Craftsmen in glass

There's a family gathering going on at Galerie Mánes. Titled "The Brychtas," it brings together works created by four generations of the Brychta clan. The best-known member is Jaroslava Brychtová, who, working in tandem with her late husband, Stanislav Libenský, gained international renown for magnificent glass sculptures.

She wasn't the first glass artist in the family, however. This exhibition also highlights the work of her father, Jaroslav Brychta (1895-1971), who is celebrated in Czech glass circles as the co-founder, at the young age of 25, of the Secondary School of Glassmaking in Železný Brod, where he taught for his entire career, influencing a generation of glassmakers. His creative output, while quite well-known in north Bohemian glass country, is less familiar to Prague audiences.

Jaroslav's whimsical and meticulously crafted glass figures set the standard for this genre of glass work, which is a specialty of the glassmaking school to this day. Nearly 70 of his diminutive figures are on display here, ranging from opaque glass figures (a gardener, two boxers) with limbs composed of beads (another regional specialty) to delicate, translucent blown-glass sea creatures. Although similar glass figures are sold in souvenir shops all over Prague, few artisans can match Brychta's craftsmanship.

Thus, Jaroslava, born in 1924, grew up surrounded by glass. She didn't attend her father's school, but instead studied at a more academically oriented gymnázium before going on to the Academy of Applied Arts (VŠUP) and Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU). After completing her education, she went to work in 1950 at the Železný Brod Glassworks, then the largest glass factory in the country. (After being bought by the huge Jablonex Group in 2005, the Železný Brod factory ended production earlier this year.) There, she established a department of glass in architecture and continued at the giant state-run company until establishing her own studio with her husband in 1984.

The sculptures she created with Libenský, starting in 1954, won international acclaim. Their work was showcased at Expo 1958 in Brussels and became one of Czechoslovakia's key "cultural exports." Under the socialist regime, glass artists were under less scrutiny than those working in the "fine arts," since glassmaking was viewed as a craft and was not supposed to "mean" anything.

The three pieces by Brychtová and Libenský in the show are examples of work that operates on a purely aesthetic level (other pieces by the pair are certainly more open to interpretation). There are two spheres of clear glass, one shot through the center with a glass cylinder and the other with a prism. Filled with colonies of bubbles and seemingly having trapped wisps of smoke, the spheres distort, magnify and reflect the gallery interior, as well as the outside world visible through the skylight. Between the glass globes is a third sculpture, a precisely cut stepped column that is an optical fun house, sending reflections around the corner, making people appear to be standing where they are not.

Jaroslava had three children with her first husband, Miloš Zahradník, so maybe it was destiny that her daughter, Alena, became a landscape architect and married a gardener by profession (zahradník means gardener). A selection of her plans is on display, such as a cemetery and the grounds of a children's sanatorium.

A cousin of Jaroslava, Jan Brychta (born in 1928), and his wife, Lída (born in 1931), both studied at VŠUP around the same time she did. However, their work is more in an amateur vein: Jan's pictures are derivative of Cubist works, such as a Picasso-style portrait with matches raining down around the head, or a collage made of scraps of newspaper, ticket stubs and corrugated cardboard. Lída paints in a smoother vernacular style, with some works utilizing collage or colorful typographical elements.

Petra Kolínová (born in 1953), the daughter of Jaroslava's cousin Marie, is showing cheerful, witty and beautifully crafted tapestries depicting interior and exterior spaces. They are atypical of tapestry work, showing, for instance, a woman's high-heeled pump stepping into a house interior, or someone's arm seen through a window. One piece at the back of the gallery is a timeline of a garden through the year, with a large textile garden hose snaking over the tapestry spraying the summer garden with an array of yarn.

From that same generation, Alex Brychta (born in 1956), the son of one of Jaroslava's cousins, is a prolific illustrator of children's books. His books from the Read at Home and Oxford Reading Tree series are on display in a variety of languages.

Jaroslav's nephew Radovan Brychta (born in 1958) is a sculptor who carries on the family tradition by incorporating glass in his art, such as two glass vessels mounted on rocks, or a machine-like sculpture with dubious utility.

The youngest generation is represented by Lauren Cassidy (born in 1989), currently a student at the San Francisco Academy of Art. She is showing 10 photographs, both black-and-white and color, that include portraiture and street scenes. She is the daughter of Alex's sister, Edita, who emigrated to London.

The other young member of the clan is Pavel Karous (born in 1979), whose two large-scale sculptures are another highlight of the show: a deconstructed Škoda Favorit and No. 9 tram. Karous deconstructs these boxy vehicles into a smaller series of blocks. They light up at intervals to reveal photographic transparencies of actual vehicles, the car's bumper and license plate or the driver inside the tram.

Beyond showing some notable artworks, this exhibition is mainly about traditions, not only familial but regional and national. From roots in glassmaking, a family tree grew with many branches of creativity. Today, with the Železný Brod Glassworks shut down and other major glass companies in bankruptcy, cottage glass industries evaporating and the school Brychta founded struggling to attract new students, this show also calls attention to a branch of Czech cultural heritage that is facing the end of its lineage.

Mimi Fronczak Rogers can be reached at
Features@praguepost.com