OPENING: Habatat Galleries will hold its 40th annual invitational exhibition and 10th auction

Harvey Littleton, Spiral Lyrical Movement, 1986. Hot-worked glass. Tallest: 43 in. Auction estimate: $28,000 – $36,000

Habatat Galleries‘ 40th annual invitational exhibition gets underway this Friday with work by 90 artists from all over the world, but all eyes will be on the gallery’s 44 lots from 15 private collections going up for auction the day before. While the “Annual International Glass Invitational Awards Exhibition“ has been a regular yearly event for this Royal Oak, Michigan, gallery since 1972, the auction is less than two decades old. And, unlike the exhibition, the auction does not take place every year, having run only ten times in the last 19 years. The highest estimate for Thursday night’s event (bidding starts at 8 PM ) is for a Harvey Littleton work (pictured at left), which is fitting with this being the 50th anniversary of the founder of Studio Glass’s seminal workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art. Work by William Morris and Dale Chihuly are also listed with a high estimate north of $30,000. In total, 44 lots are going up for auction, with bids being accepted by telephone and Internet, as well as absentee bidding.

The auction catalog, which can be downloaded in PDF form, identifies some of the collectors who are parting with their precious sculptural objects, many of which take up no more than a 10-inch square footprint, according to a brief essay by Habatat’s Ferdinand Hampson. In addition to sculptures by Jay Musler, Dante Marioni, Marvin Lipofsky, and Dale Chihuly, to name just a few, there will be a substantial portion of a personal glass library up for bid. William Warmus (a contributing editor to GLASS: The UrbanGlass Art Quarterly and a board member of UrbanGlass) is putting up much of his personal holdings including an extensive set of the Journal of Glass Studies, auction catalogs, and artist monographs from the former Czechoslovakia and other European countries. The Warmus library carries an auction estimate of between $24,000 – $28,000.

Buyers should be aware of a 15-percent premium added to the final cost of an item (16-percent if payment is made by credit card.)

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