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“De wereld volgegns Sybren Valkema (The World According to Sybren Valkema)”
Nationaal Glasmuseum, Leerdam, Netherlands.
originally published in GASNews, November/December 2005

       I recently had the opportunity to attend the opening of an exhibition at the Nationaal Glas Museum in Leerdam, Holland. The occasion was a retrospective of the work and life of Sybren Valkema, founder of the studio glass movement in the Netherlands and a seminal figure in the establishment of a European network of educators and artists involved in studio glass.
       The exhibition excelled at providing a contextual look at studio glass in Holland by providing historical background on industrial glass in Leerdam in the early 20th century and explaining the rise of a global studio glass movement in the 60s. Valkema’s early commitment to the education of the workers in Leerdam during wartime, providing them with a more holistic program that included fine arts and physical education,  as well as the more traditional vocational curriculum, indicated an innovative and experimental approach that would become a lifelong pattern. As a member of that generation who lived through the war years and its deprivations, Valkema exhibited the spirit of invention and self-reliance in many areas of his professional life that would become so indicative of the later studio glass movement.
       The exhibition also gives insight into the enlightened administration of the Leerdam factory during those years, as the director P.M. Cochius—in a parallel effort with his peers at Orrefors and Venini and other European factories—steered industrial glass production away from the traditions of the past and towards a design-oriented golden age of mid-century icons. At Leerdam, Valkema’s design work followed in the footsteps of Chris Lebeau and was contemporaneous with that of Andries Copier. These are the years that gave rise to the Serica (limited edition) and Unica (unique art pieces) series, in what might be considered a precursor to the idea of glasswork that is not conceived of in unlimited multiples.
       The historical part of the show also details what could be termed the Big Bang of the European studio glass movement: the World Crafts Council conference of  June, 1964. Held in New York, this was the event where Harvey Littleton first demonstrated the small furnace designed by Nick Labino to an audience that included Erwin Eisch and  Valkema, many of whom would return to their homes to found regional and national movements, and maintain the peer communication that would later grow into the international network of artists working in glass that exists today.
       What I came to realize by looking at this exhibit—which also includes early work by Littleton, Labino, Marvin Lipofsky and others—was that the truly revolutionary achievement of the studio glass movement lay not in objects or technology or even an aesthetic manifesto but was, rather, conceptual in nature.  The invention of the small furnace is often celebrated as the turning point that made studio glass possible. Indeed, this exhibition recognizes the critical role of that technology by having a replica of the first Labino furnace on hand (there were demonstrations of glassblowing using it at the opening reception). But small furnaces had existed for some time before that as test melters in the factories, as both Eisch and Valkema would have been aware of. Early glass work from the 60s is too often dismissed as being technically clumsy and poorly crafted, a judgment that entirely misses the point of work that was made in a spirit of rebellion against the virtuoso skill of traditional glasswork.
       The essence of the studio glass movement, the inspiration that all of those artists and educators took away from that first encounter, was an idea: that artists could have direct access to a unique material without the mediation of a factory or a system that divorced craftsman from designer. That single idea was the real spark that led to university-level glass departments, which in turn disseminated information to and inspired private studios across America and Europe and that would later spread around the world.
       The Leerdam exhibiton underlines the importance of understanding our history, which can serve as a touchstone even today for maintaining contact with that fundamental idea. These days when glass work is made with such technical assurance, when objects have such impressive presence, when all of the formal elements of color, scale and form are so much more easily commanded, it is important to keep searching for that earlier spirit of discovery and that ineffable sense of liberation that was present at the beginning. At the opening, Åsa Brandt, Valkema’s first student in glass at the newly-established Gerrit Reieveld Academy, spoke movingly of encountering rusty glass tools for the first time (scavenged from factory discards) that seemed to her then like magic wands. After 40 years, can we still say the same?

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