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According to Chrysler Museum of Art Curator of Glass, Gary E. Baker, Flying Boats is a masterful realization of Lino Tagliapietra’s background with 16th-century Muranese filigree technique and 20th-century surface cutting.* Flying Boats was created to suggest the light and color of the city of Venice, the city’s dependence on the sea, and as a celebration of the centuries-old glassmaking tradition associated with Venice.

Murano Meets the American Studio Glass Movement

“…in 1979, the master Venetian glassblower Lino Tagliapietra, who started at age 11 as an apprentice or garzone in the Murano shop of the glass master Archimede Seguso, was invited by the American glass artists Benjamin Moore and Dale Chihuly to teach at the Pilchuck Glass School in Seattle. Tagliapietra, who had achieved the arduous ‘maestro’ status by age 21 in the rigidly hierarchical Venetian glass factory system, then began a series of residencies at Pilchuck that continue to this day…”

If you were an apprentice who became a glass maestro or master in a factory system with centuries-old traditions, would you share your knowledge with the world or remain within your close-knit group?

Legend has it that Venetian glassblowers who worked on Murano during the Middle Ages were threatened with death if they revealed any of their glassmaking techniques to the rest of the world. Lasting for over ten centuries, this secrecy was still taken very seriously in 1979 when Tagliapietra accepted the invitation to Pilchuck, as evidenced by the words of his favorite teacher, the Venetian maestro Nane Ferro: “What you do is your business, but don’t teach too much. Because what you have learned is not just yours. It is part of a tradition, and it’s not right that you give it to everybody.” If one can identify a philosophy or belief system that has guided Tagliapietra’s approach to teaching glass artists around him, it might be found in his own response to his favorite teacher from Murano: “…I thought that everything we learn comes from somewhere or somebody else; knowledge does not belong to anyone…glassblowers must work together to develop their skills, to push themselves to do something different. What I like about the American studio glass movement is that people share everything. They want everyone to have all the information, yet no one has taken another’s place. There is room for everyone.” Tagliapietra’s openness with students in the U.S. and throughout the world has always been identified as nurturing and forthright.

What influence do you think Tagliapietra’s teaching and presence had on the course of the American glass movement in the 20th century?

Artist and critic Polly Ullrich has noted that a technical master like Tagliapietra, who also has an eye for innovation, was what the American glass movement needed when he arrived at Pilchuck. Benjamin Moore claims that at the juncture when Tagliapietra arrived in 1979, American glass artists were in their infancy, producing “hideous blobs” as they struggled to master their new craft. The influence of Harvey Littleton, the father-founder of the 20th-century American glass movement, had convinced burgeoning glass artists that “technique is cheap,” and they adhered to Littleton’s call to push glass from the technique-infatuated craft world into fine art. Ullrich credits Tagliapietra’s presence at Pilchuck as having produced several generations of American virtuoso glassblowers, and ensuring the dissemination—and dominance—of the Venetian aesthetic in glass.

How did the American glass movement and American artists influence Lino Tagliapietra?

The world into which Tagliapietra stepped at Pilchuck in 1979 was, by his own account, liberating. For the first time, he experienced an ethos and pursuit among glassblowers that sought the realization of their individual art, which had been inspired by Littleton and others a decade before through their experiments with annealing temperatures* and studio colonies. When accepting his Lifetime Achievement Award from the Glass Art Society in 1997, Tagliapietra noted his debt to other artists apart from glass in his American experience: “Many American artists I like a lot, for example, Jackson Pollock and Frank Lloyd Wright. Their work is totally different, it looks different, but really it is not. Because it is the same energy expressed in different ways. I like Pollock for his color, I like Wright for invention…”

Baker notes the melding of Venetian traditions with 20th-century cutting techniques in Tagliapietra’s Flying Boats. A similar coupling of Venetian technical mastery with innovation and free-spiritedness defines the legacy of this artist through his students and his place in the history of 20th-century glass, according to former Corning Museum of Glass curator Susanne K. Frantz. Ullrich concludes that Tagliapietra is famous for his clear and radiant technique, going beyond facility and stretching old glass traditions into the wider art world.

SOURCES

Barovier, Marino, ed. Tagliapietra: A Venetian Glass Maestro. Dublin: Links for Publishing, Ltd., 1998.

Glowen, Ron, Richard Marquis, and Tina Oldknow. “1997 Lifetime Achievement Award: Lino Tagliapietra,” The Glass Art Society 1997 Journal, pp. 8-14.

Marquis, Richard. “Maestro Lino,” American Craft 57:6 (December/January 1998), pp. 40-45.

Ullrich, Polly. “Lino Tagliapietra,” New Art Examiner (November 1997), pp. 53-54.

— John S. Welch

* For an excellent resource on technical definitions for glass, see the Corning Museum of Glass Web site at www.cmog.org.