Seeing through modernism: from Europe to the United States, the full sweep of the modern movement in design is captured in glass at the Corning Museum.

Strolling into the modern glass gallery of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York, where the display cases with pieces from 1880 to 1960 are arranged in chronological order, the aficionado of modernism feels comfortable moving quickly past the vitrines of ornate, sinuous wares from the art nouveau period. But there, sharing shelf space with the floral-shaped iridescent Favrile designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933), is a set of blown-glass goblets of such chaste and simple form-shallow, clear glass bowls mounted on ruby-colored bell-shaped feet-that they seem to have come form the1940s or 1950s A curatorial error, you wonder? No. The goblets were designed about 1900 by the German architect Peter Behrens (Fig.10). Soon afterward, a sleek lead glass claret jug with a wooden handle and silver cuffs appears. Surely this must be a product of the Bauhaus, you think. But no, the jug was produced in 1882 by the iconoclastic Scottish designer Christopher Dresser (Fig.7)

This unsurpassed design collection offers many such surprises, which both shed light on the roots of modernism and demonstrate the ways that the movement found expression in glass in Europe and the United States. You might, for example, think you have Rene Lalique pegged stylistically-and, indeed, the gallery includes several of his familiar neoclassically inspired art deco designs. But then you come across his Tourbillons (Whirlwind or Whirlpool) vase of 1925 (Fig 5) a vessel made of molded glass with deep sweeping incisions that Lalique coated in black enamel. The piece seems to anticipate the dynamic abstract aesthetic that came to the fore twenty-five years later. Or, on seeing an acid-etched vase, you encounter Maurice Marinot, a respected fauvist painter who became enamored of glass after a visit to a factory run by friends in 1911. He mastered the techniques of glassworking and set out to produce, as he wrote, "objects born of fire to give the feeling ... of water, still or flowing, of ice which is cracking and melting." (1) The Corning collection includes a vase he made about 1934 that captures this effect perfectly (Fig. 4). It is covered in roundels created by repeated immersions of the piece in an acid bath.

"Modernism came to glasswork for the same reasons it came to other areas or arc and design, and the same rules apply: concerns for progress, transparency, and purity of form," says Tina Oldknow, curator of Coming's Modern Glass department. "Modernism is also pluralistic, and you can see in our collection how many different things were happening under its umbrella." Three areas in Europe, Oldknow explains, produced the most artistic and influential modernist glassware. One region was die Nordic countries, in particular Sweden and Finland. In the second decade of the twentieth century, the Swedish glass manufacturer Orrefors hired artists to direct its designs. At about the same time, the company developed a technique called graal, in which an etched or engraved patterned vitreous core is encased in clear glass. The graal method, imitated worldwide, was used to great effect in the 1930s by the designer Vicke Lindstrand (1904-1983), whose figurative style is often reminiscent of that of the art deco era designer Jean Dupas (1882-1964). (2) The Nordic glassmakers employed clear glass almost exclusively, although after World War II Swedish firms like Orrefors and the companies Kosta and Boda (which all later merged) began to present glass in subtle colors and with restrained abstract designs based on nature.

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Beginning in the 1930s Finnish glass manufacturers were remarkable for their willingness to explore new forms in functional glass objects. "One of the marks of modernist glass is that designers were interested in the possibilities of the material--to see what glass could do," says Oldknow. "Previously, glass forms had been interpretations on forms that had first been worked in metal." In 1936 the Finnish company Karhula-Iittala glassworks produced a biomorphic glass vase--now a modernist classic--designed by me architect Alvar Aalto (1898-1976) for the dining room of Helsinki's Savoy restaurant. The Corning collection's postwar Finnish glass is even more striking. It includes a bladelike 1957 plate by Tapio Wirkkala (1915-1985), a designer best known for his furniture of swirling laminated wood, and a frosted glass vase made in 1956 by Timo Sarpaneva (Fig. 8). That sculptural vessel, pierced by a round hole, was part of a series that Sarpaneva said was inspired by the work of the English sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. (3)

Italy--or, more specifically, the small island of Murano in the Venetian lagoon--is another part of Europe where the story of modern ism and glass was written, though Venice is central to the entire Western history of glass craftsmanship. The city's first glassmaking guild was established early in the thirteenth century. By the end of the century workshops became so great in number that the city expelled them to Murano for fear that the furnaces might start a catastrophic fire. (4) Bravura construction and ornamentation became the keynote of Venetian glass--a style wholly at odds with the zeitgeist of the twentieth century. But a renaissance in Murano glass came about in so small part due to the efforts of an entrepreneur named Paolo Venini. An attorney from Milan, Venini began operating glass manufactories in Murano with Giacomo Cappelin in the 1920s. His initial move was to hire the painter Vittorio Zecchin co design clean-formed classical wares modeled on glass vessels depicted in works by old master painters such as Titian, Veronese, and Caravaggio (see Fig. 2). (5) But Murano glass changed utterly when Venini hired the architect Carlo Scarpa (1906-1978) as his design director in 1933. Scarpa revived the use of age-old techniques such as murthine--or mosaic glass, made by fusing together colored disks or squares--and "canne," a composite cane made by a method in which colored rods are laid out in a pattern, gathered onto a hot clear glass matrix, then reheated, blown, and tooled. Venini himself developed into a talented designer, with an eye for the buoyant color and asymmetrical forms that are a hallmark of much mid - century Murano glass (see Fig. 14). (6)

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