2024-08-18 13:36:07
The art of glass has existed for centuries on the island of Murano. But the culture is in danger. A privately funded research firm is trying to maintain a working state of the art. With success – as Le Stanze del Vetro museum in Venice shows.
A grainy black and white photo shows Hans Stoltenberg Lerche in a dirty suit in a black Fratelli Toso factory. White embers glow from the furnace. Beside him stands master Vittorio Toso with his long glass pipe, behind him two assistants. Creating works of art from glass is a collaborative effort – especially when it suddenly becomes an experiment as it was on the island of Murano in 1912.
Lerche is a Norwegian craftsman who was born in Düsseldorf and has lived in Rome for a long time. At the turn of the century, his small bronzes and symbolist were celebrated in the Paris Art Nouveau Salon. He has been in and out of the Toso brothers workshop for months now. Together with the glassware of one of the important Venetian manufacturers, he pursued a plan.
H. St. Lerche (as signed) wants to win the 10th Venice International Art Exhibition with glass objects that have never existed before: vases that look like sea creatures, shells like opened mussels. Fragile materials on crab legs, transparent snail shells and jellyfish jars with tentacles.
When the picture was officially sold at the Biennale
The Venice Biennale was then a trade fair, a fair for fine arts, crafts and design. According to the bills, 63 Lerche glasses were sold, many of which were unique pieces. But the objects from the small series can still be unique because the art of glass also thrives on the magic of melting and the enhanced material and the intense production process. Because no two glasses are the same.
In addition to the sculptural sea glasses, the two plates that can be found in one of the first exhibitions of the Venetian gallery Le Stanze del Vetro are also unique. On one side a fish is blowing the air, on the other a crab is crawling. The plates are crystal clear, with green color on the edges. The expressive animal designs are designed with hot glass granules, colored glass paint and polychrome glass fibers.
Lerche did not sell the fish plate, but gave it to his student Herta von Wedekind zur Horst. Now it is one of the fascinating loans in the exhibition “1912-1930. Murano Glass and the Venice Biennale. It is maintained by Marino Barovier, who comes from one of the old glass empires.
The glass museum on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore has a mission that always brings us with amazingly designed exhibitions, that is not only to show the outstanding works of art created on Murano, but also examine the science of the history of inventions. Because the art of glass is (and is) dangerous.
Venice has been flooded with cheap glass trash from China for decades. Some manufacturers haven’t done so well either. And inventions made in workshops, both artistic and technical and craft, are often not well documented. The knowledge of the oaths and much of the traditional glass-making guild was passed from mouth to ear in front of the kilns, because handwritten notes could easily be thrown into the fire.
Sponsors fund the glass museum
Le Stanze del Vetro presents two exhibitions a year, which are often accompanied by scientific catalogs and are important resources for glass collectors. The museum was founded twelve years ago as the head of the Venetian glass research center and is also one of the “Venice Glass Week”, a festival with more than 300 participants (from September 14th to 22nd, 2024).
It is run by the Italian Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore and financed by the Pentagram Foundation of the American art historian David Landau and his wife, the Austrian designer Marie-Rose Kahane. Last year they extended their commitment with the regular collection of the Archivio Generale del Vetro Veneziano. It has more than 200,000 designs, sketches and notes on Venetian glass and also preserves documents from long-lost manufacturers such as Antonio Salviati and Seguso Vetri d’Arte.
The current exhibition at Le Stanze del Vetro shows how the history of Murano glass is also connected to the history of the Venice Biennale – and is documented with design sketches, historical photographs, documents and sales lists. Thanks to Hans Stoltenberg Lerche’s innovation of avant-garde pieces of art, which are more than just luxurious decorations, the Venetian glass industry suddenly emerged from its nostalgic climate into modernity in 1912. two years later, Teodoro Wolf Ferrari adapted expressive pointilism into glass art, creating mosaics from multi-colored “murrines,” pixel-like glass plates.
In the Biennale years 1920, 1922 and 1924, Umberto Bellotto presented impressive Art Deco objects for the Vetreria Artistica Barovier that combined glass with bronze. His exaggerated, extended sculptures anticipate the former style of Alberto Giacometti. From 1924 onwards, Vittorio Zecchin created elegant, innovative materials for the manufacture of Cappellin Venini, which combined ancient designs with modern taste. With Napoleone Martinuzzi and archaic foam glasses, you have an equal competitor in another manufacturer in the Venini family.
In the late 1920s, Fratelli Barovier brought sculpture to glass art. These suggestive animal paintings have nothing to do with the bric-a-brac offered to tourists in Venice today. Best example: Hand-blown pigeons with highly inflated breasts using the Primavera process – clear glass pierced by a network of small, hairy cracks – or of smoked and milk glass mixed in the waves, are anonymous masterpieces of Murano glass.
They don’t need a license. Because of the artistic and economic success of the past twelve years, the artisans, whose knowledge they have guarded for centuries have been refreshed by the avant-garde of today, regained their old guild knowledge.
1912–1930. Murano glass and the Venice Biennale”, bis zum 24. November, Glass rooms
#Art #stake #Murano #glass #fragile #original