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The Intelligent Layman's Book of Stained & Art Glass: A Unique History of Glass Design & Making (The Intelligent Layman's series)

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Authors: Dr. Judith Neiswander, Caroline Swash
Publisher: IL Publishers LTD
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$70.00~~
Buy New: $51.10
You Save: $18.90 (27%)

Avg. Customer Rating: 5.0 out of 5 stars

1 reviews
Sales Rank: 251817

Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 400
Shipping Weight (lbs): 7.1
Dimensions (in): 11.9 x 9.9 x 1.9

ISBN: 094779865X
Dewey Decimal Number: 748
EAN: 9780947798659

Publication Date: September 1, 2006
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: In stock soon. Order now to get in line. First come, first served.

Customer Reviews:

Showing reviews 1-1 of 1

Important and Beautiful December 8, 2006
11 out of 11 found this review helpful

If you have any interest in the beauty of glass, you should have this book. With over 800 images in full color, this richly illustrated volume could be savored only as a visual experience, while at the same time it has been written with intelligence, style and grace for anyone with an interest in glass. That includes the casual browser of art books (like me) and also, I believe, professional scholars and serious collectors. As beautifully produced as any coffee table book, it also is an engaging and important study of a largely neglected aesthetic medium.

People who consider themselves part of the art glass world will find much that is new here, while the superb writing has a wit and sparkle that is largely foreign to strictly academic treatments. It is the writing that sets this book apart and gives it its appeal across the spectrum of readers. Rarely do you find a big book that you can actually read. The authors have a real talent for setting the stage of each chapter, describing the people and the art works, and especially the artistic challenges of each period, with an eye for apt details and description.

The success of this work may be due to the unusual collaboration of two authors, each noted in her own field: a British artist in stained glass and an American decorative arts scholar, researcher, and curator. The result is a thoughtful balance of perceptions, informed by history while grounded in the immediate response to the work of art.

The book has several key themes. It is first a review of the roots of contemporary art glass from the revival, in the late nineteenth century, of medieval techniques for making stained glass windows, then tracing an arc to the world-wide popularity of glass art today as an abstract expression of form, color, and emotion. The interconnection between flat stained glass and `studio' glass (blown, cold worked, etc.) has rarely been acknowledged and has never been explored within the same volume, to my knowledge. Secondly, the book celebrates and documents art glass as a globally evolving aesthetic medium, providing substantive examples from Japan and Australia along with the UK, Europe, and the US. A chapter devoted to Dale Chihuly's international influence calls him a "rock star" of glass; since I suppose more has been written about Chihuly than all other glass artists combined, this label is presumably an example of British restraint. It is, however, in the section on those artists who studied under Chihuly that the authors reveal the wider connections within the glass world. This perspective, which might be considered the third theme of the book, is that glass art coexists with architecture and the `fine arts' (sculpture and painting) within an intellectual framework of theories about art. Not just a craft driven by incremental improvements in, say, kiln technology, for at least the last 150 years glass art has been a medium of ideas. Those ideas and their evolution are the real subject of this book.

Like most people, I am more likely to buy a reproduction in a museum store and to display it on the kitchen table with apples in it, than to own a Chihuly. This book fed my amateur's appetite for substantive big-picture understanding of the evolution of glass art, without bogging me down in minutiae of how scholarship itself evolved. It seems most critics are more interested in dissecting each other's tiny theories than in helping people see with clarity the work in front of them. That is why this book is such a breath of fresh air. It is written both for people who slept through art history classes in college and for the museum curator with specialized expertise but a willingness to think of glass in a new way.

The only thing I can suggest if the book is reprinted, is to include indications of size of some of the pieces. I found myself wondering sometimes if an illustration represented a six-inch or six-foot piece. While I missed seeing some of the best-known monuments of art glass, these are available elsewhere and I appreciated that the illustrations are generally perfect and convincing in support of the text. In fact, it is refreshing to see a book of this beauty that is specifically NOT a bunch of best hits cobbled together around an unconvincing narrative. Instead, I find this an absorbing and thoughtful argument that engages the mind, challenges the eye to see more deeply, and offers new insights that I will be thinking about whenever I look at the windows in a church, glass objects in a museum or antique store, or at the paperweight in front of me (my one piece of truly legitimate art glass, its mysteries will never stop unfolding no matter how often I look at it, and it is the reason I bought this book). This book offers far more than I expected, more illustrations, more ideas, and better writing. It deserves serious attention.

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