Harvey Littleton Eye Form Sculpture 1968

Description

Heading : Blown, cut and assembled ‘Eye Form Sculpture’
Date :1968
Origin : Frauenau, Germany
Marks : Signed HK Littleton 68F
Type : Coloured lead glass
Size : Height 25.6cm, width 22.2
Condition : Light signs of wear. One burst bubble inside one of the amethyst bowls. Two bowl rims have been polished. The cloudiness in one bowl is intentional
Restoration : None
Weight : 4698 grams

There are sevel elements of gradualted size and in clear, amethyst and uranium

Additional Information :

Littleton’s ‘Eye Form’ series is a group of important works comprised of various quantities of hemispherical bowls of different sizes and colours placed inside one another.  Viewed directly from above, they echo the circles of different parts of an eyeball. With them, he explored the optical effects of glass, and how the different pieces reflect and react with light – an avenue he continued to pursue into the 1970s and beyond. Littleton explained, “The cut surface lets you see into the wall of the hemisphere, and the light is concentrated by the curving sides and reflected back out the cut edge. This gives a rich, deep, intense colored circle of light.” Other, later, examples are in the Smithsonian and the Corning Museum of Glass.

This example is comprised of five purple, green or colourless bowls, with a colourless solid hemisphere in the centre, all (unusually for the series) contained inside a colourless goblet form, thus totalling seven pieces. Unlike later examples, the bowls here are thinly blown in solid colour, and of different heights. Due to the lack of space between the bowls to accomodate any further bowls, and comparing it to other examples from the series, it is assumed to be complete.

It was signed by Littleton with a diamond point near the base of the foot ‘H K Littleton 68 F’, which reveals interesting information. The ‘F’ almost certainly indicates Frauenau, a German town which he visited regularly during Summers to work and learn with fellow studio glass pioneer Erwin Eisch (1927–2022), whose family owned the Eisch glass factory there.

Littleton’s biographer Joan Falconer Byrd notes in her landmark book Harvey K. Littleton: A Life In Glass that he spent Summer 1968 in Frauenanu where he made 30 pieces to be exhibited in Germany and elsewhere across Europe – this piece was acquired in Germany. She also notes that it was at this point that he began to give up using the vessel format to focus on “minimalist sculpture”. 1968 is a year before Littleton is said to have begun officially creating the ‘Eye Form’ series.

These facts combine to suggest that, together with the unusual goblet form and differing heights of the bowls, this example may potentially be an early, exploratory prototype.

Harvey Littleton (1922–2013) was, with Dominick Labino (1910–87), one of the two founders of the 20th century studio glass movement that allowed artists and sculptors to use glass directly as an artistic medium. With Labino, he organised the first glassblowing seminars aimed at artists at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1962, which enabled students to learn the new ‘studio glass’ technologies and techniques that the two had developed together. He went on to become a highly successful teacher and educator, founding the first glassblowing course at the University of Wisconsin, where he taught the first generations of studio glass artists who would, like him, go across the world disseminating the techniques and creating an entirely new branch of art and the decorative arts. In 1977, he gave up teaching to focus on his own glass art, examples of which can now be found in many major museums and private collections across the world.  Literature: Harvey K. Littleton: A Life In Glass, Joan Falconer Byrd, Skira Rizzoli, 2011; Glassblowing: A Search For Form, Harkey K. Littleton, Litton Education Publishing, 1971.