Glass by Steuben

Through a series of chaste metal and glass rooms on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue last week the curious and the acquisitive trooped to see "the first salon devoted exclusively to American handmade glass." All the glass was the product of Steuben Glass Inc., artistic subsidiary of onetime Ambassador Alanson Bigelow Houghton's big Corning Glass Works. Visitors beheld a coruscant and cleverly lit display of wine glasses, bowls, plates, bottles, candlesticks, vases; a tableful of heavy molded "architectural" glass for cornices, tiles, columns. Prize of the show was a slender glass fountain by Sydney B. Waugh, 1929 Prix de Rome winner. Other exhibits: a pair of glass slippers made to fit Gloria Swanson; a replica of Steuben's 16 by 8 in. glass casket in which, in Santo Domingo City, repose a few handfuls of ashes that were once supposed to be Christopher Columbus.

First important glassmaker in U. S. history was Caspar Wistar who opened a factory in 1739 in Salem County, N. J. His specialty was two-color work, generally of little depth, but he succeeded in producing a quantity of whiskey bottles now avidly sought by collectors as South Jersey glass. Most famed U. S. glassmaker was Henry William ("Baron") Stiegel who established a plant in Mannheim, Pa. in 1765, lived in a castle, had guns fired whenever he entered or left town, and died in bankruptcy in 1785. Sandwich glass, familiar in blue dolphin candlesticks, setting hens, and patterned tumblers, was made in Sandwich, Mass. for 60 years during the 19th Century. Later still, the golden iridescences of Tiffany glass, created by the late Louis Comfort Tiffany (TIME, Jan. 30, 1933), had a transitory popularity. Although collectors crow over early American glass, much now available cannot be definitely authenticated, much more is counterfeit.

Steuben has been trying to stimulate in the U. S. a renascence in hand-made glass similar to that which in France has been led by the fanciful Rene Lalique and the sombrely imaginative Maurice Marinot, in Sweden by Simon Gate and Edvard Hald, in Vienna by Stefan Rath. If Steuben's best designs in time become collectors' pieces (Steuben is already included in the Metropolitan Museum's U. S. glass collection) credit will go largely to two designers :

Frederick Carder was born in England some 60 years ago, son of a pottery-making father. He journeyed to Corning, N. Y. and in 1903 founded his own glass works which he named Steuben after the county. He managed to attract attention by producing a highly colored glassware almost indistinguishable from the then secretly prepared Bohemian glass. When Corning Glass Works took over Steuben in 1918, Glassmaker Carder remained as head of the smaller division. Last week in Cincinnati he was presented with the Charles Fergus Binns medal for excellence in design by the American Ceramic Society.

Walter Dorwin Teague has, besides Steuben, Eastman Kodak, Taylor Instrument, National Radiator, A. B. Dick among his clients. An apostle of functionalism in design, Mr. Teague abhors in manner as well as theory esoteric aspects of art. Explained he last week: "The industrial designer . . . does not pluck his designs out of the air, or out of his own soul. His designs are always latent in the things he deals with. . . . He asks himself, what is this thing for? What is it supposed to do? What is it made of? How is it made? . . . If he is a good designer a form will emerge which is a composite answer to all these questions. ..."

Designer Teague's composite answer for Steuben included glasses decorated with clusters of bubbles, a vase with a formalized parachute design, a graceful, cylindrical cocktail shaker.

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