University of Wisconsin 1951–1962: ceramics and glass exploration

A selection of Harvey Littleton's 1950s work in ceramics

Littleton and his family purchased a farm about 12 miles from the Wisconsin campus. This location served Harvey as home, studio, laboratory, and sometime-classroom. His production as a potter focused on functional stoneware that he sold in Chicago-area art fairs and in galleries from Chicago to New York City. His work was included in group shows in the United States, including "Designer Craftsmen U.S.A.," sponsored by the American Craft Council (ACC) in 1953 and the Ceramic National exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now the Everson Museum of Art) in 1954. His pottery gained international exposure in 1956 at the First International Exposition of Ceramics in Cannes, France.^[2]: 23 As his reputation grew, he also participated in advancing his craft; he was elected one of the first craftsmen-trustees of the American Craft Council, he received a small research grant from the university to explore glazing processes, and he designed a manually operated wheel called the "Littleton Kick Wheel," which was used by students in the ceramics lab at the UWM.^{[5]: 26–28}

In 1957-58 Littleton took a year's leave. A university research grant allowed him to visit Europe to study the influence of Islamic culture on contemporary Spanish pottery. He first stopped in Paris to visit Jean Sala, who had been recommended to him as an artist who worked alone in glass.^[2] Though Sala was no longer active in glass, he took Littleton to his now-idle studio. Conditioned by all of his experience at Corning, Littleton knew only of glass-making in an industrial setting, by a team of workers.

After four and a half months of research in Spain, Littleton visited the site of his war-time service in Naples. He was surprised to find seven small glass factories there. On a later visit to the island of Murano, he visited more than fifty glass factories. He was fascinated by the little demonstration furnaces that some of the factories placed outside their walls. The furnaces would be staffed by a couple of the factory's glassblowers, who would perform their craft for tourists. His meeting with Sala and his Murano experiences stimulated his interest in making glass art in a private studio.^[9]

Upon his return to the university and his Verona, Wisconsin studio Littleton began melting small batches of glass in his ceramics kiln, using hand-thrown stoneware bowls as crucibles.^[2]: 9 He built his first glass furnace in the summer of 1959. As a result of these ongoing experiments, the ACC asked him to chair a panel on glass at its Third National Conference, at Lake George, New York, in 1958. The panelists were glass artists and designers Michael and Frances Higgins and Earl McCutchen, who worked in laminated glass at the University of Georgia. Paul Perrot, director of the Corning Museum of Glass, was the fifth panelist. At this conference, Littleton suggested that glass should be a medium for the individual artist.^[10]: 262 By the time the ACC convened its fourth conference in 1961, Littleton not only presented a paper on his own work in glass but also exhibited a sculpture made of three faceted pieces of cullet that he had melted, formed and carved in the previous year. By this time, Littleton was applying for grants to get his vision of a hot glass studio program at the university off the ground.^[2]: 10

1962 glass workshops

When no grants for a hot glass studio had materialized by the fall of 1961, Otto Wittmann, director of the Toledo Museum of Art, suggested that Littleton consider giving a glassblowing seminar at the museum, and offered the use of a storage shed on the museum grounds. The first of two workshops was held in this makeshift facility from March 23 to April 1, 1962.

Wittman had sent a letter to a number of ceramists in the U.S. inviting them to participate in the workshop, and asked Norm Schulman, the pottery instructor at the museum school, to facilitate the arrangements. The eight attendees in addition to Littleton and Schulman were: Dominick Labino (then director of research for Johns Manville Corporation), Clayton Bailey, who was Littleton's graduate assistant from the University of Wisconsin, Tom McGlauchlin from the University of Iowa (who had been Littleton's graduate assistant at Wisconsin the previous year), Karl Martz from Indiana University, John Stephenson from the University of Michigan, William Pitney from Wayne State University, artist Dora Reynolds, and Edith Franklin, one of Schulman's ceramics students.^[11]: 54 Littleton provided a small pot furnace he had built. In the first couple of days, the participants spent much of the time trying to find a workable glass formula and getting batches of glass melted, leaving very little time to experiment with actual blowing. Labino suggested converting the furnace to a day tank, which would have a larger capacity, and provided some borosilicate marbles to melt instead of mixing a formula. This glass proved easy to work for glass blowing, and the workshop participants experimented with it in shifts for the remainder of the week. On the final day of the workshop, Harvey Leafgreen, a retired glassblower from the Libbey glass plant in Toledo, happened in to see the public display of the workshop products, and presented an unexpected two-hour demonstration of the craft.^{[2]: 11 [5]: 39–41}

The facilities that had been built for the first workshop were left in place, and a second, longer, better advertised Toledo workshop was held from June 18–30. Littleton and Wittman had attracted a small amount of financial support for scholarships and other costs. Leafgreen was enlisted to assist, and shared teaching duties with Littleton, Labino, and Schulman. In addition, there were lecturers on glass history and on furnace and annealing technology. This workshop had a larger and more diverse group of participants.^{[11]: 55 [2]: 11,  [5]: 41–44}

Because the facilities for annealing were very crude, very few of the pieces made in the two workshops survived for very long. Of all the participants in the workshops, only McLaughlin and Littleton himself pursued a glass career. Even so, from the standpoint of what was learned about how to build and operate a studio/teaching facility, the two Toledo workshops were a resounding success, and have been recognized as the genesis of the American studio glass movement.^[12]

University of Wisconsin 1962–1977: glass development

In the summer of 1962 Littleton once again traveled to Europe, this time to research how glass was taught in universities there. He found nothing that he could bring back to the U.S. to help him educate art students at the University of Wisconsin. At that time, European glass programs were geared solely toward industrial production. Students were not taught hands-on techniques with the material; the craft of working with hot glass was still taught at the factories, under the apprenticeship system. What Littleton did find in Europe was a kindred spirit in glass art, the German Erwin Eisch, who is recognized today as a founder of European studio glass.^[13] Eisch had set up a small work area in his family's glass factory in Frauenau for the production of his own glass art. Trained as a fine artist in the academies of Germany, he was largely self-taught as a glass blower and at the time produced his work with the help of the factory's craftsmen.^[14] The friendship begun when Littleton visited Eisch in Frauenau in 1962 lasted for the rest of Littleton's life, and had profound influence on the work of each. The two spent some of almost every summer together for the next thirty years.^[5]: 65

Through the fall 1962 and spring 1963 semesters, Littleton taught glass in a garage at his Verona farm to six students under an independent study program. By the following year, based on the success of the Toledo workshops and the independent study course, he had secured University of Wisconsin funding to rent and equip an off-campus hot shop in Madison and authorization to offer a graduate level glass course.^[2]: 13

With the launching of the first college glass program Littleton said that he "... became a kind of evangelist for the medium."^[9] He gave lectures at university art departments throughout the United States about the potential of glass as a medium for the studio artist.^[5]: 49 "Studio glass," to Littleton, meant hands-on glassblowing (as opposed to kiln-forming or cold-working) by the individual artist.^[11]

As the glass program grew, so did Littleton's work and reputation as an artist who used glass. In 1964, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. In 1966, a five-year retrospective, Harvey Littleton: Glass, showed at the Milwaukee Art Center.

Littleton presented papers on his experiments in glassblowing at crafts conferences in the United States and elsewhere. In 1968, Labino's book Visual Art in Glass^[15] became the first book to be written about the studio glass movement. It was followed in 1971 by Glassblowing: A Search for Form, by Harvey K. Littleton.^[16]

Through the university's glass program, Littleton taught many who became prominent glass artists, and who, in turn, spread the word about studio glassmaking into academic institutions throughout the United States. These included Bill Boysen, who originated the glass program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale and taught there for many years; Dale Chihuly, who developed the glass program (which had been started by Norm Schulman) at the Rhode Island School of Design and later was a founder of Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington;^{[3]: 9–10} Fritz Dreisbach, teacher at more than 130 institutions around the world over his career; Henry Halem, who introduced glass at Kent State University; Sam Herman, who took the studio glass movement to Great Britain; Curt Hoard, originator of a glass program at the University of Minnesota; Marvin Lipofsky, who started glass programs at the University of California, Berkeley^[2]: 15 and at California College of Arts and Crafts; Fred Marcus, who started programs at Illinois State University, the University of Illinois, and University of California, Los Angeles; Tom McGlauchlin, who taught the second-ever course in glass at an American college, at the University of Iowa;^[17] Christopher Ries; Michael Taylor, who headed the glass program at the Rochester Institute of Technology for almost 20 years; Kent Ipsen, one of Littleton's first students who taught at Mankato State College and later chaired the crafts department and founded the highly respected glass program at the Virginia Commonwealth University School of Arts;^[18] Michael Whitley, initiator of a glass program at Central Washington State College.^[5]: 72

Throughout these years a steady stream of visitors from elsewhere in the United States, and from Europe, came to Madison, where they observed and learned, and occasionally demonstrated their own skills. Many carried the idea of studio glass back to their home institutions.^[5]

Littleton served as the chairman of the University of Wisconsin art department from 1964 to 1967 and from 1969 to 1971. He retired from teaching in 1976, in order to devote his full attention to making work in glass. In 1977 Littleton was named professor emeritus of art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"Technique is cheap"

In 1972 Littleton was at the Seventh National Sculpture Conference in Lawrence, Kansas when he uttered the words, "Technique is cheap."^{[5]: 93–94} The statement touched off a debate that still finds currency among glass artists: Should technique, or content, take precedence in glass art?^{[Notes 4]}

This was a question that Littleton had evidently been thinking about for some time. In his 1971 book, Glassblowing: A Search for Form, he wrote:

The method used by the contemporary artist is a constant probing and questioning of the standards of the past and the definitions of the present to find an opening for new form statements in the material and process. It is even said that this search is an end in itself. Although knowledge of chemistry or physics as they apply to glass will broaden the artist's possibilities, it cannot create them. Tools can be made, furnaces and annealing ovens can be built cheaply. But it is through the insatiable, adventurous urge of the artist to discover the essence of glass that his own means of expression will emerge.^[16]: 13

The offhand phrase "technique is cheap" soon took on a life of its own. For some it was a rallying cry to discover the inherent possibilities of a "new" medium for the artist; for others the statement expressed nothing more than arrogant disdain for the timeless value of craftsmanship. In a 2001 interview for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, Littleton commented on what he termed the "misinterpretation" of the phrase:

All I meant by that is that technique is available to everybody, that you can read technique, if you have any background. Technique in and of itself is nothing. But technique in the hands of a strong, creative person, like Voulkos or Dante Marioni, takes on another dimension.^[6]: 23

Behind this point is another, as expressed by writer and curator William Warmus: "It might even be argued that Littleton sought long-term to put the artist back in control of the factory, even as he sought to put the furnace into the artist's studio."^[20]

For Littleton, the epitome of technique vs. content was to be found in factory-made art glass, where the division of labor was inflexible. Traditionally the art glass designer was a draftsman who made a conceptual drawing for a glass object, and then passed it along to industry craftsmen for execution. According to Littleton, the factory designer "... is frustrated by the peculiar misplacement of his skill, and his inclusion in a process where little experimentation or interference is permitted.^[16]: 17 As for the factory craftsman, his training under the apprenticeship system "limited him to one phase in the production of glass. This training could not prepare anyone to function as an independent artist, but only to serve as a cog in the industrial machinery."^[16]: 16

Work in glass

Harvey Littleton, Yellow Ruby Sliced Descending Form (c. 1983) This four-part glass sculpture is typical of the artist's "Arc" forms

In 1962 Littleton's first pieces in blown glass were, like his earlier works in pottery, functional forms: vases, bowls and paperweights. His breakthrough to non-functional form came in 1963 when, with no purpose in mind, he remelted and finished a glass piece that he had earlier smashed in a fit of pique. The object lay in his studio for several weeks before he decided to grind the bottom. As Littleton recounts in his book Glassblowing: A Search for Form, he brought the object into the house where "it aroused such antipathy in my wife that I looked at it much more closely, finally deciding to send it to an exhibition. Its refusal there made me even more obstinate, and I took it to New York ... I later showed it to the curators of design at the Museum of Modern Art. They, perhaps relating it to some other neo-Dada work in the museum, purchased it for the Design Collection."^[16]: 134 This led to Littleton's mid-1960s series of broken-open forms, and "Prunted," "Imploded" and "Exploded" forms.

These sculptures, especially the "Prunted," or "Anthropomorpic," forms were heavily influenced Eisch. Shortly after Eisch's departure from a several-week period as artist-in-residence at Wisconsin in fall 1967, Littleton realized that he had unconsciously adopted his friend's strongly personal figural style in his own work, and began a radical change.^[16]: 121 In a period of a few weeks he eliminated references to the vessel and turned from complexity to a new vocabulary of simple, clean geometric shapes, forming graceful tubes, rods and columns of clear glass encasing lines of color, that he cut and grouped together on bases of plate glass or steel.^[5]: 73

Allowing the pull of gravity to stretch and bend hot glass while on the blowpipe or punty led Littleton to his "Folded Forms" and "Loops" series, which continued until 1979. His "Eye" forms, also from the 1970s, take the form of concentric cups of various colors in diminishing sizes that nestle one inside the next.^[2]: 46

Littleton explored cutting and slumping industrial glass, including plate and optic glass, beginning in 1970. In sculptures such as Do Not Spindle and Distortion Box, slumped squares of glass are transfixed by a brass rod. In Rock Around the Clock, a bent piece of optic glass bar from Corning Glass Works in Danville, Virginia, can be set rocking on its bronze plate glass base with a touch of the hand.

Littleton incorporated optical lens blanks manufactured by Corning with his own hot-worked glass. In each case he sandblasted and cut the optical disc, draping, and in one case piercing, the disc with fluid, cased glass forms.^[2]: 64 These were followed, in 1978, by Littleton's Solid Geometry series, in which heavy cased glass forms were cut into trapezoidal, spheroid and ovoid shapes and highly polished.^[2]: 72

Perhaps Littleton's best known body of work is his "Topological Geometry" group of series, made between 1983 and 1989. Included under this heading are his signature "Arc" forms and "Crowns," as well as his late "Lyrical Movement" and "Implied Movement" sculptural groups. In 1989 chronic back problems forced Littleton to retire from working in hot glass.^[2]: 78

In 1974, Littleton also began experimenting with vitreography^{[Notes 5]} (printmaking using glass plates). He received a research grant from the university in 1975 to continue this work, and his first prints from this process were shown in a show at the Madison Art Center. When he left Wisconsin in 1977 and established his own studio in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, he designated one room in the studio for printmaking. By 1981, he had hired a part-time printmaker, and in 1983 he built a separate facility for the presses. He regularly invited artists in various media to explore the possibilities. Littleton's own prints were often simple geometric shapes, and sometimes made from shotgun-shattered safety glass. When back problems forced him to stop working in hot glass in 1990, Littleton continued his printmaking.^[5]