1974

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.

1974 Heinz Spielmann:

“The well-wooded border area between Bavaria, Austria and Bohemia, a center of European glass production since the Middle Ages, is still of great scientific importance today…

Eisch, who has a reputation as a loner in Germany, has his friends in England and the United States. Together with them he strives to overcome the narrow view of glass as only a material for functional containers.

Erwin Eisch: “I have worked as an industrial designer myself, but I could not find either satisfaction or pleasure in approaching matter intellectually. Designing technical gadgets ought to be left to technicians and business people. Industrial design is largely based on mercantile principles; consequently on the belief that the so-called simple form is most adequate to a technical object may soon be refuted by the changing taste of purchasers. Let us leave the designers to their own devices. We invite them to come with us, of course!

Whenever I am forced to design glasses for industrial purposes my soul is distorted and reduced to a miserable little thing. Nobody who knows of the infinite possibilities offered by glass, nobody who has ever felt how this material responds to his breath and his intentions as a craftsman will ever sit down at a drawing-board and try to plan and form glass exclusively by designing. ‘I do not regret,’ an industrial designer recently told me, ‘that the handicraft of glassblowing is no longer appreciated or of any importance today.’ in his opinion the glassblower has been replaced by designers and by those who make the moulds corresponding to their designs. The activity of the glassblower, he feels, has been replaced by automation, by machines.

Only a man who does not know the delight and the pride that the craftsman takes in every perfect piece of glass he has shaped can hold this opinion.”

Spielmann, H. "Erwin Eisch" GlassArt Magazine, June 1974.

1974 Harvey Littleton and Erwin Eisch:


Photo Citation: [Harvey Littleton and Erwin Eisch], 1974 Apr / Herbert Wolf, photographer. Photographic print : 1 item : b&w ; 14 x 18 cm. Harvey K. Littleton papers, 1946-1975. Archives of American Art. http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/searchimages/images/item_238.htm