Erwin Eisch
Erwin Eisch | |
---|---|
Bavaria, Germany | |
Died | 25 January 2022 Zwiesel, Bavaria, Germany | (aged 94)
Occupation(s) | Artist, educator |
Known for | Co-founder of the European studio glass movement |
Spouse |
Gretel Stadler (m. 1962) |
Children | 5 |
Erwin Eisch (German: [ˈɛɐ̯vɪn ˈaɪ̯ʃ]; 18 April 1927 – 25 January 2022) was a German artist who worked with glass. He was also a painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Eisch's work in glass, along with that of his friend and colleague Harvey Littleton, embodies the ideas of the international studio glass movement. Eisch is considered a founder of the studio glass movement in Europe.[1]
Early life and education
Eisch was the eldest of six children of
With Hitler's rise to power the village of Frauenau, located near the border with Czechoslovakia, suffered under the Nazi regime. According to Erwin Eisch, his family, as well as most of the people in Frauenau, were Communists during the
Eisch was drafted into the
Eisch returned to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1956, where he continued his studies in sculpture and painting. He, along with other young artists in the late 1950s, was aware of the
RADAMA scandal, marriage
In 1960, with his future wife,
Contact with Harvey Littleton
Harvey Littleton called his first meeting with Erwin Eisch a milestone in his development as a glass artist. In August 1962 Littleton was visiting Germany on a research grant when he noticed, in the showroom of the Rimpler Kristall glass factory in Zwiesel, a piece of glass that was unlike the other objects on display. Littleton was told that it was from the Eisch Glass Factory in the nearby town of Frauenau. Visiting the Eisch factory, Littleton met Erwin Eisch and marveled at his expressionistic free-blown glass objects. "Meeting Erwin confirmed my belief that glass could be a medium for direct expression by an individual," he wrote.[15]
The two met again in 1964 at the first meeting of the World Congress of Craftsmen in New York City. At the conference, Littleton and his students set up a small furnace built by Dominick Labino and proceeded to blow glass. The demonstration impressed Eisch, who said, "The little furnace is the future."[16] After the conference Eisch traveled to Madison, Wisconsin where he and Littleton co-taught a four-week summer class at the University of Wisconsin art department. As Eisch remembers it, his first trip to the U.S. was memorable. He wrote,"The Midwest was hot and I was shy, speechless and German in a strange new world. I didn't have an easy time of it. As [a] glassblower I was self-taught and clumsy; I confined myself to making handles. I could never get the first gather properly centered, but luckily we were all beginners."[17]
After his return to Frauenau, Eisch built a small studio furnace in the basement of the factory where he melted his own batch[18] from 1965 to 1975. During these years Eisch worked almost exclusively in glass. Working in a studio environment, rather than on the factory floor, allowed him to develop and refine his personal vision for glass as a sculptural medium.[19] Notable works produced during this time included his environmental sculptures The Fountain of Youth and Narcissus.[20]
In November 1967 Eisch returned to the University of Wisconsin as a visiting professor. For two months he worked in Littleton's studio, creating about 200 pieces of glass for exhibition in the United States. Watching Eisch develop his forms intrigued Littleton. Working with his assistant, Karl Paternoster, Eisch created "small, involved sculptural forms" that he fumed to unify the forms' surfaces, giving them the
During the time Eisch worked in Littleton's studio, his influence on his American colleague was strong. For weeks after Eisch's return to Germany, Littleton found himself creating works that were derivative of his friend's complex, intuitively-shaped forms. This, Littleton said, made him change the direction of his work to simple forms based on the column and the tube.[22] The following summer, Littleton traveled to Frauenau to work in Eisch's studio, where he created about thirty sculptures for exhibition in Europe.[23] Eisch and Littleton first exhibited together in 1969 in Munich and Cologne.[24]
Free-blown work of the 1960s and 1970s
Although many of Eisch's pieces of the 1960s and 1970s were rooted in functional forms such as the vase, the bottle, the pitcher and the stein, the usefulness of these vessels was never Eisch's goal. "The purely plastic form, with glass as medium, was a means of art free of an end," he wrote.[25]
Eisch described his own glass forms of the sixties and seventies as "poetic or pictorial realism." He made clear that such a realism did not rely on observable fact, but on his inner reality; his fantasies. As important as his reliance on fantasy was to shaping his art, his unwillingness to compromise personal vision to appeal to the marketplace was just as vital. Therefore, his early pitchers, vases and teapots are so eccentrically shaped as to seem to be in the process of becoming, rather than being, commonplace objects. Unique and imperfect as Eisch's forms are, it is not much of a step for their creator to anthropomorphize them. Eisch said, "From a glowing inert mass must emerge things of beauty that are endowed with speech. A talent of innovating, creating animatedly, and the breath to blow are requisites. Without blowing nothing happens."[26]
Portrait heads
By 1972 Eisch was putting less time into free-blown glass sculpture. Instead, he devoted himself to the creation of sculptures from which ceramic molds for glass-blowing were made. His series of heads, including those of Littleton,[27] Thomas Buechner, Picasso and the Buddha, and his "Blister-finger" series of works, were all mold-blown. This allowed Eisch to concentrate his efforts not only on sculpting but also on engraving and painting on glass. In using different cold-working techniques to create imagery on each piece in his series, along with distorting the hot glass sculpture as it came from the mold, Eisch made virtually identical mold-blown pieces into individual, unique statements.[20]
Painting and drawing
Beginning in the mid-1970s Eisch began to create more and more in the traditional art forms of painting on canvas and paper, drawing and printmaking. Eisch draws daily, often working in thematic series. While his imagery can be purely whimsical, the artist also uses it to make political statements. Above all, his guiding idea is the physical relationship of male and female, of human contact through touch with an emphasis on the hand.[28]
Littleton wrote of Eisch's paintings and drawings that "Erwin...has said that the real landscape no longer exists in art, no more than the classic figure; and so he creates his own vision of the world of the spirit and new relationships of body forms."[29]
Vitreographs
Eisch first tried his hand at
Teacher and lecturer
In addition to teaching in the glass program at the University of Wisconsin in 1964 and 1968, Eisch was a guest instructor at San Jose State University (1968), Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Maine (1972), Foley College of Art, Stourbridge, England (1974), and Alfred University in New York (1976). In addition, he taught various subjects, including drawing, glass painting, sandblasting, and engraving at Pilchuck Glass School in 1981, 1983 and 1984. Eisch lectured at the XIII International Congress on Glass in London, England (1968), the World Crafts Conference in Dublin, Ireland (1970), the World Crafts Conference in Kyoto, Japan (1978), the Glass Art Society Conferences in New York City (1982) and in Corning, New York (1979, 1991). He was also an organizer of the First and Second International Glass Symposia in Frauenau, Germany in 1982 and 1985.[34]
In 1988 Eisch founded the summer school Bild-Werk Frauenau.[4][35] In 2008 Bild-Werk Frauenau offered four summer sessions and 36 courses in subjects ranging from painting and drawing, to cutting and engraving glass, to singing.[36] In addition to Eisch and his wife Gretel, artists teaching at Bildwerk Frauenau included Eisch's friend, the painter (and founding director of the Corning Museum of Glass) Tom Buechner, glass artist Jiří Harcuba, puppet maker Peter Hermann), glass artist and vitreographer Ursula Merker, multi-media artist Gerhard Ribka, glass artist Therman Statom, multi-media artist Stephen P. Day, and glass caster Angela Thwaites.[37]
Initiator and co-founder of the Frauenau Glass Museum
Together with Mayor Alfons Hannes, Erwin Eisch was a co-founder of the Frauenau Glass museum, which opened in 1975 in the presence of international glass artists. It is thanks to him that in 1982 art historian Wolfgang Kermer's important studio glass collection, parts of which had already been shown in cooperation with Erwin Eisch in 1975[38] and 1976/77,[39] was donated to the museum, where it still forms the basis of the modern department today.[40] The Wolfgang Kermer collection catalog of the Frauenau Museum includes 46 examples of Erwin Eisch′s work from the period 1967 to 1976.[41]
Public collections
Eisch's work has been collected by the
Personal life and death
Erwin and Gretel Eisch had five children. Erwin Eisch died in Zwiesel on 25 January 2022, at the age of 94.[4][1]
References
- ^ a b Meisenberger, Raimund (25 January 2022). "Weltweit renommiert: Glaskünstler und Maler Erwin Eisch ist tot". Passauer Neue Presse (in German). Retrieved 25 January 2022.
- ^ a b History of the Eisch Family Eisch, retrieved 25 January 2022.
- ^ a b Erwin Eisch and the art of glass Eisch, retrieved 25 January 2022.
- ^ a b c d e Roßberger, Renate: Glaskünstler Erwin Eisch mit 94 Jahren gestorben (in German) BR 25 January 2022
- OCLC 56844940
- ^ Buechner, Thomas, "Erwin Eisch" (catalog essay), Maurine Littleton Gallery, Washington, DC 1987 unpaginated
- OCLC 68623262
- OCLC 192017457
- ^ a b c Buechner, 1987, unpaginated
- OCLC 11398167
- OCLC 262432305
- ^ Byrd, Joan, "Erwin Eisch" (Catalog essay), Maurine Littleton Gallery, Washington, DC 1992, page 12
- ^ Buechner, 1987 (unpaginated)
- OCLC 312141571
- OCLC 9505541
- ^ Byrd, Joan, 1984, page 15
- ^ Glasmuseum Frauenau, 1992 (unpaginated)
- ^ "Batch" is the term for the basic ingredients of glass: quartz sand, lime, magnesium oxide and aluminum oxide.
- ^ Byrd, Joan, 1992, page 14
- ^ a b Buechner, 1987 unpaginated
- ^ Littleton, 1980 page 126
- ^ Littleton, 1980, page 121
- ^ Littleton, 1980, pages 121–122
- ^ Byrd, 1984, page 16-17
- OCLC 7698530
- ^ Grover, Ray & Lee, "Contemporary Art Glass", Crown Publishers, Inc. New York, p. 185
- ^ Eight Heads of Harvey Littleton Corning Museum of Glass
- ^ Angus, Mark, International Magazine of Studio Glass website
- OCLC 7698530
- OCLC 30763504
- ^ Erwin Eisch: Kristallnacht Florida Gulf Coast University Galleries, 21 August 2021
- ^ "Kristallnacht-The Night of Crystal Death: Vitreographs from the Littleton Studios" (2-sided exhibition publication), Turchin Center for the Arts, Appalachian State University, Boone, NC, 2006
- ^ Clark, Paul, "WCU museum to debut 'Kristallnacht' prints", [1] Accessed 3/28/08
- ^ Chronology (exhibition catalog) "Erwin Eisch", Maurine Littleton Gallery, Washington, DC, 1992, Page 20
- OCLC 288915918
- ^ "Bild-Werk Frauenau: International Summer Academy 2008" (course catalog) Bild-Werk Frauenau, Frauenau, Germany 2008 pp. 2,3
- ^ These teachers/artists were among those listed in recent Bild-Werk Frauenau Summer Academy's catalogs
- ^ Alfons Hannes, Wolfgang Kermer: Venini–Murano: 65 Gläser der Sammlung Kermer, catalog prospectus Sonderausstellung Glasmuseum Frauenau, 6. Mai bis 28. September 1975, ed. Gemeinde Frauenau 1975
- ^ Glaskunst der 60er und 70er Jahre – 65 Objekte von 65 Künstlern: Sammlung Wolfgang Kermer, exh. cat. Glasmuseum Frauenau, Dezember 1976 bis November 1977, ed. Gemeinde Frauenau 1976 (Text Alfons Hannes)
- ISBN 3-7954-0753-2
- ISBN 3-7954-0753-2, cat. nos. 3–48
- ^ Erwin Eisch: Heaven Starts on Earth Florida Gulf Coast University Galleries, 27 August 2021
- ^ Habatat Galleries, Beauty that Challenges: Erwin Eisch", (exhibition catalog) Habatat Galleries, Royal Oak, Michigan 2004 (unpaginated)
External links
- Luterbach, Len. "Erwin Eisch – Contemporary Art – (202) 333-9307". Maurine Littleton Gallery. Retrieved 27 January 2022.
- "Glass Collection". Corning Museum of Glass. 23 April 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2022.
- Erwin Eisch artnet.com
- Erwin Eisch at eisch.de, company
- Gimson, Gabi: Opening: Erwin Eisch celebrated his 90th birthday with museum opening in Frauenau, Germany urbanglass.org 4 May 2017
- Harvey Littleton and Erwin Eisch (photograph) si.edu