Coincidentally, the daring cast-glass sculptures that Libensky created with his wife, Jaroslava Brychtova, are also the subject of the inaugural show at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Wash., which opens July 6. His sculptures were also at SOFA, the International Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art, in Manhattan this year.

The Czechs make glass exciting. Decades before there was a studio glass movement in the United States, the Czechs had figured out how to blow, cut, grind, paint, carve, engrave, enamel and cast glass in radically new ways. Libensky called the process alchemy.
''In spite of the fact that Czech art glass was not very accessible to the West for more than 20 years, the work has been influential, innovative and groundbreaking,'' said Tina Oldknow, curator of modern glass at the Corning Museum, where the show runs through Oct. 21. ''The Czechs understood how to use glass as a medium for painting, sculpture and architecture.''
One of the showstoppers at Corning illustrates the point. Mr. Libensky and Ms. Brychtova, who lives in the Czech Republic, created a bright red four-foot-tall abstract glass flower that is both a monumental cast-glass sculpture and a throbbing Color Field painting at the same time. Other works in the show include thick glass animal reliefs inspired by ancient cave paintings, biomorphic forms made from glass blown into molds, and prismatic glass cubes incorporated into glass spheres. If this all seems quite novel, it is.

''The Czech artists were so isolated,'' Ms. Oldknow said. ''These pieces are explorations of abstract art masquerading as glass vessels.''
Czechs have been producing what used to be called Bohemian glass since the Middle Ages. Like the Venetians, they take great pride in the quality of their glass. Early in the 20th century, the industry changed after glassmakers were exposed to Cubism and avant-garde art. By the 1920's, Czechs were treating glass as an art medium and experimenting with Cubist and Art Deco styles.
This all stopped just before World War II, when the Germans took over the Sudetenland in northern Czechoslovakia, where the glass factories were. The glass artists who could escape went to Prague. Libensky was in the north at an elite glass-making trade school in 1939. He went to Prague and took the tough entrance exam for the School of Decorative Arts. He passed and graduated in 1945.
That year, Russian and American troops liberated Czechoslovakia. Libensky, like many young glass artists, returned to the glass studios in the north, intent on reviving the country's leading industry by exploring new approaches toward cut, engraved and painted glass. He joined the faculty of a glass school, where he taught classes in painting on glass and stained glass. On his own, he experimented with etching glass and painting with transparent enamels.

Then the world changed again. In 1948, the Communist Party gained control of Czechoslovakia and nationalized all private property. Small family glass studios were merged into state-run monopolies. ''Over time, a rigid conformity was demanded of all artists, and painting, sculpture and graphic arts became tools to illustrate political ideology,'' Ms. Oldknow said. ''Artists who rejected Socialist Realism could get in trouble. Some were persecuted for their beliefs.''
But oddly enough, the glass artists were largely ignored. ''Glass was considered a functional, ornamental medium -- not an expressive and possibly subversive one,'' Ms. Oldknow said. ''Some painters and graphic artists took refuge in glass and other applied arts as a way of escaping harassment and retaining a modicum of creative freedom.''

Thus the Czech studio glass movement was born. As Ms. Brychtova once said, ''Art went in through the back door.'' The power of this new glass came to the world's attention in the 1950's when it was exhibited in Czech pavilions at world expositions in cities like Brussels, Moscow and Milan. The artists themselves were never allowed to participate. Nor were they told their glass works had garnered top prizes and worldwide acclaim.
In the United States, the Corning Museum organized an international design survey called ''Glass 1959.'' A monumental green cast-glass sculpture, ''Head I,'' by Mr. Libensky and Ms. Brychtova, was part of that show. It was an example of the principle of negative modeling. The profile of a man is created inside a piece of cast glass. The face reveals itself only when a light shines through the glass.
Thomas S. Buechner, the founding director of the Corning Museum, later recalled: ''It took me several days to figure out what this piece was. We were not expecting sculpture. We were not prepared for glass that was not about function.''

Ms. Oldknow explained that in 1959 no one in the United States had yet seen glass treated this way. ''Head I'' caused quite a sensation in the glass field, she said. After the show, which traveled across the United States, the museum bought it. Suddenly, millions were seeing the new Czech glass.
This year, the curators at Corning have taken a fresh tack in exhibiting Czech glass. They are displaying Czech studio glass works and design prototypes from the museum's collection alongside the watercolors and drawings that inspired them.
''These original sketches show how artists transform ideas into glass,'' Ms. Oldknow said. ''They provide insight into how an artist translates an idea into two and then three dimensions.''
Or how two artists translate ideas from paper to glass sculpture. To take one example, in 1955, after Mr. Libensky met Ms. Brychtova, they began to collaborate. He would make a concept drawing, and she would translate it into a three-dimensional clay sculpture. Master craftsmen then made a mold of the clay form. They filled it with chunks of glass that slowly melted and fused in the firing. The couple worked together this way for five decades, with groundbreaking results.
What the Corning show illustrates, as Ms. Oldknow put it, is that glass is a lot more than tableware. ''The postwar years in Czechoslovakia was the period when the idea of how to use glass differently was developing,'' she said. ''We are presenting a period people know very little about in order to show how glass was used as a medium for painting, sculpture and architecture.''"

Moonan, W. "ANTIQUES; how czech glass burst restraints of functionality." June 21, 2002. The New York Times. Accessed September 8, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/21/arts/antiques-how-czech-glass-burst-restraints-of-functionality.html?pagewanted=2


2002 Tan Vinh:


"John Hauberg, founder of one of the world's leading glass-art schools and former president of the Seattle Art Museum, died yesterday at age 85.
Doctors said he had suffered from a bacterial infection that led to a heart attack.
For the past 50 years, Mr. Hauberg was the face of Northwest art, owning one of the world's finest collections of Northwest Coast Indian art, raising thousands of dollars for local artists and programs, and helping save numerous art projects, including the four columns from the old Plymouth Congregational Church, which now stand in a First Hill park overlooking Interstate 5.
He was perhaps best known for starting the Pilchuck Glass School, situated on a portion of his family's 16,000-acre farm near Stanwood. Started in 1971 as a summer-study project, the school has become a leading art center, with an international faculty teaching courses such as hot-glass design, casting, engraving, stained-glass painting and glass blowing. The school has drawn Northwest artists such as Sonja Blomdahl, Paul Marioni, William Morris, Richard Royal, Joey Kirkpatrick and Flora Mace.
Growing up in Rock Island, Ill., Mr. Hauberg learned about the arts from his father, John Hauberg Sr., a philanthropist and avid collector of Indian art who started the Hauberg Indian Museum in Rock Island.
In 1955, he became the Republican state finance chairman, a post he held until 1964. He helped found the Northwest Hardwoods Association, the Child Development and Mental Retardation Center at the University of Washington, and the Foundation for the Handicapped, a residential training center now known as Lifetime Advocacy Plus.
"When he saw a problem, he worked to solve that problem. I think that's what made him so successful in the community," said his daughter Fay Hauberg Page. "He was a man of great integrity and dignity."
And a man who loved the arts. He filled his three houses in Seattle and Bainbridge Island with pre-Columbian art, Northwest Indian art and contemporary Northwest art.
Few were surprised when he succeeded the Seattle Art Museum's founder, Richard Fuller, as museum president from 1973 to 1978. Mr. Hauberg, who was the first chairman of the museum board, was a key player in securing a downtown location for the museum.
In 1991, Mr. Hauberg donated more than 200 pieces of Northwest coastal art to SAM, including four massive 1907 potlatch-house posts carved by Arthur Shaughnessy. His gift in honor of the museum's downtown opening has been called one of the world's finest collections of Native American work.
He also donated a 44-piece collection of the photography of Imogen Cunningham and a 15-piece collection of Mesoamerican ceramic pieces from the preclassic period of Mexican culture.
"I have felt from the first that I was a custodian for this material, that it was not for my private pleasure," he said in 1991.
The Times and the Museum of History & Industry last year named Mr. Hauberg among the 150 most influential people who shaped Seattle. A 1949 graduate of the UW, Mr. Hauberg also was named an outstanding UW graduate in 1987.
Before he died, Mr. Hauberg completed his memoirs, which the family plans one day to publish.
He is survived by his wife, Ann Hauberg; daughters Fay Hauberg Page and Sue Bradford Hauberg; stepson, James Brinkley III; stepdaughters Marion Brinkley Mohler, Elizabeth Brinkley Rosane and Alison Brinkley Kingsley; and several step-grandchildren.
Funeral arrangements have not been completed, but memorial contributions may be made to the Hauberg Scholarship at the Pilchuck Glass School, 430 Yale Ave. N., Seattle, WA 98109-5431, and the Seattle Art Museum's Native Art Collection, 100 University St. Seattle, WA 98101."

Vinh, T. "Northwest art world loses benefactor." April 6, 2002.  The Seattle Times.  http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20020406&slug=haubergobit06m