Viennese Glass Design 1895-1925

Venice and Bohemia have long been rival centers of fine glassmaking in Europe, and each reached its greatest height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While many styles of glassware were manufactured in bath places, the production and tradition of the two centers were quite different. In the Venetian republic the glass industry was clustered on the small island of Murano. Venice specialized in a kind of soda glass distinguished by its lightness and ductility. Blown to a miraculous thinness, this glass could, in its molten state, be drawn and twisted into elaborate shapes; colored canes were sometimes inserted to create lacy lattices or millet ion patterns. Bohemian glass was made in a number of widely scattered small towns and villages in what was then a province of the vast Austrian Empire. This was a lead-based glass, comparable in its brilliance and clarity to fine rock crystal. A courtly tradition of hard stone and gem carving led to the transfer of those refined skills to glass cutting. Clear g lass was often cased with colored glass that was partially cut away to create jewellike patterns.

With the collapse of the Venetian Republic in 1797, the Murano glassworks fell into decline. There was an effort to revive the ancient glass industry there in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and Venetian glass made in imitation of eighteenth-century models was widely shown at international exhibitions beginning in 1862. These works were greatly admired, but Venetian glassmakers continually repeated them, failing to move beyond a complacent historicism. The Bohemian glass industry flourished in the Biedermeier period-from about 1815 to 1848-producing cut and enameled glass that was exported throughout Europe and widely imitated. By the later nineteenth century, skilled Bohemian glassmakers, encouraged by industrialization, bad developed new colors and effects, as well as ever more ornate cut-glass designs. However, by the end of the century, in both Venice and Bohemia, exceptional skill and superb craftsmanship were in servitude to dispiriting routine.

Glass may have been the material that best expressed the restless spirit of art nouveau. From a molten mass of inchoate matter, colorless, yet apt to contain all colors, a Promethean master might produce a myriad of forms. This mysterious genesis, presided over by a Venetian master, was evoked poetically by Gabriele D'Annunzio (1863-1938) in the novel Il fuoco in 1900:

[The glass vessel] was indeed beautiful, mysterious as natural things are mysterious, holding the life of a human breath in its hollow, its transparency emulating skies and waters... .All colours melted into its own colour. And it seemed to be living a manifold life in its frailty, like an animated rainbow in which the universe mirrors itself. [1]

Yet art glass was invented neither in Venice nor in Bohemia, but in New York City and in Nancy, France. In the latter, Emile Galle (1846-1904) studied and imitated Islamic and other historical models before embarking on an independent course, producing sculptural and coloristic effects in cameo glass that translated a personal vision. Across the Atlantic, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848- 1913) looked at the iridescence deposited by minerals in the soil on Roman glasses recovered from archaeological excavations and deliberately imitated its beguiling mutability He called the result "Favrile" glass, a neologism intended to suggest the presence of an artist's hand. The glass of both the American and the Frenchman seemed to embody dreamlike metamorphoses, and their success and influence were worldwide.

Western art has periodically renewed itself by rejecting the perceived corruption of current taste in the name of a reclaimed Edenic purity The multifaceted phenomenon commonly designated as art nouveau was one such moment of collective impatience with the status quo. Eager to abandon the past, many accepted Charles Baudelaire's challenge to voyage "au fond de l'Inconnu pour trouver du nouveau." [2]

Modern art came late to Vienna, where it was deliberately introduced by a young generation of artists who looked abroad for models with which to oppose the pervasive local form of academic historicism, known as the Makart style after its foremost practitioner Hans Makart (1840-1884). In 1897 a group of these young artists broke with the official art academy to found the Vienna Secession. Ver Sacrum (Sacred Spring) was their motto, and the title of their art journal. From the beginning, architecture, extended to include all of the ancillary crafts contributing to domestic life, was granted a central role. The Secession announced itself publicly by constructing a temple to art in Vienna, a Secession building, designed by Josef Maria Olbrich (1867-1908) in 1897. The motto above the portal--"Der Zeit Ihre Kunst/Der Kunst Ihre Freiheit" (To each Age its Art/ To Art its Freedom)--was congruent with the relativist philosophy of the contemporary art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905) who taught that every era express es itself through its own artistic language. Styles previously described pejoratively as archaic or decadent in relation to a classical norm were now seen as valid idioms. [3] The immodest goal of the Secession was to give formal expression to the "Modem Spirit."