Paul M. Hollister Collection, The Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass
Transcribed by Bard Graduate Center
Title: Paul Hollister Recording for New Glass: A Worldwide Survey, April 11, 1979 (Rakow title: New Glass, Corning [sound recording] / with Paul Hollister, BIB ID: 168418).
Paul Hollister, Narrator
Location: The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York
Lauren Drapala, Summary and transcriber
Barb Elam, Editor
Duration: 34:35
Length: 10 pages

Note: This transcript is based upon an audiotaped recording that has been digitally converted. The recording is part of the Paul M. Hollister Collection at The Rakow Research Library at The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York, and was transcribed at Bard Graduate Center, New York, New York, for the digital exhibition and archive Voices in Studio Glass History: Art and Craft, Maker and Place, and the Critical Writings and Photography of Paul Hollister. Usage requests for all or part of this transcript must be obtained from The Rakow Research Library at The Corning Museum of Glass. 

Paul Hollister often made audio recordings for research purposes in preparation for writing, including interviews with artists and curators, and lectures. The reader should bear in mind that transcriptions of these recordings reflect spoken, rather than written, prose. While every effort was made to be as accurate as possible, the sound quality of the recordings in the Paul Hollister Collection varies greatly. Transcripts have been edited for readability and occasionally condensed. They should serve as a best-effort guide to the original only and not be considered verbatim.

Summary: Paul Hollister records his observations on various works as he tours the New Glass: A Worldwide Survey (1979) exhibition at The Corning Museum of Glass.

Mentioned: Blanka Adensamová, Art Centrum, Art Deco, Howard Ben Tré, Karl Berg, British Museum, James Carpenter, Daum, Michael Esson, Torres Esteban, Ulla Forsell, Gral-Glashütte GmbH, Lars Hellsten, Pavel Hlava, Adolf Stepanovich Kurilov, Dominick Labino, latticino, Věra Liškova, Federica Marangoni, Henri Matisse, Roberto Moretti, Museum of Modern Art, Bretislav Novák, Jr., Anthony Parker, pâte-de-verre, Tom Patti, Rochester Folk Art Guild, Rosenthal Glas & Porzellan AG, Miluse Roubícková, Ivo Rozsypal, Livio Saguso, Fumio Sassa, Albin Schaedel, Helmut Schäffenacker, Steuben, Dalibor Tichý, František Vízner, Steven Weinberg

Paul Hollister (PH): This is New Glass, Corning, April 11th, 1979. I’m reviewing pieces for the Times and also for Acquire.

82, page 82, Number 60, Castle in the Air by Ulla, U-L-L-A, Forsell, F-O-R-S-E double L, from Sweden. [break in audio] Apparently hot furnace work, pure fantasy piece in primary colors: red, blue, yellow, and a milky, opaque white—an opalescent white, very much Castle in the Air and pure fantasy, nonfunctional piece. The various towers, there are eight of them, fit into the blank spaces between glass paving blocks, mostly of white, but some of the milky white, but some of blue. Purely decorative thing in the old tradition. There’s minarets, there’s all sorts of fantasy in it. It’s casually done, very freely done. The towers aren’t quite straight, but it has real pazazz and color. It is a conversation piece. It’s a kind of piece that’s really hit, but it’s hit very solid. The glass leaves a great deal to be desired in itself, it’s filled with bubbles, but this apparently doesn’t make any difference. It’s rough like a building. The towers are sort of minarets and the pinnacles are sort of tilted and so forth, but it’s got real power. It stands out as an excellent exhibition piece. [break in audio] It’d make a fine color shot.

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Anthem of Joy by Věra Liškova of Czechoslovakia, I guess it’s Number 125, is an absolutely marvelous, roughly convoluted, circular-shaped sculpture that is perhaps, oh, three and a quarter feet tall by say, twelve feet, in its total meandering extent. Consisting of very, very delicately blown pencil top and bottomed tubes, which flare out into mammary forms—pouches— at midpoint, and all of the midpoints are all fused together so that the thing runs without any break and without any visible seam all the way around like a procession of icicles. [break in audio] A few key ones touch the ground—a few of these icicles—and many of them are suspended in the air, top and bottom, so that they are supported by the few that do touch the ground. So it’s a really—a real piece of engineered sculpture. [break in audio] This is a winter-draped world, icicles all around. [break in audio] Piece is not going to travel in the show. In fact, it could hardly travel anywhere. It’s so delicate. It’s amazing that it came over all packed in a very light plastic paper in a huge crate to protect and accommodate it, and it has been given by Centrum to the museum, very happily. [break in audio] Centrum is the outfit in Czechoslovakia in charge of works of art. This thing is—it’s really beautiful, it’s a fantasy piece forever. I can see it sitting for five hundred years in some showcase in some castle. It’s a pure fairytale piece in the most imaginative type—just beautiful. [break in audio] If Czech glass had been just a little better in quality, with a little less yellow in it, which is either from the lead or the iron—I don’t know which, but a little more decolorized, a little higher quality glass, it would have been absolutely spectacular, and it really is anyway.

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Number 314, Sunset by Dalibor Tichý, the Czech. Accent on the Y. Is not more than eight inches tall. It’s a jar-shaped vase, about four inches high, that has been molded in a beautiful mulberry red jelly color glass that’s very deep. It appears almost black here on the table. And then it sprouts two rings of a wave-like splash of glass in fading pink color that come up and end up in a crown of what looks like almost glass nails, as if one had thrown a pebble into this jar and it had splashed and two rings of bubbles had come up and been caught in the act, so that it’s a beautiful flower-like, crown-like arrangement suggestive, with many, suggestive overtones. You can think of it as anything you want, and yet it’s a completely abstract piece. The two rings are slightly tilted, slightly askew, very freely done by pulling up the glass, pincering it up while it was hot, God knows how. The most skillful-looking manipulation of hot glass with this double ring. One within another, pulled up from the top of it. It is not hollow. It’s solid. [mumbles to self inaudibly] If it’s hollow, it’s a hollow bubble, but it is not open like a vase and the top is closed over a lighter mulberry jelly-like color showing at the base of this wave of bubbles as they come up. It’s a pure fantasy piece, a sculptural entity all its own and just entirely its own kind of thing. [break in audio] That can be done in black and white quite easily. [break in audio] Perhaps too subtle to catch.

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Haute Vase by František, with a Czech mark over the S, Vízner, with a grave, a aigu accent over the “i” in Vízner, Czechoslovakian. It’s only about 13 inches high, and it is really smoked, and it’s also frosted on all the outer surfaces. This is a square-shaped monolith with the corners rounded and the middle points of two of the sides flattened out into straight-sided wings. It looks like a girder. The top has been polished, the vase holes—is not more than a half an inch in diameter in the top. It’s a stark—the machine-age as you could possibly be. It’s a girder-like thing in beautiful bronze steel-sort-of-thing, and lighter as one can see a translucence through the fins. And it is as simple and as perfect as it could be. It is absolutely representative of today’s rigid steel world. I think it’s terrific. I don’t think it would photograph at all.

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[inaudible] [Burial] Box by Howard Ben Tré. B-E-N, separate word, T-R-E, at least it looks that way—of the United States. And it looks as if it were, it’s only about six inches square. It’s a cubed-shape receptacle, hollow receptacle with a square hollow in the center. It goes down—it’s not more than six inches in diameter or height. Slightly less in height than diameter—and it’s a square or an open cube as one might say, with four sort of columnar Art Deco corners to it with vertical column-like protuberances at the corners. But it looks as if it were made out of translucent cinderblock and with that title and that box, it’s about as imaginative and simple and timeless as a piece could be. And it might make a good black and white photo, though obviously not color. And it looks as if it had been left out in the rain in a part of a drain pipe mechanism or something like that. It’s absolutely [laughs] got every overtone imaginable and it is simple and yet awe-inspiring. One can see the ashes of the dead. It is the color of the ashes of the dead.

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Two Daum, Nancy production pieces, which are vases, obviously of a good heavy lead crystal. Very simple modernoid—Deco 1940s forms. Beautifully polished on the rims, polished on the flat bases, I gather, and signed Daum. Each with two differently shaded, purple flowers from violet to light, light pale pinkish-purple to a deeper one. Done in almost the—in the clear crystal, cut into the clear crystal or perhaps applied. They look as if they’re applied because the glass in the flowers is filled with bubbles intentionally—millions and millions of them in the pâte-de-verre style—pressed into the vase. I believe that’s what has happened, though I’ll have to ask about it. But very simple and attractive, and in that kind of a useful, decorative household ware, you just can’t beat this sort of thing. [break in audio] Curiously, It’s one of only two entries from France. Why? Why?

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East Germans have been doing a lot of threaded decoration, in the old latticino Venetian style, and bowl number 210—Bowl with Stem, it says, whatever that means. By Albin, A-L-B- I- N, S-C-H-A-E-D-E-L, Albin Schaedel of East Germany, is a series of spinning top-like those colored spinning tops, but this of course is in white, all crammed in together on the surface of the ball. They’re just white streaks that spiral out and they’re packed in circles of white spiraling streaks that are like those little spinning toys. Very gracefully shaped, thin, Venetian, delicate. Venetian 17th-century delicate vase with a slightly irregular top rim, but a lovely piece. The kind of piece of glass you’d want to keep good care of, always.

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Plate Number Three—the title derives from the plate of black plate glass that it’s resting on. It looks as if somebody had set down an outer space 2001 traveling mask in two parts of opaque white matte finish—opaque white, and shiny black glass with a lens-like window looking into it that has a brilliant orange vermillion circumference to it, and a clear slice down the middle where you can see through this thing. But, of course, you only see through under the black glass. It looks roughly the shape of a horseshoe crab. Very primitive and yet very futuristic and it sort of catches the spirit of space travel. It’s a masterpiece of its type of thing. It would make a nice color shot.

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E-L-E-F-A-N-T, done by the Gral-Glashütte of West Germany. Signed S-C-H-Ä ‘77, which is a trademark. I guess these must be produced. Oh, the designer is Helmut Schäffenacker. S-C-H-Ä-F-F-E-N-A-C-K-E-R. And the maker—oh, the maker is Livio Saguso of Italy. S-A-G-U-S-O. [break in audio]  It’s a delightfully humorous piece in a slightly brown-greenish tinted glass with the elephant form very much abstracted, but as you move around the piece and see it from different angles, it’s very subtly modeled and suggests the cluster, combined cluster of the elephant’s weight all coordinated and clomped into one great big, marvelous mass and extremely humorous and successful piece, made by Livio Saguso from this other guy’s designs.

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Eagle’s Eye by Lars Hellsten, Sweden. Cast glass, two big rocks, and then the crystal sphere in front of them all resting on a mirror and absolutely suggestive, in an abstract way without saying too much, of the eagle up on the aerie and the crags and just looking down and the contrast between the quite clear crystal sphere, which does, however, have a couple of bubbles in it, and the bubbly cast glass, which is also clear, but not as brilliantly clear is quite marvelous. It’s a very suggestive piece of heavy sculpture.

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Five and six, page number 208. Object is a crystal vase by Sassa, S-A-S-S-A, of Japan. It’s a rather pale, pale orchid. Brilliantly clear, optical glass with—wild technicolor refractions and lined on the back, as you can see in the illustrations in the catalog, and with a hole through a bubble in it, up the plinth. It’s a triangular column, really, and there’s a beautiful oval bubble near the top. It has a hole in it or appears to have a hole in it. And then on the back, it looks like the Pan-Am building. It’s lined across horizontally with little blind cuts across the backside, which has been flattened off as the other corners have too. But, it’s a superb piece of workmanship and again, most interesting as one moves around it and sees the other things that a triangular prism always picks up as you move around it. And the shapes of the cutting change too. It’s an extremely skillful piece of work. [break in audio] It could actually serve as a vase with one dying, wilting flower sticking out of the pocket, through the hole. [break in audio] Probably not made as a practical vase. On this one—were to hang an orchid or something out of it. Put the stem in and let the rest hang out. And then, how would you clean it?

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Green window quality glass. Page 222, Number 239, illustrated in the catalog by Torres, T-O double r-E-S, Esteban, E-S-T-E-B-A-N, of Spain, is a long cylinder mounted on a flat, three flat, thick rectangles of glass. It’s a series of fit together, I suppose, epoxied upright pieces. Some of them have had holes cut through them, like bullet holes, cheese holes, tunnel or propeller shaft holes, and it has that wonderful green of thick plate glass to it. I guess it is plate glass. And then it looks as if it has been smashed with a hammer here and there on the alternating pieces all the way through so that we have a total mystery of confusion, destruction, explosion, and so forth inside. And, when one looks at the front there are places where you can see through dark tunnels—circular tunnels, like looking through a drain pipe. Some of the distances are dark and it’s almost impossible to tell what area the cracks and bubbles are in. It’s a real piece of very elusive sculpture that takes a great deal of looking at. [break in audio] Five very large square blocks, an inch and a quarter thick, and the width of the whole piece, maybe a foot wide and a foot tall of perfectly clear plate glass and these revolutionary things are going on in behind it. Though, when you look at the first piece, you think it’s right in the first piece, but it isn’t. It’s in the four interstices between the five clear blocks. One clear on the back, one clear on the front. One of the blocks is slightly taller than the others, but, and they’re all slightly different heights, but that doesn’t really affect it at all. As a matter of fact, it gives it a little more interest. It’s an illusorily spectacular, and a terrifying piece. There’s a xylophone-effect as one looks down at the bottom of it and catches the light from the window hitting the bottom surfaces of all the pieces, and they’re all sorts of inside, outside. You can’t tell what’s going on where; it’s a very, very mysterious and exciting piece of glass and it should be illustrated, though it can be perfectly well done in black and white. [break in audio] As it is laminated, cut and fractured, this Volumenes by Torres Esteban. So that’s his description of it. [break in audio] From Spain, as you might expect from this.

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Flower by Novák, Jr. N-O-V-Á-K, Junior, Czechoslovakia. Cut and polished amber-tinted glass. Well, it is partly amber, but it’s a rich, rich ruby, most of it. It’s apparently the—part of it was re-struck, I would say. And it’s a completely abstract form, illustrated in the catalog, we may do it in color for Acquire, but it is a marvelous piece of sculpture. It just rests on a curved surface, and just rocks back and forth on that. It’s big and massive and heavy and something of the shape of a freight car coupler, and he had to have the gall to call that thing a flower. It is like a big heavy blossom—that is, those droplets in perfectly marvelous abstract form, but I don’t think we’ll illustrate it in the Times.

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Page 129, Number 118, A to C. There’s three pieces here called Sport Prizes for Weight Lifters by Kurilov, K-U-R-I-L-O-V of the U.S.S.R. They’re very heavy, twisted vase forms, and extremely heavy that are in clear glass and are cut and twisted and blown and twisted, and then cut and also acid-etched up grooves that are grooved out. And it’s wonderful [laughs] that they should have such a sense of humor to present these things. A weightlifter could probably grab one around the middle or the neck and hold it up and lift it. And it suggests gladiolas and all those flowers that one sees in Russian dews. And it’s a very fanciful and humorous thing and very well done and nice clear glass. We have a black and white of that in the catalog.

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196, page 189, illustrated in the catalog. Might use in Acquire. Rochester Folk Art Guild. Clear glass vase, perfectly simple vase with nice hot glass festooned over it, and absolutely beautifully arranged. A Gothic version of the lily pad. Very simple, very satisfactory.

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Number 200. Stream by Ivo, I-V-O, Rozsypal, R-O-Z-S-Y-P-A-L. Czechoslovakia. Consists of six hollow, as far as I can see—I believe they are hollow—cylinders. A very nice, clear glass with applied spaghetti-like bands. Almost musical staff kind-of-thing going over them, called Stream. It’s called Stream and six together make a fine piece of sculpture. There is a black and white photo of it in the catalog.

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Tom Patti’s Banded Bronze. Number 175, which is on the cover, is like the one I said was going to be a classic. I don’t think it’s as nice as that one. And it does show lamination bubbles. Doesn’t have quite the form that the one I like did.

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It’s nice to see that pseudo-art brand nouveau is just about out. Now we’re coming to Number 119. Triangular Fountain by Dominick Labino, illustrated, and it is a triangular fountain-shaped piece. His other things have been sort of rough—roughly the rock-shape, pebble-shape, rounded—but this one gives an extra swoop of the Radio City curtains being raised one time was a big, tall teardrop bubble coming down the center and the usual veils, which are echoed very elegantly in the side curtains. It has an almost Radio City Music Hall feeling about it, but it makes a different effect when you do this thing in a triangle, which was all these people who made the paperweights cutting the back understand that theory.

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Number 20, Untitled, as the title of it is Untitled by Karl, K-A-R-L, R middle initial, Berg, B-E-R-G, of West Germany. This is absolutely superb. What do we call—a diagonal cylinder, rather than a straight, well, it’s straight-sided, but it’s diagonal-sided. It’s cut on the diagonal—a cylinder cut on the diagonal. A slice through a cylinder. Absolutely, almost—except for one tiny bubble—almost flawless optical glass. It’s absolutely superb and polished so that it makes a lovely eye pupil of a cat’s eye when looked at head on. Nicely mounted in aluminum, I gather, mount that just cradles it. It’s so simple and so magnificent. It’s like the best telescope lens or lighthouse lens, and it shows what you can really do with simplicity. However, I think to illustrate it, it wouldn’t do very much.

While we’re on this—265 is called Double Cross. No pun intended. One’s on an X and one’s a straight intersection by Steven, S-T-E-V-E-N, J. Weinberg, W-E-I-N-B-E-R-G, of the U.S. One of his wonderful things I’ve written about him before—cast, frosted. Very difficult to tell how the piece was done. Very mysteriously done. The tool crosses one above the other, very much in the shape of the English flag, the Union Jack, in a pale green—in the window green glass—one of these marvelous creations, frosted on the inside and very beautifully cut out on the inside with a subtle circle underneath the whole thing. A hemispherical, frosted, concave hemisphere down underneath it, which softens these two rough things. So, it’s like a mysterious flower or ashtray or construction site, or the base God forbid of a nuclear reactor. His work is highly original and very, very powerful. This is about eight inches square and about two and a half to three inches high, at the most.

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Number 227, Paired Hearts, P-A-I-R-E-D. Steuben [James Carpenter]—probably got a black and white of that. It’s a nice effective piece, and it’s going to be multiple-produced by them; they make a nice pair together. Very simple sort of a Deco in design, very sculptural, very simple, nice combination of two shapes arranged in such a way that they each look quite different and one isn’t even aware that they’re heart-shaped. Nice job of creating a complexity out of the simplicity.

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Number 58, Self-Portrait by Michael D. Esson, E-S-S-O-N, of England. A frosted glass skull. The eye sockets are shiny. The rest seems to be frosted and over that placed a partial reconstruction, apparently, in epoxy of some sort plastic—of the artist—on the left hand side of the face as one faces it of what his skin really looks like, and his bone—his facial structure really looks like over the skull, plus a glass eye, presumably, colored even down to the veins in a similar way to his eye, and it’s a very arresting piece, which immediately recalls the thing from Yucatan or wherever it is in the British Museum. It’s a startling, shocking and [laughs] inevitable piece of sculpture.

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[Inaudible (first number)] 79 is a big, black, glass torso. Actually, it’s right from the shoulders down to below the buttocks on the upper side in—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine—10 huge blocks of molded glass that are separated from each other, but in a high sculptural relief, in fact, just as big as a body would be lying face down in cement and greenish tinge as if it were lying on the beach or had been washed up on the beach. Very monumental and fascinating thing. It implies the sea, almost rubber, big rubber boots and waiting to rescue drowned victims and so forth. He’s American. Anthony Parker is American. The top surface is all matte, but the interstices between the pieces are shiny black glass. It hasn’t been acid-finished in those parts, and it’s very impressive. It reminds you a little bit of the big sculptures of Matisse on the Museum of Modern Art wall.

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Crystal glass sculpture of Pavel Hlava is an elongated, hemispherical piece. It’s really quite big. It’s maybe twenty, twenty-one, twenty-two inches in its longest dimension. It’s two hemispheres—roughly hemispheres—put together, epoxied or whatever, with a joining piece between them of circular plate glass. And then great pulled out knobs of very fine, hot crystal inside with knob-like forms on the end big like seeds coming out of a seed pod spray out on the inside, and they’re very heavy and very solid. The whole piece is really very massive, but it has great power. [break in audio] Looks like an arrested, frozen explosion of seeds of the creation of nature. The seed pod about to explode and create new seed. [break in audio] [Inaudible] green edge of the piece that’s used as the joiner between them of the plate glass, which is about a quarter of an inch thick, shows this wonderful blue-green edge to it, and it gives the piece an unexpected color dividing it into the two cells or two parts of the one cell and actually adds life to the piece. The bursting seeds down at their narrow, or ends where they join the plate, have a slightly greenish cast, too—probably from the plate itself, rather than from their own glass, which may be a different kind of glass. [break in audio] Those things are not like bubbles. They’re suspended independently in the air, inside each hemisphere so that they don’t really look like bubbles at all. They do like the thing’s exploding, and it’s this explosive force which makes it a very, very strong and convincing piece. It’s a simple idea, damn difficult to do. Extremely well carried out.

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265, I did Steven Weinberg, the Double Cross thing. I talked about that. I’m sure on  here. I think we ought to get an angle shot of it because of the angle, it’s view doesn’t look very interesting in it’s own exhibit here. It should be tipped so you can see it a little more of it.

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Number 161, Figure of a Woman on Negative Space by Roberto Moretti, E-T-T-I, United States. The title is more complicated than the piece. However, it’s a nice piece of sculpture and a little blue tint edging of the inside of the negative space of the woman, sort of with their arms folded, in an old skirt—an old-fashioned woman form. It’s rather nice and blue, when the blue glass hits it. The rest of it’s clear crystal, but there’s just a faint blue outline, which makes it rather nice. It’s a pity one has to give that thing a title. [break in audio] It stands perfectly well on its own without a title, and well, maybe there should be a picture of it. I don’t know.

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Nature and Geometry—Number 135. Nature and Geometry Clouds by Federica, F-E-D-E-R-I-C-A, Marangoni, M-A-R-A-N-G-O-N-I, Italy. A monolith slab of glass of the usual Murano—reasonably clear, but not very brilliant glass with, however, a nice monolith with the deep, inky, cobalt bottom glass down in the bottom with pointed shapes like roofs or trees or churches or whatever. And then, blue rain clouds dropping blue streaks of rain with little air bubble drops. Clear air bubble drops at the end, at an angle so that this thing is moving. It’s a nice, sculptural conversation piece. Rather tricky, technically, I’m sure. The idea is very interesting. It sort of dominates the technique.

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Number 2. Number 2 was a head by Blanka, B-L-A-N-K-A, A-D-E-N-S-A-M-O-V-Á. Ádensamova of Czechoslovakia, where the orange looks painted and green and blue in the back and the hair engraved. Very charming, very jazzy, and very pleasant.

Number—similar one. Number 199, Colored Head with Flower by M-I-L-U-S-E,, Miluše R-O-U-B-I-C-K-O-V-A, Roubíčková, Czechoslovakia. A similar kind of blown form, with—like a hat—like a clothes model, like a clothes dummy with a flower in her hair and stripes of color that blends and bleeds of colors suggesting the hair and rose and green and yellow and a little necklace with a little locket or something on it, down around her neck and a little shard of glass for a lip. Somewhat different techniques, similar in feeling. If we could get a color of that, it would really be quite nice, I think.

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And Number 197, Papyrus by Rosenthal Aktiengesellschaft, A-K-T-I-E-N, Gesellschaft, West Germany. There’s a set of nine table pieces of varying kinds of wine glasses—wine, water, and champagne, and maybe beer with the olive green bases and stems that come up like enclosing leaves to hold the bud blossom shape of the very thin glass bowl of the pieces. Damn nice set; nice piece of design. Very hard to get anything new in the food and drink line.

[recording ends]