Jenna Gilley, Associate Curator of Exhibitions
Spring has sprung! In the spirit of the season of new beginnings, curators at the FWMoA have swapped 16 pieces of glass in our Studio Glass Wing. One of those new additions is a favorite recent acquisition of mine, Marvin Lipofsky’s Tacoma Series, #27. Besides its beautiful bubblegum pink color, I like this piece because of its historical importance; it is the museum’s first acquisition of Lipofsky, a pioneer in the Studio Glass movement. Even more special, it was made during Lipofsky’s last public glass demonstration in 2007 at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, WA. He was 69 years old, and had spent 45 of those blowing glass. At Tacoma he made more than 30 works, although many of them remain unfinished due to his health concerns.
Though large for the artist, Tacoma Series, #27 features Lipofsky’s signature mold technique which uses wooden paddles in various shapes pressed into the hot glass (see a video here). Sometimes Lipofsky made molds out of scraps found around the hotshop, blowing the glass into it to form a unique shape indicative of where it was made. Molds have been a part of glassmaking since its earliest times in America. They were used in industry to quickly produce identical vessels or to imprint texture to an object’s surface. Lipofsky appreciates this connection to the past but pushes the practice further by not knowing what the final shape of the vessel will be. He likes to leave part of the process to chance to highlight glass’ mutability.
Marvin Lipofsky was not initially planning to become an artist. He received his B.F.A. in Industrial Design in 1962 at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, hoping for a profession that “had a job at the end.” After taking all their available sculpture classes, Lipofsky decided that he needed to continue his studies to fulfill his true passion for art. At the University of Madison, Wisconsin, he encountered Harvey Littleton, the “Father of the Studio Glass Movement”, who was teaching the first studio glassblowing course in the country. Immediately, Lipofsky was hooked. He switched his focus from clay to glass but remained inspired by the abstract works of Peter Voulkos and John Mason. Like these artists and Littleton, Lipofsky was interested in how traditional craft mediums could become fine art, allowing the inherent properties of the materials to be celebrated rather than becoming functional objects. His earliest sculptures showcase the fluidity of molten glass, freezing its viscosity in sparkling and globular objects. Even his modern sculptures riff of this sentiment.
Upon graduation, Lipofsky began to spread “the gospel of glass”, as fellow pioneer Joel Philip Myers once said. Lipofsky remembers,
“I walked into the studio early one morning and Harvey [Littleton] was sitting there in his office reading his mail and he handed me a letter and he said, “There’s your job, boy.” It was a letter from Ed Rossbach at the University of California in Berkeley asking Harvey to come out for a semester to teach a glass class.”
In the fall of 1964, at the age of 26, Marvin began the school’s glass program. He and his 6 female students built the furnaces and annealing ovens. His philosophy was complete openness, with any discoveries by teacher or student shared among them as equals (after all, they were only a few years apart!). Lipofsky recounts, “I liked creating obstacles for [my students], not so great that they would fall over them, but maybe just trip a little. It was my way of increasing their curiosity.” One class turned into eight years at the college and, in 1967, he founded and headed the glass department at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he taught until 1987.
Once he learned how to work with blown glass, Lipofsky began to explore the material’s boundaries far past functionality into sculpture. His California Loop series, begun in 1969, produced twisting, linear pieces that hoped to capture the form of the breath. He experimented with texture, covering the shiny, “seductive” surface of the glass with paint, electroplated metal, sandblasting, and fuzzy rayon flocking, which he saw covering a car at the Oakland Hotrod and Roadster Show. He fought with the material during this period; although, soon after, he gave into glass’ natural luster and properties. His sculptural eye remained intact, and he would soon take his aesthetic across the world.
To expand his skills, Lipofsky traveled across Europe, and, eventually, to 20 countries on 4 continents to visit glass factories, designers, and artists. He amassed a library of 54,000 photos and 30 films taken during his travels to share with his students, facilitating one of the largest exchanges of glass information in the world. In each location, he carefully assessed the skills of the team, their specialties, and the equipment available before making a work. Using color, form, and pattern, he would then aim to incorporate the specificity of the place although his forms remained consistent: large, amorphous bubbles.
One of those pieces is Fragments Jugoslaja Stakla, the second work recently acquired by the FWMoA. It was made in 1980 when the artist was invited to the III International Symposium in Paracin, Yugoslavia (now Serbia). He arrived the day after Marshal Tito’s funeral and the country was in chaos, including the glass factory. All the chemists who knew the glass formulas had died, so the factory did not know which colors were compatible. Not to be deterred, Lipofsky made a great number of pieces. He focused on the beautiful fall colors of Eastern Europe, including sunny yellow. With only 1-2 days in each factory, Lipofsky developed a consistent way of working with molds that allowed him to further embed the essence of each factory into his pieces. In Yugoslavia, he experimented with combining existing mold forms with pressing his own wooden “finger” paddles into the shape, producing a ribbed texture inside. This would become a hallmark of his work. Sadly, he returned after his productive day to find that most had shattered upon cooling in the annealing oven due to improper chemical formulas. Our piece is one of 10 survivors from that trip.
After another visit to the Czech Republic two years later, Lipofsky’s process reached its maturity. He settled on creating his own molds from tools and scraps laying around the factories, pressing other various paddles into his pieces to gently manipulate the form further. Cold-working, including cutting or sandblasting, helps finish the work’s surface to the artist’s desire.
Like the medium itself, Lipofsky’s glass is free. It encapsulates the breath of the artist and the fluid mutability of the material. Yet, perhaps more than any other glass artist’s work, it also emulates specific art historical movements. It captures the energy and immediacy of the action painters of Abstract Expressionism, popular when Lipofsky and Harvey Littleton were entering the glass foray. It also harkens back to the painterly beauty of Impressionism, where the mood of a specific moment in time was frozen for future viewers to enjoy. Therefore, his success should not only be regarded in studio glass, but in the larger realm of sculpture for furthering these movements ideals in the sculptural realm. FWMoA is delighted to welcome Marvin Lipofsky into our collection, and we hope you will find joy as his work welcomes you into our Glass Wing.