The roar of the furnace is music to Harvey Littleton`s ears, the blast of intense heat a welcome assault on his perspiring body. Armed with a traditional ”gathering iron,” a blowpipe and two able assistants, he has all the tools he needs to choreograph breathtakingly beautiful rainbow sculptures in glass.
The master never tires of the work. ”Do you get tired of breathing?” he asked. There is some stress, perhaps, in the self-imposed pressure of one-upping his own creations. ”Boredom is the touchstone of writers, artists, all creative people. We escape from it as we discover new ideas,” he said. In his 20- by 26-foot studio in Spruce Pine, N.C., the magic continues as it has for the last 23 years. Here toils the 62-year-old father of the modern art- glass movement.
”It is a compulsion,” the artist said. ”I used to even dream about glass once in a while.”
The exhibition of Littleton`s rainbow creations that can be seen through April 20 at the Betsy Rosenfield Gallery, 212 W. Superior St., is his first one-man show in Chicago. His works have been displayed in museums and galleries around the country.
Working with glass was his destiny. Littleton`s father, Jesse, a physicist, directed research for Corning Glass Works, where he invented Pyrex cookware. He began to take his son to the factory when he was 6.
”It was essentially babysitting,” Littleton said. ”He would turn me over to the stockman, who`d sit me in front of a Bunsen burner or tubing, which I`d play with and love. I was most fascinated with the colors. When you see a great big furnace and out of the end of it comes a ribbon of glass, its jaws are cut off and it rolls down a chute and goes into a mold pock-e-ta, pock-e-ta–it`s mesmerizing.
”I think most people who practice in glass are frustrated pyromaniacs. My desire to make pottery stemmed from my enjoyment of firing the kiln.”
After military service and studying art and industrial design, Littleton went to Corning in 1947 and proposed that it launch an experimental workshop devoted to artistic experimentation with glass. When Corning declined, he poured his energies into pottery. But that was only an affair. His true love still was glass.
At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, with which Littleton was affiliated for 25 years, he established the first university glass-blowing program in the country. (Today about 100 educational institutions offer such programs, and at least 2,000 people describe themselves as professional glass artists.)
His dream became one that not even the old masters of glass–Louis Comfort Tiffany, Emil Galle, Rene Lalique–had realized. Although they were the masters of design, their tools never touched molten glass; factory glassblowers implemented their creations. No single person went from creative design to furnace to finishing the product. A division of labor existed from the beginnings of the industry, whether the output was mass-produced goblets or one-of-a-kind figurines.
When in 1957 Littleton visited more than 50 factories on the island of Murano, the home of the Venetian glass industry in Italy, he became convinced that it was possible. When he returned to the United States, he continued to experiment with a primitive furnace, which he recently described as ”just a box of brick.”
”The first pieces were hardly more than shapeless lumps,” he said. The first formula didn`t work. But with the guidance of Dominick Lambino, who had developed a formula for glass fibers, he was able to achieve the results he was looking for.
In 1962 Littleton led a seminar at the Toledo (Ohio) Museum of Art (where he had taught from 1949 to 1951) and in a garage behind the museum demonstrated how his dream of glassmaking could be done by one person.
It was a technological breakthrough in a city that has been a center for the glass industry since the 19th Century. It also was a revolutionary artistic achievement, (”We proved glass could be melted and blown outside of a fancy industrial setting,” Littleton said). It was the birth of what is referred to as the modern art, studio or contemporary glass movement.
In 1963 Littleton was invited by the Art Institute of Chicago to exhibit some of his vases, bowls, plates and paperweights. ”That lended prestige to an almost-amateurish approach,” the artist said. ”Don`t talk to me about the pieces.”
Obviously, he was not yet pleased with what he was doing. But the more he experimented, the closer he got. A work shattered in frustration, whose pieces he reassembled and re-fused into a new form, was Littleton`s turning point.
(The Museum of Modern Art later purchased that piece for its design collection.)
His abstract sculptures have taken on many forms in the last 20 years. They undulate, their veins of color frozen in clear uninterrupted tubular forms called rockers.
Littleton`s works may range from $6,000 to $38,000. ”Somebody paid me the ultimate compliment during a retrospective exhibition in Ames, Ia.,” he said. ”They came in and stole a piece.”
Littleton has his own heroes. His respect for traditional glass craftsmen inspired him to collect Steuben (he inherited his first pieces from his parents), Baccarat, Tiffany, Lalique, Victorian and Art Nouveau works, which he used to in teaching his students.
Just as Littleton described in his book ”Glassblowing, A Search For Form” (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1971), he constantly experiments, seeking new manifestations of the medium that has fascinated him since he was a boy.
”Now I`m searching again because I find the pieces not satisfying enough. I`m frustrated because they`re smaller than I would like.”
Littleton Co. employs 13, including his wife, Bess. Son John also is a glassmaker, son Thomas is involved in the administration of the company and runs the computer, daughter Maurine runs a gallery in Washington and a fourth daughter lives in Columbus, Ohio, where she works in a hospital.
”I don`t use molds,” said Littleton. ”I have some idea of what I`m going to do, no drawing. What makes (glass) an art form is the action and reaction, just as a painter faces a canvas, makes a mark, changes the canvas.”
Except that it`s the furnace Littleton faces daily. ”The furnace has two chambers separated by a perforated wall. Hot glass flows from the melting chamber to the working chamber to provide a continuous supply of crystal. The glass is melted with electricity–electrodes are built into the wall at the bottom of the chamber at either end. Molten glass will carry an electric current, but not very well, so it`s the resistence of the glass to the passage of the current that makes (the sculpting) work.
”The real heat is about 2400 degrees Farenheit, 1700 in the working chamber. Temperature is critical, and it`s controlled by a gas burner. Molten glass is a marvelous material because it sticks to the iron, the hot steel (of the blowpipe). We gather it on end like gathering honey, then chill it on the outside and blow into it, always using hot glass against cold glass. Heating the colder layer you`ve chilled is the way you control the movement.”
The magic of color comes from different minerals such as magnesium, which produces green, and manganese, purple.
”I pretty much use all colors as threads, overlays and underlays. There are a variety of technical ways to apply them–you can buy them in powder form, then roll them in, for example.” Hot glass colors differ greatly from the final cold colors.
It may take two hours to produce a single work, then several days to cool it in a computer-controlled annealing oven followed by weeks of polishing.
While some critics are lukewarm about Littleton`s current production, they cannot fault the works which labeled him pioneer nor dispute his leadership role in the movement. Littleton earned a gold medal from the American Craft Guild, its highest honor.
He has described himself as obstreperous. Ambition never has left him.
”I like to build. This is the real passion.”
And so, the artist in glass toils in his studio in the Blue Ridge Mountains, about 50 miles northeast of Asheville, with the sparkling liquid, twisting, spinning, puffing until the solid form he desires is achieved and the colors are more or less where he wants them. No, he never tires of this mistress.
”Glass is a very seductive material.”
