C olored
photo: Bruce Miller /
V ase
photo: Julia Hayes /
Parallelogram s
photo: Courtesy of Littleton Archives / Chihuly photo: Courtesy of Chihuly Inc.
L ittleton urged budding glass artists not to get bogged down in technique.
Littleton working with
former student Dale
Chihuly at the Pilchuck
Glass School in 1974.
Chihuly graduated from
Littleton’s UW-Madison
program in 1968, then
studied in Venice and at
Rhode Island School of
Design before founding
Pilchuck in 1971.
Littleton’s furnace, transport-
ing^ to Toledo, reassembling it -
then working around the clock
to keep it burning to provide
hot glass for the workshop.
“The first batch was so stiff,
you couldn’t get a bubble,” recalls
Edith Franklin, 88, a Toledo
clay artist and teacher who
was one of the seven “mud-ball
slingers” there. “Then Nick
Labino went out and brought
back a couple of bags of glass
marbles.” Those clear balls,
known as #475, were made of
glass invented by Labino for the
manufacture of fiberglass. Their
low melting point made them
ideal for glassblowing.
“Eventually, everybody tried
to blow glass,” says Norm Schul-
man, 87, a clay artist and teacher.
“And we all managed to get a
bubble out - little ones, like
chewing gum.”
After watching those feeble
attempts on one of the work-
shop’s last days, a passerby
picked up a blowpipe, dipped it
into the furnace and gathered a
gob of molten glass. “He blew
the bubble, then showed us how
to spin it and swing it” to create a
shallow bowl, Bailey recalls.“It’s
the first time we’d ever seen it
done,” he says. “When you saw
him do it, you saw the magic.”
The magician was Harvey
Leafgreen, a Swedish glass-
blower who’d retired from a
Toledo glass factory. Littleton
promptly recruited him to help
teach the workshop in June.
Littleton’s own efforts,
meanwhile, expanded like
blown glass. That summer, he
consulted with the 99-year-old
Carder in Corning; met with
artists in Europe, notably glass
sculptor Erwin Eisch; and cam-
paigned for a glass program at
the University of Wisconsin.
“I think he got a foothold and
didn’t want to let it go,” says
Littleton’s younger son, John,
54, who makes glass sculpture
with his wife, Kate Vogel.
“He felt the material deserved
a place in art.”
By the fall, Littleton was
recruiting his pottery students
at Madison to take an indepen-
dent study in glass at his farm.
“I walked into the clay class,”
recalls Marvin Lipofsky, 73,
“and this little short guy said,
‘Do you want to blow glass?’ I
said, ‘I don’t know.’ ” But after
visiting Littleton’s farm/studio
with a friend, the reluctant
Lipofsky was hooked.
“Harvey would demonstrate
to the students by blowing glass
and say, ‘OK, guys. It’s yours,’
and hand them the blowpipe,”
Lipofsky says.
“It was a very American,
very pioneering kind of thing,”
he says. “In Europe, artists had
all these restrictions. But Amer-
ica had these wide-open spaces -
backyards and garages behind
houses - and plenty of fuel to
keep the furnace going.”
Another early recruit was
Joan Falconer Byrd, 72,
professor of ceramics at Western
Carolina University and author
of a new biography,
Harvey K.
Littleton: A Life in Glass.
“He gave
us glass to work with, but then he
had to keep us going,” she says.
He urged them to try every-
thing they could with glass and
not get bogged down in tech-
nique, she says. “It was that
whole American approach:
Here, anything is possible.”
For Littleton, those possi-
bilities swiftly became realities.
By 1963, the 41-year-old Lit-
tleton had given 35 lectures on
glass in universities around the
country, had solo shows of his
glass at the Art Institute of Chi-
cago and five other venues, and
persuaded the University of
Wisconsin to add a glass pro-
gram to its curriculum.
feb/mari2 american craft 049
