Ellipsoid Prismatic
USA, Harvey K. Littleton, 1981
Colourless transparent glass, red, yellow, blue, grey
H 23,2 cm
Musée de design et d’arts appliqués contemporains, Lausanne,102
Throughout the thousands of years of the history of glass, the products of glassmakers were almost always associated with a specific function until well into the 20th century, from simple drinking glasses for inns to representative vases for palace interiors. Even when the conditions of production were changed by industrialisation, the manufacture of high-quality pieces remained largely with companies that continued to uphold the artisan manufacturing process.
At the beginning of the second half of the 20th century, a fundamental change occurred. Besides its use as utility glass, glass was now discovered as a material for non-functional works of art.
After preliminary stages around the time of Art Nouveau, which, however, was still associated with “usable” objects such as vases, the new tendencies mentioned above began to take hold vehemently in both Europe and the United States in the 1950s. Glassmakers, who were beginning to realize their new role as artists, used the infrastructures of existing glassworks for their activities. At the same time, artists who did not have their own craft experience in the field of glass also began to explore the material and its possibilities and either had their ideas implemented by glassmakers or acquired the skills for execution themselves.
Throughout the 1960s there was still an incredible amount of experimentation and work on solving technical problems. The studio glass movement in the United States proved to be an important element in this development. The initiator of this movement was Harvey K. Littleton, who, in collaboration with the glass technician Dominik Labino, on the occasion of a workshop at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1962 attempted to introduce artists to glass as a material for their work. The term studio glass comes from the fact that small glass furnaces were developed that could be set up in artists’ studios.
The signed object shown here is by Harvey K. Littleton. It was created in 1981 and was constructed in several layers of colourless and coloured glass using an overlay technique. After cooling, it was cut, ground and polished to its present shape and surface structure.