Living: Stained Glass, Back and Blooming

Old skills and new techniques

“To beholde hit wasgretjoye.”

—Chaucer, describing his “wel-y-glased” chamber.

The shimmering lights and the shifting imagery of stained-glass have entranced the eye and expanded the imagination since the evolution of the art some 16 centuries ago. Today, as pervasively as sunshine pouring through the great windows of Chartres, the resurgent art and craft of stained glass is irradiating the American scene.

In this decade, the challenge of this once and future form has attracted a vast legion of artists, students and collectors. In the U.S. there are now 5,000 professionals working in glass and, according to Patrick White, president of the St. Louis-based Stained Glass Association of America, at least 100,000 hobbyists; ten years ago there were fewer than 100. The output of artists and amateurs is becoming highly visible in offices and stores, schools, courthouses, chapels, restaurants, apartment buildings and homes. The pieces may be room dividers, skylights or side lights, bathtub screens, doors, windows or—most significantly—hanging or freestanding “autonomous” works that can be displayed like paintings or sculptures or suspended in front of windows. As Lithuanian-born Artist Albinas Elskus notes: “You can actually suspend an image in midair. You cannot find any other material that does that.”

At the first major exhibition of its kind ever mounted in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Crafts is showing 33 pieces of “New Stained Glass,” devoted to small, “personal” works by leading artists that range from Miroesque abstraction to ribald political satire. One offbeat work by Californian Richard Posner, 29, is called The Big Enchilada 1975; it depicts in allegorical terms the White House infighting over Watergate. A similar show at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles drew 2,000 people on weekends, while another recent exhibition in the Washington suburb of Reston was jammed during its six-week run.

Glass mania infects people of all ages, occupations and educational backgrounds. However, most of the professionals are young. One of the most innovative artists in the field, Bay Area-based Paul Marioni, 36, had previously worked as a garage body-and-fender man (though he has degrees in English and philosophy). Ecuador-born Frank Del Campo, 44, who works on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, went from soldier to singer to antique dealer before becoming a full-time artist. Philadelphia’s Ray King, 27, until recently had to make ends meet by restoring old stained-glass windows; now he is one of the few artists in the medium who can earn a living making his own experimental pieces. Benida Solow, 30, whose lustrous Innerscape, a freestanding screen, was included in the Los Angeles show, has been represented at five other California exhibitions in the past two years.

Says San Francisco Artist Peter Mollica, 36: “The reason it’s happening for serious artists is because it’s happened on the hobbyist level. I think you have to thank the amateur. A lot of people who are serious now about stained glass started out as amateurs.”

More than a thousand courses in stained glass are now available in public schools, museums, Y.M.C.A.s, art centers, colleges and private studios throughout the U.S. After Artist Don Davidson started teaching stained-glass works as a pilot project for 25 fifth-and sixth-graders at Houston’s Luther Burbank elementary school, parents clamored successfully for their own afterschool classes. Louisiana State University is offering a full-time course in the medium for undergraduates. At North Adams, Mass., an institute sponsored by the Hoosuck Corporation, a nonprofit organization that promotes design-oriented manufacturing businesses, has just completed a two-week, $330 class in rudimentary technique; it was sold out. Another course in April will teach painting on glass; in June under Albinas Elskus, there will be a course in design. At the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, four-year students can take a major in stained glass. Later this year a special class will be taught there by West Germany’s Ludwig Schaffrath, 54, a master of design who is regarded as the greatest single influence on Americans working in the medium.

Artist Otto B. Rigan notes in his book New Glass (Ballantine; $7.95): “The pioneering, limit-shattering art of the new glass springs up at a time when the American middle class has more leisure, is better educated and more diversified in interests than ever before, and when the search for expansive ideals and lifestyles is at an all-time high.”

The craft’s appeal to the tyro lies partly in the fact that it need not be expensive. Basic equipment, in addition to the glass, can be bought for less than $50. It includes: a glass cutter, a breaker (for splitting the glass), a grozier (to grind off errors), copper foil or lead (to hold the pieces together), a lathekin (a wooden tool) to flatten the foil on the glass, a soldering iron, a lubricant (usually kerosene) to make the cutter run smoothly on the glass, a flux (a solution to make the solder adhere to the foil or lead). New techniques, such as sandblasting, silk-screen painting, laminating and the use of epoxy resins, enable artists to achieve subtle tactile and visual effects. Even so, stained glass demands infinite patience; a single lamp shade may be composed of 2,400 meticulously assembled pieces.

Most beginners putter with machine-made glass, which costs from $2 to $5 per sq. ft. and comes in some 300 hues. Once hooked, the hobbyist will gravitate to blown glass (up to $20 per sq. ft.), which has a special mystique: each sheet is unique, with bubbles, streaks, ripples, tints, curves and a translucency that seems to give it a life of its own. This so-called “antique” glass, obtainable in some 3,000 colors and shadings, is imported almost exclusively from European makers, who cannot produce enough to feed the American market.

The demand for finished works has secularized most professional studios.

Chicago’s Giannini & Hilgart, the Midwest’s oldest stained-glass studio (founded in 1868), struggled along for years on sparse church commissions until the boom hit in 1973; its business then started tripling annually, to $170,000 in 1977, and 90% of its output now goes to homes and businesses. Dealers specializing in supplies for the craft have also been transported on a beam of dancing light (green). Hollander Glass company in Long Beach, Calif., which started in 1956 as a small studio specializing in windows for churches and residences, is now solely in the business of selling the glass—$4 million worth in 1977.

Glass art may in the past have been stifled by its traditions: Gothic, Renaissance, Victorian, art nouveau, Tiffany, art deco. Today artists and artisans, students and professionals are creating a distinctively American form, moving away from mere decoration and drawing eclectically from the other visual arts. As Artist-Editor Fred Abrams writes in Glass magazine, a journal for artists and craftsmen: “Glass is the most beautiful and magical art medium in the world,… and we have only begun to explore its possibilities and potential.” To which its admirers and practitioners can only add amen, translucent tomorrows and “gret joye.”