1945: New Beginning
After 1945, young artists were convoked to North Bohemia to help with renewing the glass industry and education. It was thanks to precisely these artist´s efforts that the foundations for a new approach to Czech glass were laid in 1946–1948.
Stanislav Libenský, Jaroslava Brychtová: Winged Head (1962) by Stanislav Libenský (1921–2002), Jaroslava Brychtová (1921–2020)Museum of Decorative Arts In Prague
Behind the Iron Curtain
When the boarders were closed after 1948, the work of Czech glassmakers evolved for nine years in a certain amount of isolation from the wider world. Milan Triennial in 1957 and Expo 58 Brussels opened up new opportunities.
Thomas S. Buechner (1926 – 2010), founding director of Corning Museum of Glass (USA):
"As the unanticipated crates from behind a very hostile Iron Curtain arrived in 1959 – and there were many – we were amazed. It was like receiving household goods from another planet..."
Stanislav Libenský, Jaroslava Brychtová: Head–Bowl (1955/1956) by Stanislav Libenský (1921–2002), Jaroslava Brychtová (1921–2020)Museum of Decorative Arts In Prague
Stanislav Libenský a Jaroslava Brychtová
From 1957 onwards Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová began working on the systematic melding of glass art and architectonic space. Trey created more than 80 large interior works both at home and abroad.
Work of the Czech glassmakers met with acclaim from Western critics. Czech glass artists won four awards in Milan, and eleven at Expo 58, with two of these being grand prizes. This was followed by exhibitions in Moscow, Corning, Berlin, Magdeburg, Sao Paolo, New Delhi, and Bombay, Expo 67 in Montreal, and elsewhere. Czech glass began to be valued abroad and became a popular collector´s item.
Potemkin Village of Communistic Society
Issues specific to Czechoslovakia: Large foreign exhibitions made up for the absence of market economic pressure and competitions. However, the Czechoslovak exhibits never saw execution.
While the global art scene was dominated by an industrial design that reacted to the postwar fascination with consumer goods, the Czechoslovakian glassmaking scene began to reflect issues specific to Czechoslovakia. Although the industry did still retain a role for artists, there was a lack of internal mechanisms for ensuring the actual introduction of their new designs into the manufacturing process.
A Triumph and... the End
Expo 1970, in Osaka, Japan, was to see the last Czechoslavak state participation in the Expos for a very long time.
Like other artists, Czech glass artists, too, used their works at Osaka to criticize the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion of their country. Czechoslovak society at the time was dominated by so-called "normalization": the process of re-freezing political life after the Prague Spring thaw. However, domestic glass artists had the advantage of not being dependent on the sale of their works in Czechoslovakia alone.
That is: a massive part of their individual production was exported abroad by the Art Center, and as it had no success with Western collectors when it came to selling other artistic commodities, and meanwhile the regime vitally needed foreign currency, in this respect, the abstract forms of Czech glass were something that the state was willing to tolerate.
Dana Vachtová: Houses That Have Disappeared (1989) by Dana Vachtová (1937)Museum of Decorative Arts In Prague
The 80th – a clear effort to rise again into activity
Glassmakers arrived with new ideas, and, excellent exhibitions, symposiums, and an individual spark lit up the atmosphere of creation in this field. More frequent work-related travel abroad became possible.
Around mid-1980s, the youngest artists studying at the glass studio of the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague discovered the elements of post-modernims and, with them, decorativeness, grotesque ornament, humor, and provocation. And also rebellion against centrally directed culture – and against glass itself.
Klára Horáčková: Xiphosuran (2003) by Klára Horáčková (1980)Museum of Decorative Arts In Prague
Fundamental changes after 1989
Czech glass artists had to begin abiding by harsh laws of global marketing. They thus travel, go out on intership, teach abroad, and cooperate with professional galleries
The long-term exhibition Pleiad of Glass 1946–2019, which has consisted of art-exhibition glass objects, has been expanded to include almost fifty large-scale sculptures from the collections of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague.
All of the exhibited objects document not only the creativity of Czech artists, which in its day foreshadowed the future developments in art glass in the world, but also the technical virtuosity of the master glassmakers that collaborated in the execution of these artworks. Last but not least, they also attest to the high moral and professional codex of the curators who deserve merit for instigating the creation and preservation of these works of art.
Text: Milan Hlaveš, Sylva PetrováPhoto: Gabriel Urbánek a Ondřej Kocourek
https://www.upm.cz/pleiad-of-glass-1946-2019/
