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MID 20TH CENTURY GLASS IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA
by:
Tina Oldknow
Czech art glass from the 1950s and 1960s is relatively unknown, even in the Czech Republic, yet recent research has begun to illuminate this innovative and experimental time as a key period in twentieth century glass design. Sealed off from the West for decades, with only intermittent periods of exposure, Czech glass made in the post World War II and Cold War eras is now being studied in depth. The artistic courage and dynamic vision of Czechoslovak artists and designers, who preserved their creative independence under a totalitarian Communist regime, is strikingly documented in their use of glass as a medium for painting, sculpture,
and architecture. 1
With the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948, the official styleknown as socialist realismwas heavily promoted for the arts and compulsory for public commissions.2 Painting, sculpture, and graphic arts were used to illustrate political ideology and artists who rejected the state-approved direction ran the risk of persecution. The heritage of the Czech avant-gardewhich included early twentieth century Czech Cubism and Functionalismwas dismissed as decadent. Contemporary art in the West, particularly abstract art, was held in contempt. Information was restricted behind the Iron Curtain and Czechoslovak artists gradually became isolated from artistic developments in the rest of the world.
However, Czechoslovak designers working in glass, textiles and ceramics were relatively immune from the repression that fine artists endured. Unlike painters, sculptors and graphic artists, artists working in the applied arts were allowed to continue relatively unhindered and, in certain cases, encouraged to be experimental. Glass was considered a functional, ornamental medium, not an expressive or potentially subversive one. How could a political statement be made in the design of a vase?
The survival of artistic experimentation under Communist rule was largely due to economics and the political climate that Russian author Ilya Ehrenburg termed the thaw, or the period in which Soviet ideology was somewhat relaxed.3 During the 1960s especially there was a belief that the peoples ideal of socialism with a human face might actually be achieved. The thaw began with the revelation of crimes after Joseph Stalins death in 1953 and ended in Czechoslovakia with the punitive invasion by Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops in August 1968.
Glass has been produced in Czechoslovakia since the Middle Ages and historically it has been one of the countrys leading exports. The original designs of its post war glass reflect the Czech desire to create a strong national identity in glass, to attract foreign currency and to look good in competition with the West. Design was seen as a politically harmless way to accomplish these goals. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, glass design in Czechoslovakia was closely related to developments in contemporary painting, sculpture, and architecture and it continued to have this close relationship during the Communist period.
The 1957 Milan Trienniale di Milano and the 1958 Brussels Exposition universelle et internationale /Wereldtentoonstelling were the first significant international exhibitions of Czech glass following the 1948 takeover. Large international exhibitions were the primary means of exposure for Czech design in Europe and north America. The major works in glass sent to the Milan Triennials and to international exhibitions were specially commissioned and their planning and execution often took several years. They document a crucial migration in Czech glass from applied arts to fine art, a sophisticated movement that would begin a few years later in the United States and western Europe, and still later in Australia and Asia.
The Czechoslovak pavilion at the 1958 exhibition was made of a new material for architecture: foam glass. A lightweight, opaque and insulating material, foam glass is made of fused crushed or granulated glass that has been mixed with carbon or limestone. The glass inside the pavilion was as radical as the glass outside and monumental sculptures by Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtov￡ and Ren￩ Roub￭cek earned gold medals. With these extraordinary works, the foundation for a new Czech concept of glassmakingthe idea of glass as a medium for sculpture, painting and architecturewas laid.
Major works in glass made for the 1958 exhibitionsuch as the iron and stained glass sculpture Sun, water, air by the painter and graphic artist Jan Kot￭killustrate the freedom of glass artists to pursue abstract ideas. While it may seem surprising that the Communist government allowed the public display of such work, the West was a crucial market for the Czech glass industry and it was understood that products had to be made that would appeal to a Western audience. Yet, most of the glass displayed at these exhibitions were prototypes and were not commercially produced.
Glass designers were not entirely immune from censorship, however, and some of their designs were questioned. Three nudes, Jan Kot￭ks vase engraved with an abstract theme, was exhibited in Moscow in 1959. This was an important exhibition for Czechoslovakia and, in addition to commercial examples of glass production, some artistic pieces were shown. The abstract style of Kot￭ks vase, which was clearly at odds with the tenets of socialist realism, drew unfavourable attention and the vase was personally criticized by Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet premier.
In spite of some restrictions, the opportunity to explore abstraction was among the most important of the freedoms experienced by Czech artists working in glass. This exploration is most clearly demonstrated in original design drawings of the period, created in watercolour, tempera, gouache, charcoal, ink, and pencil. The design drawings vary from straightforward concepts for tableware to small abstract paintings overlaid with mats cut into glass shapes. The drawings show how Czech artists transformed abstract ideas into glass and they provide insight into the ways in which an artist develops an idea in two and then three dimensions.
The 1967 Canadian World ExhibitionExpo 67held in Montreal was an especially influential and successful exhibition for Czechoslovakia. The Czechoslovak pavilion, with its sophisticated historical, scientific, and cultural exhibits was one of the most popular national pavilions.
Expo 67 was particularly significant for visiting American and European studio glass artists, who were impressed with the way the Czechs used glass as a medium for sculpture, painting, and architecture. Many studio glass pioneers such as Harvey Littleton, Erwin Eisch, Dale Chihuly, James Carpenter and Marvin Lipofsky visited Czechoslovakia in the years immediately following Expo 67 to meet artists such as Stanislav Libensky and Jaroslava Brychtov￡, Ren￩ Roub￭cek , Jir￭ Harcuba and Vladim￭r Kopecky who had made such exceptional and little-known works. These visits were much appreciated by Czechoslovak artists, especially during the period of isolation that followed the 1968 invasion.
Large-scale glass at Expo 67 featured Roub￭ceks remarkable installation of tall blown and assembled sculptures, titled Glass forest, and three extraordinary sculptures by Libensky and Brychtov￡, titled Sun of centuries, Big Conus and Blue concretion.
The Montreal exhibition came at the tail end of the Communist reforms of the 1960s. In 1968, the invasion of Czechoslovakiaand the implementation of neo-Stalinist cultural policy that followedproved that artistic freedoms, among others, were ultimately irreconcilable with Communist rule.
After 1968, Czechoslovak artists continued to teach and to work under highly repressive conditions. In the 1980s, some of these artists were allowed to travel and to teach abroad, influencing the development of studio glass internationally, especially in cast glass sculpture. It was not until after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, however, that Czech artists and designers working in glass were able to pursue truly individual and free expression in their work.
The role of Czech glass design as an outlet for artistic exploration in a period of political repression has lasting importance for the history of twentieth century glass. A similar crossover from painting and sculpture to a decorative arts medium occurs nowhere else. In other totalitarian regimes of central and eastern Europe, there was neither the strong craft tradition nor the long history of glassmaking that Czechoslovakia possessed. This was a unique situation that arose from the intersection of several key factors: the political repression of the fine arts; strong painters and sculptors who brought their ideas, through teaching, into the applied arts; an excellent educational system in the applied arts; a government that funded and promoted exploration, experimentation, and international exhibitions in glass; the relative isolation of Czech artists from the outside; and the spirit of artistic cooperation, ambition and optimism that was honed by political adversity.
Post war Czech glass design is the subject of a major travelling exhibition Czech glass, 1945-1980: design in an age of adversity organised by Prof Dr Helmut Ricke of the Museum Kunst Palast in Dsseldorf, Germany. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, edited by Dr Ricke, that is the most complete documentation to date of this extraordinary and little-known period in modern glass design.
NOTES
1. Artists and designers are of Czech and Slovak origin, hence the term Czechoslovak. Glass, on the other hand, was primarily made in the traditional Czech lands known as Bohemia in northern Czechoslovakia, hence the term Czech glass. Czech glass is also called Bohemian glass.
2. Bohemia was a kingdom in the Holy Roman Empire, and later a province of the Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire. With the dissolution of Austro-Hungary in 1918, at the close of World War I, Bohemia was incorporated into the independent republic of Czechoslovakia. Occupied by Nazi Germany from 1938 until its liberation in 1945, Czechoslovakia became a Communist state in 1948. After the Velvet Revolution of 1989, the independent Czech and Slovak Republics were formed and officially instituted on January 1, 1993.
3. The term thaw is derived from Ehrenburgs 1954 novel, Ottepel, translated as The thaw, or A change of season. This controversial novel described Soviet life in a less propagandistic and more realistic way than was previously allowed by Soviet cultural authorities. The thaw refers to the period after Stalins death in 1953, and the subsequent de-Stalinization programs of Nikita Khrushchev, who was secretary general of the Communist Party from 1953 to 1964. Ehrenburg was an important literary link between Soviet and Western intellectuals during the Cold War era. He was censured in 1963 when the thaw began to reverse in the Soviet Union, but he managed to stay active in Soviet literary circles until his death in 1967. In Czechoslovakia, the period of openness lasted from about 1957 to August, 1968, when the Prague Spring movement was ended by the 1968 invasion. |
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