As a medium for artistic expression, glassmaking is ancient, first practiced more than 4,500 years ago in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt. The making of glass involves a kind of magic, melting together the commonplace materials of sand, potash and lime into a substance that flows like liquid in its molten state, and cools into a solid that has an extraordinary marriage with light.
Yet as old as glassmaking may be, the artisans who practice it are continuously coming up with new and diverse ways of creating beauty.
“Contemporary International Glass: 60 Artists in the V&A”
By Jennifer Hawkings Opie
V&A Publications, 144 pages, $50
This is a beautifully illustrated new book that celebrates the endlessly diverse artistic medium of studio glass (a unique product hand made by a single individual). Sixty of the world’s top contemporary glass artists, whose works are in the unrivaled collection of glass art at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, are brought together in this survey, a must-have for glass collectors.
A huge variety of work, abstract and figurative, from America’s Dale Chihuly, Richard Marquis and William Morris, to Japan’s Koichiro Yamamoto and Keiko Mukaide and Italy’s Lino Tagliapietra, is highlighted.
Steuben Design: A Legacy of Light and Form
By M.J. Madigan
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 144 pages, $29.95
With striking black-and-white images and a laudatory text, this book by M.J. Madigan (former editor in chief of several magazines, including Art & Antiques) chronicles the history and the painstaking process of designing, forming, finishing and engraving Steuben crystal.
Glassmaking at the internationally acclaimed Steuben Glass factory at Corning, N.Y., is a team effort. Technological advances such as gas-fired furnaces and computer-fed melting tanks may have updated the ancient process of glassmaking, but the passionate commitment to high standards for making crystal is the unchanged ideal that has made Steuben crystal the cherished possession of connoisseurs for 100 years.
