Living in glass houses

As the Secondary School of Applied Arts for Glassmaking in the north Bohemian town of Železný Brod marks its 90th anniversary with an exhibition titled "100% Glass" at Prague's Museum of Decorative Arts, a unique branch of specialized education in this country is at a crossroads. Indeed, the entire glass industry is in crisis. This spring, the glassmaking school in Kamenický Šenov - the oldest in the world - launched a public fundraiser just to continue operating another year.

The multilevel system of glassmaking education in the Czech Republic, which trains students starting in high school and guides them all the way through graduate school, has produced some of the most renowned glassmakers in the world. Yet enrollment has been steadily declining.

The "100% Glass" exhibition lauds the 90-year heritage and impressive achievements by students of the glassmaking school in Železný Brod and makes a strong case for the continuation of its tradition. The show presents all the different disciplines taught at the school, introducing its most prominent teachers over the past nine decades. In particular, it highlights the accomplishments of past and present students, perhaps even to the point of downplaying those of its illustrious faculty - which included Stanislav Libenský, the world-renowned glass sculptor who headed the school from 1954 to 1963.

A flashback to the swinging '60s ushers visitors into the show, as they pass through a mod glass bead curtain. Immediately on the left is a display of the different types of beads produced in the region (fire-polished, iridescent, pressed, faceted, satin and so on). Once a major industry, marked by distinctive glass-pressing houses with their tall double chimneys, beadmaking also has taken a blow as cheaper beads from the East usurp market share.

Refined glassworking technique and design on the one hand and fanciful expression on the other are two of the hallmarks of the students' output. Numerous pieces in the show are worthy of note, and even many of the more functional glass pieces are anything but ordinary.

An impressive 2002 piece titled Vessel by Milan Svoboda is a thick-walled vase that transitions from polished clear to frosty pink glass, with rows of red gumdrop shapes frozen in icy glass at the top and then dissolving toward the bottom of the vessel. At points, the smooth surface is broken by depressions in the glass. Another striking piece is Bowl (2009) by Marek Slavík, a thickly blown piece of pale blue glass, its top edge cut in a wave, with an overall pattern like raindrops on a windshield.

Using a combination of techniques taught at the school to remarkable effect, Tomáš Košťál's Vase is a mold-melted, cut-and-glued hourglass form with alternating layers of milky white and radiant lemon yellow glass separated by a slim, chocolate-colored band in the middle. Its roughly chiseled surface and the contrast of opaque and translucent glass are terrific.

A whimsical streak runs through the show, reaching back to the school's early history. This is especially evident in many of the figures and other pieces made from blown and lampworked glass - a specialty of the school almost since its inception. Jaroslav Brychta, who set the standard for these diminutive animal and human glass figures and was the school's director from 1948 to 1952, is represented by a large selection of works, including his 1936 Aquarium, a group of individual pieces consisting of fish swimming through delicate strands of glass coral. Vilém Dostrašil modernized the tradition in the 1960s with fantastical mutant forms.

Žaneta Matěková's Spaghetti (1998) pairs a plate of straw-colored glass noodles topped with squirts of red sauce and strands of white melted cheese with a set of overlong cutlery composed of flattened pieces of glass fruits and vegetables.

Tereza Hanušová's Breakfast combines blown, hot-shaped, engraved and cut glass in a playful ensemble: On a glass plate rests a mug of tea, half a lemon, sugar cubes, a rohlík broken in half, and an apple with a bite missing - all glass, down to the engraved teabag label.

Unlike the region further west, where Kamenický Šenov and Nový Bor are located, which has a centuries-old history of glassmaking, the 90-year-old upstart in Železný Brod was built in an area without a previous tradition. Nearly a century later, it is now steeped in its own tradition, and a community has formed with a strong continuity. Most of the teachers were once students there, and multiple generations of families have studied and taught at the school.

Running a specialized glassmaking school is financially demanding, and while it would be sad to see any of the individual schools shut down its furnaces, one scenario that has been discussed is combining two or more of them.

That makes the "100% Glass" exhibition - like a show held at the same museum in 2006 on the occasion of the Kamenický Šenov school's 150th anniversary - even more important in drawing the attention of the Czech and international public to the glassmaking schools' past achievements, their continued potential and their current plight. On both artistic and practical levels, it's vital to preserve this singular form of specialized glassmaking education.

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