For Art's Sake

In its Fifth Avenue store, bathed in soft white light and filled with quiet music, Manhattan's Steuben (rhymes with "new Ben") Glass Inc. last week showed off its 16 new designs for the fall and winter trade. Recessed into the store's grey, black and white walls, or set out on square pedestals and tables, the glassware ranged from a chubby crystal mug ($8.50) to a graceful three-tiered waterless fountain ($1,500).

Immortality. With not a cash register, counter, or order book in sight, thick carpeting (changed four times a year) covering the floors, Steuben looked more like an elegant museum than a retail store. To Steuben President Arthur Amory Houghton Jr., 43, fondly described by one of his associates as a "real couth" fellow, that was just as it should be. Steuben, says he, has always been more interested in art than in sales reports. "We're not interested in the ordinary businessman's standards of success . . . [but in catching onto] the coattails of immortality."

Steuben glass (Steubenites think the word "glass" is redundant) has done much more than catch the coattails of success in both art and business. Steuben now has some 20,000 customers a year, including Trygve Lie, the Duchess of Windsor, J. Edgar Hoover and President Truman, who has sent Steuben ware as gifts to Princess Elizabeth and Princess Wilhelmina (TIME, Nov. 10, 1947). Seventeen U.S. museums display Steuben's glass, which ranks among the finest, most expensive crystal glassware in the world.

Taste Makers. Steuben has not always done so well. When young Arthur Houghton, fresh out of Harvard with a well-developed taste for rare and fine books,* went to work in the Corning Glass Works 21 years ago, Steuben was an unwanted, money-losing subsidiary. Glassblowers made their own designs, and tried to outdo each other in rococo examples of their craft. Houghton, whose family controls Corning Glass, was wasting his well-cultivated taste on ordinary glassmaking. He asked for and was given Steuben in 1933, along with a stockpile of "blinding-colored glass monstrosities" and the lusterless annual deficit.

Houghton started out by hiring Architect John M. Gates and Sculptor Sidney Waugh to work together on new designs. They cleared the shelves for a fresh start by a simple method: they got lead pipes from the factory, smashed the worst of the old glassware.

Houghton, Gates and Waugh worked out new designs by letting the pure colorless crystal* "do what the material wants to do." The designs, said Gates, fell esthetically "somewhere between the curves of the Taj Mahal and the straight lines of the Empire State Building." From time to time they called on such outside artists as Raoul Dufy, Thomas Hart Benton, Salvador Dali, Jean Hugo and Moise Kisling. Steuben never tried to figure out what the taste of customers might be. Says Houghton loftily: "We made taste." By 1935, Steuben taste had made Steuben a success.

No Bargains. Despite its toplofty accent on art, there is no artistic wooliness about Steuben's merchandising methods. It refuses to sell indiscriminately to retailers, prefers such stores as Marshall Field, Neiman-Marcus, Bullock's Wilshire and makes them operate "stores-within-stores" on Steuben's own strict terms. Steuben designs the displays from top to bottom, trains the sales girls (who get a flat salary, no commissions) and never permits bargain sales.

Steuben's profits are Houghton's secret, but in any case, he says, they are not important: what is important is the fact that Steuben is giving art to America and "formerly men died for art." Nevertheless, it was comforting to know that with customers streaming in the front door, there is little chance that Steuben will have to make the supreme sacrifice.

* Today he has one of the finest private collections of rare books in the world. In 1940-42 Houghton split his time between Steuben and the Library of Congress, where he was curator of rare books.

* A term for glass with a high lead content. Corning produces crystal by its own secret formula, discovered in 1932.

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