Harvey Littleton

Harvey Littleton died on December 13, 2013, aged 91 at his home in Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

Littleton was married to Bess Tamura Littleton in 1947. She predeceased him on October 8, 2009. The couple had five children, one of whom died in her early youth. The surviving four all work in the field of glass art. Daughter Carol L. Shay is the curator at Littleton Studios; Tom Littleton owns and manages Spruce Pine Batch Company (founded by his father), which supplies batch (the dry ingredients of which glass is made) and colors to artists and art departments around the U.S.; Maurine Littleton is the owner and director of Maurine Littleton Gallery which specializes in glass art, in Washington, DC. With his wife and collaborative partner, Kate Vogel, John Littleton is a glass artist in Bakersville, North Carolina.

The offhand phrase "technique is cheap" soon took on a life of its own. For some it was a rallying cry to discover the inherent possibilities of a "new" medium for the artist; for others the statement expressed nothing more than arrogant disdain for the timeless value of craftsmanship. In a 2001 interview for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, Littleton commented on what he termed the "misinterpretation" of the phrase:

Littleton worked as an independent glassblower and sculptor until chronic back problems forced him to abandon hot glass in 1990, and he continued his creative interest in vitreography well beyond that.

Perhaps Littleton's best known body of work is his "Topological Geometry" group of series, made between 1983 and 1989. Included under this heading are his signature "Arc" forms and "Crowns," as well as his late "Lyrical Movement" and "Implied Movement" sculptural groups. In 1989 chronic back problems forced Littleton to retire from working in hot glass.

Allowing the pull of gravity to stretch and bend hot glass while on the blowpipe or punty led Littleton to his "Folded Forms" and "Loops" series, which continued until 1979. His "Eye" forms, also from the 1970s, take the form of concentric cups of various colors in diminishing sizes that nestle one inside the next.

Littleton incorporated optical lens blanks manufactured by Corning with his own hot-worked glass. In each case he sandblasted and cut the optical disc, draping, and in one case piercing, the disc with fluid, cased glass forms. These were followed, in 1978, by Littleton's Solid Geometry series, in which heavy cased glass forms were cut into trapezoidal, spheroid and ovoid shapes and highly polished.

Littleton retired from teaching in 1977 to focus on his own art. Exploring the inherent qualities of the medium, he worked in series with simple forms to draw attention to the complex interplay of transparent glass with multiple overlays of thin color.

In 1974, Littleton also began experimenting with vitreography (printmaking using glass plates). He received a research grant from the university in 1975 to continue this work, and his first prints from this process were shown in a show at the Madison Art Center. When he left Wisconsin in 1977 and established his own studio in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, he designated one room in the studio for printmaking. By 1981, he had hired a part-time printmaker, and in 1983 he built a separate facility for the presses. He regularly invited artists in various media to explore the possibilities. Littleton's own prints were often simple geometric shapes, and sometimes made from shotgun-shattered safety glass. When back problems forced him to stop working in hot glass in 1990, Littleton continued his printmaking.

In 1972 Littleton was at the Seventh National Sculpture Conference in Lawrence, Kansas when he uttered the words, "Technique is cheap." The statement touched off a debate that still finds currency among glass artists: Should technique, or content, take precedence in glass art?

This was a question that Littleton had evidently been thinking about for some time. In his 1971 book, Glassblowing: A Search for Form, he wrote:

Littleton explored cutting and slumping industrial glass, including plate and optic glass, beginning in 1970. In sculptures such as Do Not Spindle and Distortion Box, slumped squares of glass are transfixed by a brass rod. In Rock Around the Clock, a bent piece of optic glass bar from Corning Glass Works in Danville, Virginia, can be set rocking on its bronze plate glass base with a touch of the hand.

Littleton presented papers on his experiments in glassblowing at crafts conferences in the United States and elsewhere. In 1968, Labino's book Visual Art in Glass became the first book to be written about the studio glass movement. It was followed in 1971 by Glassblowing: A Search for Form, by Harvey K. Littleton.

These sculptures, especially the "Prunted," or "Anthropomorpic," forms were heavily influenced Eisch. Shortly after Eisch's departure from a several-week period as artist-in-residence at Wisconsin in fall 1967, Littleton realized that he had unconsciously adopted his friend's strongly personal figural style in his own work, and began a radical change. In a period of a few weeks he eliminated references to the vessel and turned from complexity to a new vocabulary of simple, clean geometric shapes, forming graceful tubes, rods and columns of clear glass encasing lines of color, that he cut and grouped together on bases of plate glass or steel.

As the glass program grew, so did Littleton's work and reputation as an artist who used glass. In 1964, he had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. In 1966, a five-year retrospective, Harvey Littleton: Glass, showed at the Milwaukee Art Center.

Littleton served as the chairman of the University of Wisconsin art department from 1964 to 1967 and from 1969 to 1971. He retired from teaching in 1976, in order to devote his full attention to making work in glass. In 1977 Littleton was named professor emeritus of art at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

When no grants for a hot glass studio had materialized by the fall of 1961, Otto Wittmann, director of the Toledo Museum of Art, suggested that Littleton consider giving a glassblowing seminar at the museum, and offered the use of a storage shed on the museum grounds. The first of two workshops was held in this makeshift facility from March 23 to April 1, 1962.

In the summer of 1962 Littleton once again traveled to Europe, this time to research how glass was taught in universities there. He found nothing that he could bring back to the U.S. to help him educate art students at the University of Wisconsin. At that time, European glass programs were geared solely toward industrial production. Students were not taught hands-on techniques with the material; the craft of working with hot glass was still taught at the factories, under the apprenticeship system. What Littleton did find in Europe was a kindred spirit in glass art, the German Erwin Eisch, who is recognized today as a founder of European studio glass. Eisch had set up a small work area in his family's glass factory in Frauenau for the production of his own glass art. Trained as a fine artist in the academies of Germany, he was largely self-taught as a glass blower and at the time produced his work with the help of the factory's craftsmen. The friendship begun when Littleton visited Eisch in Frauenau in 1962 lasted for the rest of Littleton's life, and had profound influence on the work of each. The two spent some of almost every summer together for the next thirty years.

Through the fall 1962 and spring 1963 semesters, Littleton taught glass in a garage at his Verona farm to six students under an independent study program. By the following year, based on the success of the Toledo workshops and the independent study course, he had secured University of Wisconsin funding to rent and equip an off-campus hot shop in Madison and authorization to offer a graduate level glass course.

In 1962 Littleton's first pieces in blown glass were, like his earlier works in pottery, functional forms: vases, bowls and paperweights. His breakthrough to non-functional form came in 1963 when, with no purpose in mind, he remelted and finished a glass piece that he had earlier smashed in a fit of pique. The object lay in his studio for several weeks before he decided to grind the bottom. As Littleton recounts in his book Glassblowing: A Search for Form, he brought the object into the house where "it aroused such antipathy in my wife that I looked at it much more closely, finally deciding to send it to an exhibition. Its refusal there made me even more obstinate, and I took it to New York ... I later showed it to the curators of design at the Museum of Modern Art. They, perhaps relating it to some other neo-Dada work in the museum, purchased it for the Design Collection." This led to Littleton's mid-1960s series of broken-open forms, and "Prunted," "Imploded" and "Exploded" forms.

Upon his return to the university and his Verona, Wisconsin studio Littleton began melting small batches of glass in his ceramics kiln, using hand-thrown stoneware bowls as crucibles. He built his first glass furnace in the summer of 1959. As a result of these ongoing experiments, the ACC asked him to chair a panel on glass at its Third National Conference, at Lake George, New York, in 1958. The panelists were glass artists and designers Michael and Frances Higgins and Earl McCutchen, who worked in laminated glass at the University of Georgia. Paul Perrot, director of the Corning Museum of Glass, was the fifth panelist. At this conference, Littleton suggested that glass should be a medium for the individual artist. By the time the ACC convened its fourth conference in 1961, Littleton not only presented a paper on his own work in glass but also exhibited a sculpture made of three faceted pieces of cullet that he had melted, formed and carved in the previous year. By this time, Littleton was applying for grants to get his vision of a hot glass studio program at the university off the ground.

In 1957-58 Littleton took a year's leave. A university research grant allowed him to visit Europe to study the influence of Islamic culture on contemporary Spanish pottery. He first stopped in Paris to visit Jean Sala, who had been recommended to him as an artist who worked alone in glass. Though Sala was no longer active in glass, he took Littleton to his now-idle studio. Conditioned by all of his experience at Corning, Littleton knew only of glass-making in an industrial setting, by a team of workers.

Littleton and his family purchased a farm about 12 miles from the Wisconsin campus. This location served Harvey as home, studio, laboratory, and sometime-classroom. His production as a potter focused on functional stoneware that he sold in Chicago-area art fairs and in galleries from Chicago to New York City. His work was included in group shows in the United States, including "Designer Craftsmen U.S.A.," sponsored by the American Craft Council (ACC) in 1953 and the Ceramic National exhibition at the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts (now the Everson Museum of Art) in 1954. His pottery gained international exposure in 1956 at the First International Exposition of Ceramics in Cannes, France. As his reputation grew, he also participated in advancing his craft; he was elected one of the first craftsmen-trustees of the American Craft Council, he received a small research grant from the university to explore glazing processes, and he designed a manually operated wheel called the "Littleton Kick Wheel," which was used by students in the ceramics lab at the UWM.

Littleton received the MFA degree in ceramics in 1951, with a minor in metals. With a recommendation from Grotell, he landed a teaching post at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (UWM).

In 1949, Littleton enrolled under the GI Bill as a graduate student in ceramics at Cranbrook Academy of Art, studying under Finnish potter Maija Grotell. Commuting weekly between Toledo, Ohio and Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, he played Wednesday-night poker in Toledo with a group that included Dominick Labino, who would be important to the success of his seminal workshops a dozen years later.

Littleton returned to the University of Michigan in January, 1946, and finished his degree in industrial design in 1947. With his father's encouragement Littleton submitted a proposal to Corning to create a workshop within the factory to research the aesthetic properties of industrial glass. When this proposal was not accepted, Littleton and two friends, Bill Lewis and Aare Lahti, opened a design studio called Corporate Designers in Ann Arbor. After obtaining an equipment order from the Goat's Nest Ceramic Studio in Ann Arbor, Littleton began teaching evening pottery classes there. Later, when the Goat's nest was put on the market, he helped his students form a co-op that became the Ann Arbor Potter's Guild. At about the same time, he found a teaching job at the Museum School of the Toledo Museum of Art.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack, Littleton tried to volunteer in the Coast Guard, the Air Force, and the Marines, but was rejected because of his poor eyesight. In the fall of 1942, he was drafted into the Army, interrupting his continued study. He was assigned to the Signal Corps, and served in North Africa , France, and Italy. Near the end of the war, he received a commendation for developing a decoding device. In England awaiting his turn to be shipped home, he attended classes at the Brighton School of Art to fill time. He modeled and fired another small clay torso that he carried home in his barracks bag. Once back in Corning, New York, Littleton cast the torso, again in Vycor, as a small edition.

While studying physics, Littleton also took sculpture classes with Avard Fairbanks at Michigan, which fueled his growing preference for art. After three semesters of physics, the pull of art proved stronger than his respect for his father's wishes, and, with sister Martha's encouragement he arranged to study at Cranbrook Academy of Art for the 1941 spring semester. There he studied metalwork with Harry Bertoia and sculpture with Marshall Fredericks, and worked part-time as a studio assistant to the aging Carl Milles. Dr. Littleton was not pleased by his son's decision. Littleton enlisted Martha's aid in arriving at a compromise: Littleton would return to the University of Michigan that fall, to major in industrial design. He also enrolled in a ceramics class, with Mary Chase Stratton

During the summers of 1941 and 1942 Littleton worked at Corning. In summer 1942, working as a mold maker in the Vycor multiform project laboratory, he cast his first work in glass. Using a neoclassic torso he had modeled in clay, he made a casting in white Vycor.

Harvey Littleton (June 14, 1922 – December 13, 2013) was an American glass artist and educator, one of the founders of the studio glass movement; he is often referred to as the "Father of the Studio Glass Movement". Born in Corning, New York, he grew up in the shadow of Corning Glass Works, where his father headed Research and Development during the 1930s. Expected by his father to enter the field of physics, Littleton instead chose a career in art, gaining recognition first as a ceramist and later as a glassblower and sculptor in glass. In the latter capacity he was very influential, organizing the first glassblowing seminar aimed at the studio artist in 1962, on the grounds of the Toledo Museum of Art. Imbued with the prevailing view at the time that glassblowing could only be done on the factory floor, separated from the designer at his desk, Littleton aimed to put it within the reach of the individual studio artist.