letter from the GAs President new Membership ... - Glass Art Society

L E T T E R S t o t h e E D I T O R
A Historical Opinion Piece by Maestro Gianni Toso
2
I recently had the honor of participating in the
Carnegie Museum’s exhibit and panel discussion Glass
Alive! Venice and America: Cultural Exchanges in Glass.
I read with great interest the catalog article by Matthew
Kangas, and was much impressed by his extensive
research and obvious appreciation of twentieth century
developments in Murano glass art. As Mr. Kangas writes
about events that occurred during my years as both an
apprentice in the factories and as a young artist starting
out on my own, I would like to add a few details about
my personal experience, and, perhaps, respectfully
question several of Mr. Kangas’ underlying assumptions
about the nature of the cultural exchange that was
– and still is – taking place.
After the destructive visit of Napoleon to Murano,
almost nothing remained of the means of glass
production. The abbot Vicenzo Zanetti, a historical
writer on the subject of glass, joined with the Salviati
family and two Toso brothers to revive the ancient glass
techniques of Murano’s illustrious past. In 1861, Zanetti
and the mayor of Murano, Anthony Colleoni, created the
still extant glass museum, and the following year they
opened an art school for future master glassblowers.
The school, eponymously named Abate Vicenzo Zanetti,
was founded with the intention of providing for these
young men a formal education in the classical artistic
tradition: art history and aesthetics as well as drawing,
painting and decorative applications in glass. It
operated continuously until the early 1970’s, when it
was closed for political reasons.
In 1957, Paolo Venini was president of the school
and Angelo Fuga was our manager and magnificent
professor. I and ten other students were fortunate
enough to comprise the last class of the school which
had produced so many generations of Murano maestri.
Among the greatest masters of the twentieth century
were Archimede Seguso and Alfredo Barbini, both of
whom I had the great fortune to apprentice, as well as to
serve as their first assistant.
Contrary to Mr. Kangas’ implication that at this
time Murano was an insular, parochial glass center, I
would submit that one of the reasons young American
artists flocked to Murano beginning in the early 1950’s,
rather than to other glass centers in Sweden, Germany,
France, England, Ireland, etc., was because of the culture
of curiosity and experimentation that Murano offered
them. Nor was this openness a new phenomenon:
many of the ancient families of Murano, including mine,
have collaborated with and worked glass for the best
artists of various epochs, including Carpaccio, Bellini,
Vivarini, Leonardo da Vinci, Paolo Veronese and others.
Mr. Kangas asserts that productivity and creativity
declined dramatically in the postwar years as a result of
economic hardship and shortages; my own memories
and experience support the view of Attilio Dorigato in
his book Murano: Island of Glass that, on the contrary,
creativity exploded. Cinematographic depictions,
no matter how picturesque, must not be confused
with historical veracity. Cinema Paradiso has more in
common with Commedia dell’Arte than with reality.
The first postwar example of cultural exchange
came about when Egidio Constantini suggested to
Peggy Guggenheim that she invite the greatest masters
of contemporary art to create sketches and projects.
These projects were eventually fabricated in the best
Murano fornace by the best master glassblowers.
In 1954, an exposition in Rome presented these
masterpieces in Murano glass, conceived by celebrated
Italian artists as well as the more internationally
renowned foreigners George Braque, Alexander Calder,
Oscar Kokoschka, Le Cobusier, Ferdinand Leger, Henry
Moore and Pablo Picasso. In Robert Willson: A Story in
Glass, contributor Astone Gasperetto makes mention of
this exhibit in describing the artistic climate that existed
in Murano at the time of Wilson’s arrival.
By the mid 1950’s, Livio Seguso, descended from
an ancient glassblowing family, was recognized as an
international artist as well as a maestro, or master, of
traditional techniques. He had for many years been
a talented student of his uncle, Alfredo Barbini; other
students had followed Livio, but none reached his level
of artistry, for Livio was in the process of developing
his own personal artistic language. In 1976 he began a
collaboration with Angelo Churchill to establish summer
courses in sculpture, and the workshop was installed in
his Murano studio. This collaboration continued every
year until 1989.
Other factors contrived to make Murano a
particularly inviting mecca for young American glass
artists. Contrary to the widespread perception of the
factories as no more than insular, production-oriented
assembly lines, many family firms were open and
welcoming to new visions and ideas. World renowned
architect and designer Renato Toso (a three-time first
place winner of the Venice biennale) was working at
that time as a designer for the firms Artemide, Barovier
Toso, Ferro Murano, Foscarini, Leucos, Venini and Vistosi.
The son of Ermanno Toso, himself a famous designer
and one of the original partners of the Fratelli Toso
factory, Toso paved the way for Robert Wilson to develop
his marvelous sculptures, by virtue of having already
provided the maestri at Fratelli Toso with an informal
artistic education.
My own first “cross-cultural” experience came
about in 1969, when Charles Lin Tissot offered me
the opportunity to execute some 80 x 50 cm panels
of sketches and crayon drawings by Salvador Dali,
among them his famous slumped clocks. Upon the
presentation of the first of three panels to Peggy
Guggenheim, she praised both the work and the
concept of this kind of collaboration by saying that the
glass pieces brought “light and life” to Dali’s sketches.
Three years later, in 1972, the first symposium of
glassblowing artists took place in the Bellerive Museum
in Zurich. From Italy, Fulvio Bianconi, Luciano Vistosi,
Paolo Martinuzzi and I were invited. I was the youngest
– 30 years old. Vistosi had already broken with the
tradition of delicate elegance in Murano glass. His
artistic research had brought him to a level of fine
art involving the largest glass sculpture ever made.
Unfortunately, Vistosi withdrew at the last moment,
while Martinuzzi participated in the opening with his
glass engravings and didn’t return. Fulvio Bianconi and
I remained.
Naturally, being young and still excited from the
experience of Murano art school, I was much attracted
to the American approach to glassblowing as a fine art,
and was determined to share with them my expertise,
a culmination of centuries of Murano glassblowers’
achievements and experiments in this field. Prior to
my trip to Zurich, my artistic career was characterized
by my love of painting. I had already achieved a fair
amount of success as a painter; production in glass
had been simply an economic necessity. Subsequent
to the Zurich symposium, and directly related to the
excitement that all the participants felt about this new
way of approaching glass, I spent all my time that was
not devoted to production to experimenting with
fine-art forms and colors in Murano glass. Venini, Fratelli
Toso and De Maio all graciously allowed me to make
use of their facilities while developing my art. While I
continued with my lampworking in my studio in the
Venice Ghetto, I maintained a rewarding collaboration
with Marvin Lipofsky, whom I had met in Zurich.
As Mr. Kangas reports, in 1976, Marvin invited
me to CCAC to teach American students some of the
ancient Murano techniques. Determined to create a
cultural bridge between Murano and the U.S., and with
his customary generosity, Marvin arranged for me a
series of artistic visits to the colleges where new kinds
of glass programs were being developed by young
and enthusiastic teachers: Harvey Littleton, Joel Phillip
Meyers, Michael Taylor and Fritz Dreisbach. (In line with
his conception of these visits as a culturally reciprocal
collaboration, and in keeping with the contemporary
American penchant for protest buttons, we even created
a button on which was written “Save the Venice Glass
Culture!) I was very impressed by the enthusiasm and
excitement of both the teachers and students who were
approaching glass from an artistic, intellectual point
of view. It seemed to me that colleges and universities
were the places best qualified to teach artistic glass,
recognizing that the open minds of American students
could easily assimilate this beautiful medium. In
contrast, many of the Murano factories where I began
working as a child of ten were often staffed by workers
from outside the traditional Murano glass culture.
Motivated solely by economic concerns, outside of the
culture and uneducated in its traditions, they viewed
glassworking as simply an expedient to make a living.
They frequently made life in the furnaces very difficult
for us young people with their brutal and vulgar
behavior.
In the late 1970’s some master glassblowers
from Murano were invited to America to teach.
Technical virtuosos and highly skilled craftsmen, they
demonstrated to the American students the repetition
of forms they had been producing for years in the
Murano factories. Following these visits, a kind of
competition developed amongst the Americans as
to who could best imitate Murano techniques. My
perception of this phenomenon was that this intense
focus on craft production – and, not incidentally, the
marketing of it – led the students to neglect the artistic
aspect of their education in favor of technical skills.
Intent on imitating the classic Murano forms, they lost
the opportunity to develop an authentic American
dialect of the Murano language.
Much credit must be given to those students
who continue their artistic, aesthetic and intellectual
experiments in glass – they have created art that is
quintessentially “American glass,” sprung from Murano
roots. They are the true teachers of tomorrow. The Glass
Studio Movement was born on the college campuses of
America, and it still thrives today. Many of these artists
are well represented in the Glass Alive! exhibition, and
their work, in years to come, will become an integral
part of the historical dialogue between the Murano and
American glass cultures – a dialogue that, at its best, is
mutually rewarding. As for myself, after fifty-five years
working in glass, I am still striving to create my own few
original “words” as part of that cultural conversation.
– Maestro Gianni Toso
_______________________________________________
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