Two new shows reflect the shiny versatility of glass | At the Smithsonian

Roger Catlin

Museum correspondent

Glass art has its origins in ancient Egypt and Assyria. Glassblowing originated in Rome in the first century. The beauty and versatility of the medium still brings new innovations centuries later, as can be seen in two new exhibits from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM).

“New Glass Now” at SAAM’s Renwick Gallery, organized by the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, pays tribute to the creativity of modern glass artists worldwide. A study at the museum’s main building, meanwhile, “Sargent, Whistler and Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano,” explores the revival of the Venetian glass movement in the late 19th century and how it in turn affected collection, art and tourism.

While there are connections between the two, there is history at Renwick, which was the site of a previously landmark modern glass exhibition, “New Glass: A Worldwide Survey” from 1980, also organized by the Corning Museum. Some of the now famous artists in Renwick’s permanent collections, including Paula Bartron, Dominick Labino, Karla Trinkley and Dale Chihuly, whose 8-foot Chandelier with sea foam and amber work hanging in the gallery’s Octagon Room, is displayed in the display, “New Glass Then.”

“New Glass Now” shows works by 50 artists from more than 23 countries and highlights previously underrepresented societies in the glass world, which reinforces how advanced the art form has become in the 35 years since the last study of this type.

The gallery is literally buzzing with the electricity billowing in neon from Megan Stelljes’ This shit is bananas with its hanging hot-sculpted fruits, and Doris Darling’s lever-snapped “Super strong ”lamp, as well as the child’s toy mix of James Akers’ The wild (B).

This shit is bananas by Megan Stelljes, 2017

Corning Museum of Glass, 2019.4.181. Photo courtesy of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, © Alec Miller

The show also overwhelms with control and beauty. Jeff Goodman’s cool curved oven-cast borosilicate glass of an exterior tile is one of thousands used in the architecture of a magnificent Bahá’í temple in South America; and David Derksen’s decanters and laboratory cups are precision machined and highly functional. Deborah Czeresko gets an entire room for her own eight-foot chandelier, a chandelier that should look like hanging carvings from the butcher shop, Meat chandelier.

Ceresko, who is a bit of a rock star in the glass world as the first season winner of the Netflix glass competition “Blown Away”, brings scale and humor in his still quite intricate work. She has worked on a series that mixes notions of high and low art, usually with a food theme that has included a spirit set that replaces the dragon design common to many Venetian revival pieces, with an idealized worm from a tequila bottle.

She is also working on a glass reproduction of a turkey and a chicken. But her Meat chandelier, has with its hanging sausages a more serious intention – to dismantle the “toxic masculinity” and sexism found among the smoke, fire and steel tools of the typical glassblowing “hot shop” – a dramatic setting that once attracted Venetian audiences from the 19th century. century to the macho workplace.

Meat chandelier by Deborah Czeresko, 2018

Corning Museum of Glass, 2019.4.165. Photo courtesy of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York

“I was thinking: What would I do if I were a female maestro back then in Venice?” Czeresko pondered during a Smithsonian-sponsored artist talk in early November. “I wanted to make a comment about the hot store. I also wanted to make candles and cook in glass. I combined the two as an iconic vision.”

“It’s just really about empowerment,” she says, “an alternative approach to being and changing the paradigm of being in the hot store.”

That mood is also called for on the posters exhibited by Suzanne Peck and Karen Donnellan, Blow Harder: Alternative encyclopedia for the Hotshop, where sexually charged terms and phrases commonly used in the studio get a charming refreshment – Jacks becomes Jills; strip off is replaced by Chippendale, blow partner becomes companion in fire.

While the technical mastery of many pieces is awe-inspiring, other pieces are effective because of their simplicity. Tamás Ábels Color therapy is a commercial glass mirror affixed with rainbow-colored tape, from which he can easily and quite innocently project the Pride flag’s reflections on well-known white buildings from the Millennium Monument in Budapest to the Washington Monument in Washington, DC.

Color therapy: Washington, DC + Budapest and 33 “Rainbow by Tamás Ábel, 2017

Corning Museum of Glass, 33.3.2019. Photo courtesy of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, © Terre Nguyen and Benedek Bognár

Viewers tend to stand in line to see the effects of Bohyun Yoons Family II, an elegant glass vase on a rotating base that makes silhouette portraits of his family – artist, wife, child and back again.

While some pieces show mastery of form with finesse, others comment on the always fragile state of the medium. In fact, a warning accompanying the five vessels bent with stones, bricks and window glass, in Maria Bang Espersen’s Things are changing warns that they “can naturally break while appearing.” The show’s catalog calls the work a “painfully beautiful read about mortality and perishability.”

As it happens, several of the pieces in “New Glass Now” come from studios in Murano, the island in the Venetian lagoon that is the focus of the Smithsonian American Art Museum exhibition. One, by Austrian Erwin Wurm, with the title mother, is a skewed injection molded glass image of a hot water bottle wearing lace-up shoes. Another, Bonded by Monica Bonvicini, in hot-tempered glass with metal buckles, looks like a tangle of men’s trouser belts.

C. Matthew Szõsz’s Reservoir uses the same kind of delicate fiberglass, which is also seen in the latticework of a boat-shaped vessel from the 19th century – based on a design of the only documented female glassblower from the Renaissance in Murano, patterned in 1521.

mother by Erwin Wurm, Berengo Studio, 2017

Corning Museum of Glass, gift from Adriano Berengo, 2019.3.2. Photo courtesy of The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, © Francesco Allegretto and Berengo Studio

The smart vases and cups that revived the 19th-century Murano glassblowing seen in “Sargent, Whistler and Venetian Glass” have a certain echo in the contemporary show, but their shapes and colors may seem cheating in comparison. . At that time, however, the delicate, colorful and intricate works became quite popular and collectible, and their appearance in American living rooms meant that they were also reflected in the paintings of the time. Crawford Alexander Mann II, the museum’s curator of prints and drawings that organized the show, says the exhibition “reveals the impact of Italian glass on American art, literature, design theory and science education, as well as ideas at the time about gender, labor, and class relations. . ”

“Many of these vessels were used to decorate homes, and they would appear in these paintings, to denote taste and elegance and as a way of telling a story about a person,” adds Mary Savig, curator of crafts at Renwick.

The famous American painter John Singer Sergeant was born in Italy and returned to the country throughout his life, stopping in Murano, where he was fascinated by behind the scenes of glass production, and the women who had previously carried long strings of glass. they were cut into beds, and the spray of the tubes attracted and reflected their own light.

This is seen in the striking life-size oil portrait from 1882 A Venetian woman it has become the main image of the show. In it, a model pauses while holding a bundle of blue glass tubes that will soon be cut and polished into colorful glass beads, a major international export of islands at the time. Five Sargent paintings are on display, though his famous 1903 portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, hanging in the White House, is the source of one of two striking glass mosaics by American presidents (the other being by Lincoln).

A Venetian woman by John Singer Sargent, 1882

Cincinnati Art Museum, Edwin and Virginia Irwin Memorial, 1972.37

Better represented in the exhibition is James McNeill Whistler, who on more than one occasion was tasked with visiting Venice to make etchings, and (to the dismay of his patrons) was attracted more by the city’s edges and down dingy alleys than he was. grand canals that were the basis of so much tourism art. Ten of his etchings are part of the show.

Other artists include Robert Frederick Blum (if Venetian lace highlighted another craft that the region became familiar with), William Merritt Chase, Louise Cox, Thomas Moran, Maxfield Parrish and Maurice Prendergast – the painter who for a time focused on making images of glass and ceramic tiles.

Two linoleum block prints by Mabel Pugh, recently acquired by the museum, help create awareness of female artists who are often put on the sidelines in the history of the period.

“Venice’s famous glass industry has long contributed to its historical richness and its reputation for pioneering contemporary art along with the Venice Biennale Art Fair,” says Mann. “To this day, Americans are dazzled by this face-off between past and present … following in the footsteps of Sargent and Whistler to enjoy its beauty and creative energy.”

“New Glass Now” continues at the Renwick Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum through March 6, 2022.

“Sargent, Whistler and Venetian Glass: American Artists and the Magic of Murano” continues at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC through May 8, 2022.

American Craft Art Art History Arts and Crafts Fine Arts Renwick Gallery Smithsonian American Art Museum

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