BOOK REPORT: Following recent exhibition, new Lino Tagliapietra catalog features fresh perspective o

“Recent Work by Lino Tagliapietra” is available to buy on the Museum of Glass’s website. Hardcover, 96 pages, 70 color illustrations. 9.5“x10.75”. Published 2012, University of Washington Press. courtesy: http://www.museumofglassstore.org/

In the forward to Lino Tagliapietra’s new catalogue “Maestro: Recent Work by Lino Tagliapietra,” Museum of Glass curator Susan Warner observes the length at which Tagliapietra’s works have been discussed. “To say that Lino’s work and his amazingly fluid work style have been the subject of several treatises by glass scholars is an understatement,” she says. Thus when it came to finding the right essayist for the catalog, the Museum turned to a PhD scholar with a fresh perspective on glassmaking and glass art. Claudia Gorbman, who is a professor of film studies and interdisciplinary arts and sciences curricula at the University of Washington, Tacoma, addresses several fundamental facets of Tagliapietra’s process and life’s work in her essay, “Glass-Whispering,” and excellently complements the catalog’s crisp, vivid photographs of Tagliapietra’s work.

“Glass is a medium of contrast and paradox,” she begins. With regard to Tagliapietra’s approach, this could not be more accurate. He has been described by esteemed art historian and curator Rosa Barovier Mentasti as “sprezzatura,” a word whose use dates back to the sixteenth century and that is meant to describe one who speaks and acts with deceptive ease. “Sprezzatura” comes with complete mastery, either over a certain technique or manner; after working with glass for seventy years and becoming a maestro vetraio at the age of 21, Tagliapietra doubtless possesses nothing short of complete mastery. The fluidity and casualness with which Tagliapietra manipulates hot glass was hard-won, and so was the affectionate and warm environment in which he creates. Gorbman also describes his studio space with such details as the foil-wrapped vegetables someone leaves to cook in the garage for lunch; his relentless, almost uninterrupted laboring in his workshop; the use of jazz terminology to refer to the works created therein.

As for the pieces included in the catalog, Gorbman observes their startlingly bright and expertly composed coloration. “When we think of the restrained, ‘tasteful’ monochromaticism with which Venetian glass is most often associated,” she says, “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.” His newest works feature titles that refer to places, native cultures, and reinterpretations of familiar objects and shapes (for instance, Buttonhole, Goose, Dinosaur, and Batman).

Tagliapietra’s catalog has been released following the opening of his new exhibition at the Museum of Glass, also called “Maesto: Recent Work by Lino Tagliapietra.” It can be purchased on the Museum’s website here.

—Isabella Webbe