitrate and beach sand.

Modern glass men, well knowing that it requires a fierce heat of great furnaces generating temperatures of 2600-2850 degrees Fahrenheit to properly liquify sand, soda ash and lime (three of the most important ingredients of glass) are inclined to scoff, but the discovery is credited with being something more than a Phoenician fantasy.

The sailors examined the shimmering material with vast interest, but with no more than that displayed by a group of motion picture news weekly men quite recently when a three ton elephant stepped upon a platform with a floor consisting only of a one-half

inch pane of glass. The glass bent but did not break under its terrific live weight load and returned to its normal plane when the huge pachyderm stepped off.

Before discussing the fascinating modern magic of the glass technicians, however, it is well to consider a few things that developed after the discovery of glass, so that we may better understand the gigantic drama of American glass manufacture.

Although the production of glass as we know it today involves tremendous expenditures annually and a processing that has been reduced to an exact science, amazing in its detail, it can be said that fundamentally glass is the result of the fusing of sand, soda ash, lime and certain other ingredients.

Despite this apparent simplicity there is magic in its making, yet no black magic or mystery that characterized the art for about 5000 years, when even murder was invoked to protect the secret of manufacture.

Glass making then was conducted only by master craftsmen who worked behind locked doors, protected by secret guilds whose members were punished by death and their families thrown into prison for any slight attempt to divulge secrets of the craft.

From its accidental discovery by the Phoenicians, glass and its manufacture gradually spread among the Mediterranean peoples, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. To this day some of the most beautiful objects to be found in our museums are examples of ancient Egyptian bottles, vials, decanters in blue whose exquisite quality baffles the modern colorist to duplicate.

Glass manufacture reached its pre-American apexin the Middle-Ages when haughty Venice was at the height of its glory, its marvelous glass products the envy of European royalty.

On the tiny island of Murano, nestling among Venetian lagoons, furnaces were fired behind barred

doors. Murano's glass workshops were prisons for the men who knew the secrets of blowing molten glass into shapes of gleaming beauty that were making Venice famed throughout the courts of Europe.

The outside world knew nothing of the operations, for a very good reason. Fortnightly the dreaded council of ten met in a palace room overlooking the island of Murano.

There the council members discussed the latest attempts to steal the secrets of the Venetian art of glass making. King Louis of France, was offering fabulous riches, titles of nobility, to any man who would escape from Murano and establish glass making in France.

The famed council acted quickly, swift death overtaking more than one hapless glass blower who tried to reach France; a few of them were stabbed almost within the shadows of the gates of Paris by trusted servants of the relentless council.

Despite all the murderous precautions, however, the secrets finally passed beyond the shores of Murano, into France, thence to Germany, England, and throughout Europe, yet withal the art remained a secret, handed down from one glass blowing family to another.

In 1607, eight Polish and German glass blowers, members of Captain John Smith's first colonizing

group, sent out by English merchants, landed in the James River at what was later to be the site of Jamestown, Virginia. They constructed a crude glass furnace in the nearby woods; thus the manufacture of glass was the first industrial enterprise on American soil.

It failed, as did the works established later by Stiegel, the first great American glass maker, whose work today brings huge prices from museums and collectors.

Glass plants of early America struggled on and upward, failing here, rebuilding there, but always the industry grew.

In 1900 the making of glass was not essentially different from what it had been in 1800 or 1700 or

1600—and at the turn of the century, when American business was about to launch one of the world's greatest industrial progressive parades in transportation and machinery, glass was still marking time.

Then there came, elbowing his way out of the hills of West Virginia, an aggressive young Irishman, himself a master glass blower, son of a coal miner, to precipitate the world's most interesting struggle between men and machines.

His invention of the world's first automatic bottle making machine in 1903 did more in fifteen years to revolutionize the art of glass making than anything had done for thousands of years previously. As one views window glass coming out of one of our large glass factories, it is a little difficult to realize that this automatic progression is so new. Its birthday can be fixed to an exact date in 1916. To comprehend the revolutionary character of the flat-drawing process requires a description of the older processes.

Window glass was obtained by blowing glass into spherical shapes, reheating, and rotating until it became a disk of glass marred by a bull's-eye in the center. America's center of production was Boston and "Boston Crown Glass" became a trade name in colonial America. After annealing, the disks were cut into small panes, those with the bull's-eye being used chiefly for transoms and door side lights.

Larger panes resulted from another hand process involving exhausting physical labor and high skill; it came into general use early in the nineteenth century and continued to be the accepted method until 1903. By repeated gatherings, blowings and swingings of molten glass at the end of a heavy iron blowpipe, long cylinders were obtained up to dimensions of twenty

inches in diameter and seventy inches in length. They were then cut, reheated and flattened; but the most skillful operatives could not bring to absolute flatness glass originally blown into cylinders. For this reasonold window glass is slightly bowed and given a con-

siderable degree of distortion. Size and quality were limited sharply by human capacities under tremendous strain, and progress awaited a mechanical method for eliminating lung power and muscular fatique.

The first step in that direction substituted com-pressed air in the blowpipe for the lung power of the glass blower. This made possible the fashioning of the large cylinders and sheets at less cost; but flattening the glass continued the same defect. In the making of modern sheet glass preliminary operations are similar to those in other forms of glass manufacture, but they proceed on so vast a scale in those great plants that a visitor may be puzzled in cor-relating the simple "shop" glass making of olden days with the vast automatic manufacturing program.

From railway cars the raw materials are run up by cup elevators into huge circular concrete bins, like farm silos, but much larger. From these the ingredients of the "batch" are drawn by gravity—so much silica, so much ground limestone, so much soda ash and saltcake. They are the chief ingredients which from time immortal have been used in glass making, but real progress has been made in controlling the mixture in both purity of materials, exactness in proportions and thoroughness in mixing. After these materials have been thoroughly mixed in a power hopper, the batch travels along a broad band to the furnaces on a conveyor system. Unloading is accomplished at any desired furnace. There, with a certain amount of cullet, or broken glass, it is fed into furnaces to be melted under a heat of approximately 2700 degrees Fahrenheit. Cullet melting more quickly than the new materials, starts the liquefying of the mass and protects the sides of the tank from chemical action during the early stages. Even so, the tanks must be frequently rebuilt.

Eyes shielded against heat and glare, the visitor peers through an observation hole into a tank of

molten glass. What he beholds is a lake of glass five feet deep and more than a hundred feet long, but the optical effect is one of vast distances and weird un- canny vistas. The colors of this lovely, ever-changing mirage are those not often seen on land or sea. Heat waves and convection currents explain the illusion of

distance and the diffusion of light, but the layman will rest content with an unforgettable revelation of beauty. This lake of glass in the great tank is ever being replenished at one end, and at the other end giving forth a broad carpet of white hot, even-flowing glass.

The endless carpet passes first through a chamber which cools the glass slightly by a short, sudden drop in temperature to toughen it in preparation for a straight upward pull to bending rollers, thence hori- zontally over flattening rollers, and into the lehr for slow annealing. The powdered batch and broken cullet have become fused into a solid transparent sheet; the white hot fluid of a few hours ago is now cool enough to be handled by cutters as it emerges from the lehr. The slow annealing possible under this flat-drawn process reduces internal strains and yields glass less brittle and hence more economically cut for glazing.

The past and the present of glass is strangely interwoven; one of the most fascinating stories of lost treasure ever told has to do with glass. A glass that was malleable, that would bend, that could be hammered like metal and dropped without breaking, was invented by one of the master craftsmen back in the days of the Caesars, when Liberius was master of the Roman world.

The inventor was brought to Caesar, the remarkable qualities of the glass demonstrated to him. He watched as the inventor flung the glass on the marble floor of the audience chamber, and as hammer blows were rained upon it. Here was one of the greatest discoveries of the ages, of untold value, the secret known to a single man, yet Caesar ordered him killed on the spot. He feared the marvelous glass would be worth more than gold and silver, and his own vast fortune was in those precious metals. Thus was lost on the bloody sword point of the Nubian slave body- guard a secret that kept the world waiting 2000 years to rediscover.

Today in one of the great glass plants of the country, technicians are working with the modern

counterpart of that Caesarian glass. It can be twisted to a remarkable degree and is highly resistant to im-pact and severe thermal shock; it is a glass that is making possible the manufacture of all glass furni-ture. It enables glass to be utilized for applications heretofore ideally suited to glass but restricted to other materials because of the physical limitations of ordinary glass.

It is known as Tuf-flex or tempered plate glass. It is produced by heating ordinary plate glass until it is almost plastic and then cooling it suddenly by sub-jecting both surfaces to jets of air. Both outer sur-faces, cooling more rapidly, are in a state of compression, while the inner portions of the glass are in tension or pressure in the opposite direction. In general one can say that with this discovery another ancient art has been accomplished.

Restricted in usage until comparatively recently, glass today is the symbol of all progress. It is the

ever-present servant of man, and it can be said that we of today are dependent upon glass in one form or another every hour of the day and night from the moment we are born until the day we leave this earth.

Diehn, D. "History of Glass." Ohio State Engineer. March, 1941. PDF file @ The Knowledge Bank at Ohio State University, accessed September 5, 2009. https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/35776/1/OS_ENG_v24_i04_005.pdf. Google automatically generated the html file: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:bhj06n7y_2cJ:https://kb.osu.edu/dspace/bitstream/1811/35776/1/OS_ENG_v24_i04_005.pdf+dreaded+glassblower&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=usOhio State University's Knowledge Bank which operates with the Creative Commons license.

Glassblowers, Lantern Makers, and Elephant Washers

2009 Jamie Rhein:

"With Labor Day approaching, as we think of work, consider the culturally significant jobs in the world that may not be around in the future. Here is a look at seven that are hallmarks of particular regions.

First up. Traditional Glass Blower. In one of the furnace rooms at Cam Fornace in Murano, Italy, a short water bus hop from Venice, is a black and white photo from the 1920s (or thereabouts). In the photo, young men are blowing glass the way that glass blowers in Murano have blown glass for hundreds of years.

One of the men in the photo is the father of the master glass blower in this shot that I snapped two weeks ago when he was demonstrating how to make a vase. This master glass blower has been working at Cam Fornace ever since he was 14-years-old when he started there as an apprentice. Now he is 62.

According to our tour guide at our factory visit, traditional glass blowers are becoming a dying breed. In the past, the art was passed on through generations as sons learned from their fathers. These days, Italian sons are not particularly interested in their fathers' glass blowing life. Our guide suspects that in twenty years, it will be hard to find a traditional Italian glass blower.

This doesn't mean there won't be glass blowers, but there won't be many--if any-- people who will be doing the art the way it's been done for centuries. Cam Fornace will not be the same.

Traditional glass blowers aren't the only jobs that are becoming a rarity. I've thought of others based on what I've seen in my travels. Each are jobs that are impacted by economics and cultural shifts. Here are six more jobs you may want to see people do before it's too late."

The other 6 include: Cyclo driver, Bybee Pottery maker, Horse carriage driver, Traditional lantern maker, Coconut Shell Rope Maker, and...Elephant Washer.

Rhein, J. "Seven jobs that may soon disappear." September 1, 2009. Gadling blog. Accessed September 3, 2009. http://www.gadling.com/2009/09/01/seven-jobs-that-may-soon-disappear-travel-to-where-they-are-whi/

Silva's A Blow is Enough sells at Christie's today

In the International Modern and Contemporary Art Sale April 29, 2009 at Jumeirah Emirates Towers Hotel (sale 7802), lot 67 sold for $14,375. Lot 67 was a piece by Roberta Silva. A Blow is Enough was estimated at $6,000-$8,000.

"Lot Description

Roberta Silva (Trinidad and Tobago, b. 1971)
A Blow is Enough
hand-blown Murano glass
11 x 22 7/8 x 12 5/8in. (28 x 58 x 32cm.)
Executed in 2000-2008, this work is unique"

Christie's. Accessed April 29, 2008. http://www.christies.com/LotFinder/lot_details.aspx?intObjectID=5193586

US Glass Market "Saturated" -Murano factory owner