Tagliapietra: Maestro returns to Museum of Glass in Tacoma
Serious collectors seek out Tagliapietra’s most important handcrafted glass designs. This exceptional battuto vase, signed and dated 2004, brought $31,000 last October at Rago (est. $7,500-$9,500).
When the Museum of Glass in Tacoma organized the 2008 exhibition “Lino Tagliapietra in Retropect: A Modern Renaissance in Italian Glass” – featured that December in a Style Century article available on this website – it might have seemed like the artist’s long career had been summed up. But the working pace has never skipped a beat for the celebrated Venetian glassmaker, who divides his time and teaching between home base in Italy and workshops on these shores.
Tagliapietra will turn 78 this month, and Auction Central News caught up with the man who never seems to rest at the new MOG show, “Maestro: Recent Works by Lino Tagliapietra.” He seems pleased with the presentation: “This is new work, not so much retrospective things. I feel, it’s a wonderful exhibition – quite well done. There are beautiful installations – three, four, five with the Borboleta – butterflies.”
The exhibition, which showcases 65 works from the decade 2002-2012, runs through Jan. 6. The coloration and patterning of individual objects is intense, the techniques of their creation unfathomable. Amid the stunning single pieces are group installations, such as the 2011 assemblage called Gabbiani, the word for seagulls in Italian. Another 2011 composition called Masai resembles a line of decorated shields.
Tagliapietra explains, “I am doing a lot of experimental things at present, trying different things – different colors, different techniques. I also work on the rediscovery of older techniques. I do mentoring in Italy and also here in the United States.”
The making of these massive, intricate projects – La Porta Blue in Campo dei Frati 2012 is nearly 4 feet high – requires the work of many hands under the direction of the maestro. He says, “It depends on what we are doing. It’s possible to work with three or four people. Sometimes I work with six or seven people. I form a relationship with them. When we start with a new guy, we give him very long training before he begins, then he becomes part of the famiglia.”
Tagliapietra is particularly delighted with the exhibition catalog published by the Museum of Glass through the University of Washington Press. Accompanying the superb photographs is an essay, not by an art historian, but by Claudia Gorbman, professor of film studies at the University of Washington/Tacoma who draws parallels between the glass and audiovisual media.
“To the extremely demanding world of glass, Lino Tagliapietra brings unparalleled mastery,” she writes. “Dale Chihuly and many others have called him the greatest living glassblower. He stands at an extraordinary confluence of two systems and two ideologies of glassmaking. On the one, hand he is a product of the 1,000-year-old Venetian factory tradition. … On the other hand, for the past quarter century he has gained global renown as an independent star in the firmament of glass art.”
Next to an image of Lino Tagliapietra at work in the hot shop, the book features his statement: “In Murano we were young when we went into the glasshouses: we did not continue school. It was a different situation and different training than you get in the States, but I think it takes the same amount of time, one way or another, to make good work. … The most valuable aspect of the traditional Murano education is that you have the chance to practice. All the time!”
The volume also features detailed descriptions of painstaking glass techniques, such as the last stage of making a borboleta (butterfly) for one of the show’s most spectacular installations: “The piece begins as an incalmo vessel, but toward the end, it is whirled out like a pizza centered on the punty – a glass pizza with a beautiful bilateral pattern of color splotches. The spinning glass is then allowed to slump, and a butterfly is born as mysteriously as the phoenix.”
In the marketplace, Tagliapietro works can be found at almost every price point. He worked his way up through the Murano glass factories, becoming chief glassblower and designer at Effetre International in mid-career. Collectors place the greatest value on the masterpieces Lino has designed and created hands-on in recent decades. An exceptional sculptural work, signed and dated 2004, in style quite similar to exhibits in Maestro, sold for $31,000 last October at a Rago auction.
Suzanne Perrault at Rago says of Tagliapietra, “He brings to contemporary studio glass a Murano approach. He runs a workshop, liked Dale Chihuly does, but perhaps not as large. He travels greatly and does many projects with other glassmakers.”
“Some of his more commercial lines (like Effetre) do very well, but what serious collectors want are the handcrafted items, like the large battuto vase we sold for over $30K,” she continues. “His rare spiral pieces, especially the taller ones, do very well too. The prices for his new sculpture from his studio are very high.”
In the conclusion of her catalog essay, Claudia Gorbman writes, “When we think of the restrained, ‘tasteful’ monochromaticism with which Venetian glass is most often associated, the exuberance of these color patterns signals Lino’s total mastery of and liberation from the tradition that produced him, like a vessel that has launched and taken off for uncharted parts of the universe.”
“Lino’s approach to glass is fearless. He continues on his 70-year-long journey with it, showing the same passionate curiosity that brought him to it as a young boy on the island of Murano.”
The current catalog, one for the 2008 exhibition Lino Tagliapietra in Retropect, and many other important publications in the field are available at www.museumofglassstore.org
ADDITIONAL IMAGES OF NOTE
Serious collectors seek out Tagliapietra’s most important handcrafted glass designs. This exceptional battuto vase, signed and dated 2004, brought $31,000 last October at Rago (est. $7,500-$9,500).
‘Borboleta’ (il giardino di farfalle – garden of butterflies) is one of the glass installations in the current exhibition ‘Maestro: Recent Works by Lino Tagliapietra’ at the Museum of Glass in Tacoma through Jan. 6. Courtesy Museum of Glass; photo by Francesco Allegretto.
This 2011 Fuji vase in the ‘Maestro’ exhibition is part of a series of recent works named after international cities and places. Courtesy Museum of Glass; photo by Russell Johnson.
On view in Tacoma, the stark ‘La Porta Blu in Campo dei Frati’ – almost 4 feet high – marks a new direction for the glassmaker in 2012. Courtesy Museum of Glass; photo by Russell Johnson.
In the June Italian Glass sale at Wright auctions in Chicago, this ghostly pale Cogolo vase with filigree zanfirico, made in 1985 for Effetre in Murano, Italy, brought $7,500.
In Rago’s February sale, a tall spiral glass sculpture (33 1/2 inches high), Murano 1991, passed its modest $2,500-$3,500 estimate to bring $18,750.
A strikingly simple black and white glass bowl, Effetre 1986, sold in February at Rago for $5,313.
