MODERN GLASS
Sidney Waugh [foreword]
Sidney Waugh [foreword]: MODERN GLASS. Corning, NY: Steuben Glass, Inc., 1939. First edition. Slim quarto. Printed and embossed thick wrappers folded in the Japanese style. Clear Plasti-coil binding. [44] pp. Richly illustrated in gravure. Interior unmarked and very clean. Out-of-print. Plastic binding chipped to crown. Wrappers lightly etched and worn, but a very good copy of this elaborate and handsome promotional booklet.
9.25 x 11 Plasti-coil booklet with 44 pages of period correct graphic design and magnificent gravure printing courtesy of the Beck Company. Early and luxurious promotional booklet for the modern line of Steuben Glass produced under the auspices of director of design Sidney Waugh.
“Steuben Glass was a token of high-end New York modernity from about 1930 to 1960. Its elegantly contemporary and flawlessly executed products -- cocktail shakers, drinking glasses, bowls, cigarette urns, olive dishes and the like -- made the perfect gift for the upscale bride and groom. And the company, an offshoot of Corning Glass Works in Corning, N.Y., promoted its wares, even during the Depression, to an unabashed luxury market.
“Possessing a Steuben piece could become ''one of those evidences of solvency, like the ownership of a Cadillac or a house in the right neighborhood,'' counseled Walter Dorwin Teague, a leading industrial designer who worked early on as a design and marketing consultant for the company.
“Competing with European glassmakers -- especially Orrefors in Sweden, from which it took many cues -- Steuben went all out to tailor its products to the Modern era: clean design, the use of biomorphic and abstract shapes, a revolutionary formula devised for optical glass that is said to produce the world's purest lead crystal. The company was so proud of an olive dish with a handle shaped like a snail's shell, designed by John Dreves of its staff, that it held a prominent spot in the futuristic Steuben pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1939.
“In 1937 Steuben scored a coup by persuading a clutch of world-famous artists -- among them Henri Matisse, Isamu Noguchi, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Georgia O'Keeffe, Grant Wood and Jean Cocteau -- to make designs that were engraved on special glass vessels. The list was put together by Matisse himself, and if the results of the project, called ''27 Artists in Crystal,'' were not always salutary, well, the attempt was audacious.
“Although its factory has always been upstate, Steuben has a close connection with Manhattan. The company opened a retail shop at 748 Fifth Avenue in 1934 and then, as business grew, put up the Corning-Steuben building at Fifth Avenue and 56th Street in 1937, with walls of Corning Pyrex glass blocks set in limestone.
“Steuben's Modernist push got started in 1933, when Arthur A. Houghton Jr., a young member of the family that owned Corning Glass, decided that the unprofitable Steuben division (now Steuben Glass) should go contemporary. He was prompted by the example of other factories, like the furniture manufacturer Herman Miller, which had seen Modernism as the solution to falling sales. But he realized that while Steuben had skilled craftsmen and a special crystal formula, it lacked design and marketing expertise.
“The ground had been prepared by Teague, who in 1932 had designed for the company a group of shimmering ''lens bowls,'' cut like automobile headlights, and a group of unadorned vases in simple shapes that were chosen for the Museum of Modern Art's ''Machine Art'' show in 1934. But Houghton hired a New York City architect, John Monteith Gates, as managing director, and Sidney Waugh, a sculptor, as director of design. And Steuben was off and running, under the team that was to lead it for three decades.
“The group threw out the fussy, frosted, iridescent and colored glassware produced by the factory since its inception in 1903. And the division began to make objects, using the new formula, to appeal to a public willing to believe that glass was the material of tomorrow. Under the direction of Waugh, Steuben's wares emulated the simplicity of Orrefors and took on new principles of balance, proportion and truth to materials. The final forms of many of the objects were dictated by the naturally curvaceous shapes they assumed at the molten-glass stage.” — Grace Glueck