Publisher: Skira editore, Milano, 2010

A new publication in the series “Le Stanze del Vetro”, a project for the study and enhancement of Venetian glassmaking in the 20th century, from a collaboration between the Fondazione Cini and Pentagram Stiftung.

This volume accompanies the fall exhibition in Venice dedicated to the history of master glassmaker Muranesi Cappellin & C. (which Giacomo Cappellin founded after breaking with Paolo Venini and the V.S.M. Cappellin Venini & C.) to become one of the most important glass companies thanks also to its collaboration with a young architect, Carlo Scarpa. The vast production ranges from transparent glass to milky glass with gold, or glass paste and cased glass, or Phoenician decorations and figures, animals and plants; plus important lighting works.

The entire output of Cappellin is documented (open from 1925 to 1931), placing the spotlight above all on the contribution of the major architect and glass designer Carlo Scarpa, his work during the 1920s and his relations with the arts. The book also discusses the production and exhibitions of Cappellin in Paris and the United States, relations established with artists in Turin and its very unique glass productions. Edited by Marino Barovier, this volume includes the catalogue of the complete works by Carlo Scarpa for Cappellin and is an indispensible tool for collectors, scholars and art dealers.

A Murano artist and painter interested in the decorative arts, and particularly in glass, Vittorio Zecchin (1878–1947), from 1921 to 1925 and in accordance with a practice not seen in Murano before, occupied the position of artistic director of the V.S.M. Cappellin Venini & C. glassworks, founded in 1921 by the Venetian antiquarian Giacomo Cappellin and the young Milanese lawyer Paolo Venini, together with other shareholders, with the intention of offering a sophisticated, modern style of production. Responding to the demands expressed by Cappellin and Venini, Zecchin designed monochrome blown-glass pieces with extraordinary colours and classical essential lines. Products of this kind, clearly different to anything being offered by their contemporaries and in perfect harmony with the changed public taste, marked a decisive turning point in the 20th-century panorama of Murano and contributed significantly to the renaissance of the sector. The elegance of the design combined with evocative shades of colour also characterised the glass pieces designed by Zecchin (between 1925 and 1926) for M.V.M. Cappellin & C., where he continued working as artistic director after the association between Giacomo Cappellin and Paolo Venini came to an end in 1925. This volume reconstructs for the first time the entire collection of transparent blown-glass pieces designed by Vittorio Zecchin, first for Cappellin and Venini and then for Cappellin alone. It consists of a sequence of about 900 models (from vases to compote bowls, from table services to chandeliers) which were identified following rigorous research. The work of Zecchin is illustrated both by an extensive set of photographs produced for this occasion and a selection of period photographs and drawings, mostly unpublished, coming from the Archivio Storico Venini, Murano, the Archivio del Centro Studi Vetro, Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, and the Archivio Zecchin Ramani, Trieste.

“I’ve tried to get away from the everyday object and sought to make Glass works with a capital G. Of course, that’s a dangerous approach, because I don’t want to be an artist, or a sculptor, but in the end the objects I produce look like glass sculptures, and yet they aren’t: they’re a mix that’s hard to fathom.” The brilliant architect and designer Ettore Sottsass “made glass” from 1947 until the end of his career. This volume documents the entire period of his glass oeuvre, from the series he designed in the 1970s for Vistosi to the Memphis collections of the 1980s, the symbolic forms of the 1990s, the stunning constructions for the Millennium House in Qatar, and the famous Kachinas. The wealth of images, the analysis of design and painting together with the coeval cultural and artistic context, and the summary of works including many unpublished pieces make this volume edited by Luca Massimo Barbero the first scientific study on Ettore Sottsass’s works in glass and crystal. Ettore Sottsass jr (1917-2007) was born in Innsbruck and spent his childhood in the Trentino Region (Northen Italy). He trained in Turin during the 1930s, following the footsteps of his father, architect Ettore Sottsass senior (1892-1954). In 1939 he graduated at the Politecnico in Turin, while at the same time cultivating his passion for painting under the guidance of painter Luigi Spazzapan. In 1946, he moved to Milan where he devoted himself to architecture and collaborated with the Triennale, overseeing the set-up of the handcrafts sections. Sottsass continued to work both as an architect and designer, winning many rewards such as the ‘Compasso d’Oro’, which he received in 1959 for the Elea 9003 processor and Valentine, the first portable typewriter, both produced by Olivetti. He loved traveling: he visited Europe, America and Asia. His travels inspired him and were at the center of many of his conceptual photos. In 1976 the Venice Biennale dedicated a broad retrospective exhibition to Sottsass, curated by Vittorio Gregotti. During the later years of his life Sottsass devoted himself to the organization of exhibitions and collaborated with both industrial designers and well-known galleries.

Edited by Rainald Franz Curator, MAK Glass and Ceramics Collection, Vienna With texts by Rainald Franz, Pasquale Gagliardi, Valerio Terraroli, Christoph Thun-Hohenstein and Andreas Vass

The Glass of the Architects. Vienna 1900-1937 is the second exhibition dedicated to international developments in 20th-century glass, after Glass from Finland in the Bischofberger Collection. The exhibitions are part of the “Le Stanze del Vetro” project jointly run by the Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Pentagram Stiftung for the purpose of studying and promoting the art of glassmaking in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Published in collaboration with the MAK Vienna and “Le Stanze del Vetro” on the occasion of the exhibition in Venice, the volume presents over 300 works from the collection of the MAK Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art in Vienna and private collections. It focuses for the first time on the history of glassmaking in Austria from 1900 to 1937, a period spanning the last decades of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the First Republic.

In the early 20th century a group of young architects, designers, and fine arts and architecture students developed a special interest in the process of glassmaking. Many of them were to become leading figures in Viennese Modernism, such as Josef Hoffmann (1870-1956), Koloman Moser (1868-1918), Joseph Maria Olbrich (1867-1908), Leopold Bauer (1872-1938), Otto Prutscher (1880-1949), Oskar Strnad (1879-1935), Oswald Haerdtl (1899-1959) and Adolf Loos (1870-1933). They paved the way to the first pioneering developments in 20th-century glass production as they worked with the furnaces in order to gain a thorough understanding of the material. The collaboration between architects and designers, and the introduction of their innovations to production, created the style of Viennese Glass found in new projects such as the Wiener Werkstätte or the Austrian Werkbund.

A protagonist of Murano glass in the 20th century, Paolo Venini (1895–1959) with his passionate activity spanning almost forty years, made a decisive contribution to the vitality of the art of glass, achieving extraordinary results soon recognised also internationally. A native of Milan and a former partner in the Cappellin Venini firm, in 1925 he founded the V.S.M. Venini & C. glassworks with Napoleone Martinuzzi and Francesco Zecchin as partners, from whom he separated in 1932. Becoming president of the company, he worked untiringly as the undisputed director and manager of the Venini firm up to his death, which occurred in 1959. In defining the catalogue of the glassworks, he also contributed as the inventor of new series of glass pieces in the mid-1930s, but in particular during the 1950s.

This volume, the fruit of in-depth research based mainly on the unpublished material coming from the Venini Historical Archive, illustrates principally this aspect of his activity through a succession of some three hundred models. For the greater part of these Paolo Venini had recourse to the traditional Murano techniques, of which he gave a refined and innovative interpretation, resulting in the Zanfirico reticello, Mosaico zanfirico and Mosaico multicolore series and the highly coloured a murrine glass pieces. The influence of Nordic design was also significant, being reinterpreted through Murano eyes. The volume also documents the contribution of the artists who worked with him intermittently between the 1930s and the 1950s, called upon by Venini himself or arriving independently because of their interest in glass and/or the quality of the work at the furnace. Two hundred and fifty glass pieces tell the story of the collaboration of the Swedish ceramic artist Tyra Lundgren, of Gio Ponti, Piero Fornasetti, the painters Eugène Berman and Riccardo Licata, but also the Americans Ken Scott and Charles Lin Tissot. To them must be added the architects, Massimo Vignelli and Tobia Scarpa, and the Norwegian designer, Grete Korsmo.

The latest publication from the Le Stanze del Vetro tries out a new narrative style based on dialogue and a comparative approach to the poetics of two artists. I Santillana explores the twofold universe of the siblings, Laura de Santillana and Alessandro Diaz de Santillana, descendants of a legendary glassmaking dynasty, who trained in the tradition of their father, Ludovico Diaz de Santillana, and their grandfather Paolo Venini. Published to accompany the Venice exhibition, the book presents around 100 works, including glass sculptures, artworks and objects made by the two artists from the 1980s to the present day. There is also a section with the new works specifically conceived and made for the Venice exhibition. These works were not produced jointly. The two artists have explored individually the language of glass in a different but intertwined way, reflecting their independent artistic careers, albeit bound by family ties and a shared biographical background. In addition to critical essays by Pasquale Gagliardi (Secretary General of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini), Martin Bethenod (Director of the François Pinault Foundation) and Peter Murray (Director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park), the book includes Martin Bethenod in conversation with Alessandro Diaz de Santillana and Laura de Santillana, the catalogue of the works, photographs of the exhibition installation, and the biographies of the two artists.

 

A lively leading exponent of Milanese “Neoclassicism”, the architect Tomaso Buzzi was a friend and collaborator of Gio Ponti and also a member of the design group called Il Labirinto, together with Ponti himself and Paolo Venini. From 1932 to 1933 Buzzi was involved in a very fruitful collaboration with the Venini glassworks, which also periodically turned to him again for designs in later years. This book reconstructs Buzzi’s whole glass production, previously only barely described since few examples of his work were known. The careful documentary research highlights the context that he worked in and underscores his original creative contribution to both the forms of models and the related significant glassmaking techniques. Buzzi often designed objects inspired by ancient art and invented a kind of opaque glass with several layers of colour, finished in gold leaf. With various colour tones this gave rise to the works called laguna, alba, alga and tramonto. The catalogue surveys over 300 designs, ranging from vases to lamp shades produced by Venini, but also includes designs that Buzzi made for specific commissions and unrealised projects. The architect’s glass works are well-documented in a rich section with period photographs and, importantly, the previously unpublished drawings from the Venini historic archive and other unpublished designs now preserved in the Buzzi Archive at Scarzuola (Montegabbione) –all evidence of his great passion for glass.

 

A graphic artist, illustrator and designer, Fulvio Bianconi (Padua, 1915 – Milan, 1996), from the interwar period onwards, was associated with the glassworks of Paolo Venini with which he established a significant working relationship, one continuing for much of the 1950s and leading to the creation of an extraordinary series of highly coloured Murano glass pieces that encapsulate the enthusiasm of the decade and characterise the taste of the period. In the ’60s and ’80s–’90s, the artist renewed his association with the glassworks, if in an episodic way, designing several other little series. The present volume, the fruit of thoroughgoing research based mostly on unpublished material coming from the Venini historical archives, revisits this exciting experience of Bianconi’s and illustrates the entire production created for the celebrated Murano furnace. This consists of some five hundred models, including vases and bowls with original forms and exuberant but refined polychrome glass weaves (pezzati, scozzesi, a fasce) (patchwork, Scots, with bands etc.). As well as these, there are amusing animals but also a great number (c. 180) of very lively and ironic glass figurines, often freely inspired by characters of the Commedia dell’arte (Italian popular theatre), such as Arlecchino (Harlequin) and Pulcinella, and others by regional or period costumes etc., testimony to the extraordinary creativity of a versatile and prolific artist.

The catalogue presents the works by some of the most interesting international artists of our time who have experimented with industrial and found glass – from Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, to Ai Wewiei, Damien Hirst, Giovanni Anselmo and Jannis Kounellis, to name a few. This exhibition is part of LE STANZE DEL VETRO project, a joint collaboration between Fondazione Giorgio Cini and Pentagram Stiftung, developed with the aim of promoting the appreciation of and research in glass made in the 20th and 21rst centuries.

In the context of Venetian glassmaking and its peculiar artisan connotation, “Fragile?” aims at taking a different, yet equally important, aspect into account, namely the use of glass as a found object, with specific metaphorical and linguistic features.

Instead of precision or originality in design, other aspects will be sought, such a symbolic transparency, fragility and resistance, imprecision and smoothness, along with the construction of elements that draw inspiration from reality and contemporary artistic language