Visions in Glass

Up to the 20th century, the tradition of glassmaking has been caringly maintained by artists and craftsmen, and the intricacies of its workings were traded between artisans and between cultures for centuries. But the rise of mechanized factories witnessed a decline in the creation of hand-crafted glass. As factories disbanded hand-blown units only a few individual artists and small glass-art firms remained.

By Chad Fasca

In Toledo, Ohio, an experimental glassblowing workshop in the early sixties signaled the start of an artistic revolution and heralded the ascendancy of studio glass as a recognized and sought-after art form. Competing for space with lawnmowers in the Toledo Museum of Art's (TMA) garage, a group of artists-mostly potters-spent two weeks exploring glass as an artistic medium. Led by Harvey Littleton, the workshops endeavored to take glass out of the factories and into art studios. Previously glasswork was largely restricted to large-batch industrial production and was typically limited by functional considerations. The 1962 Workshops would help change all that.
   Harvey Littleton, an artist and art professor from Corning, New York, strove to remove glass from its increasingly industrial setting, unfetter it from function, and explore its potential as a medium for liberated artistic expression. For over twenty years, he would devote himself to his passion for glass art.
   Not the ordinary enthusiast, Littleton had developed a playful fondness for glass as early as six years old. On Saturdays, Littleton's father, who was director of research at the famous Corning Glass Works, used to take him on visits to the factory, allowing him to toy with glass melted over Bunsen burners. Perhaps, it was those first impressions of fluid, molten glass that ignited Littleton's fascination with the material. He was raised in a community whose main activity was the fabrication of glassware, but his passion for glass as an artistic medium was tempered by his father's insistence that he study a more practical pursuit. Littleton Sr. considered glassblowing the impractical fascination of a young man with a dead past: Littleton was enrolled as a physics major at the University of Michigan in 1940.
   World War II military service transported Littleton overseas, where he would remain, upon his discharge in 1945, to study pottery at the Brighton School of Art in England. Feeling himself unable to return to the study of physics, Littleton eventually came home, compromising with his parents and graduating with a degree in industrial design. Regardless of compromise, Littleton's interest in art and glass could not be suppressed. While working in an industrial design firm after graduation, he taught nights at a private pottery.

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