CHIHULY
BASKETS: CELEBRATING FORTY YEARS
SCHANTZ GALLERIES 1
CHIHULY
BASKETS: CELEBRATING FORTY YEARS
1977–2017
Schantz Galleries contemporary
glass
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or many celebrated artists, the path to creative achievement is gradual, studied, and often plagued by self-doubt. David Galenson, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago and the author of Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity (2007) calls these people “experimental innovators.” On the opposite end of this spectrum are what Galenson terms “conceptual innovators”—those whose brilliance arrives in a relative blaze, at a fairly early age, disrupting convention. Dale Chihuly is a conceptual innovator whose Baskets were a flashpoint for his originality. Forty years later, he is still a leader of the avant-garde and prodigious creative force, and the Baskets remain vital in the fascinating arc of his career.
COVER: Tabac Basket with Drawing Shards and Oxblood Body Wrap 2008 12 x 12 x 11" (detail left)
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Dale Chihuly had a meaningful encounter with traditional Northwest Indian basketry in 1977, during a visit to the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. He was a young vanguard in the field of glass (he had become the head of the glass program at Rhode Island School of Design and cofounded the Pilchuck School of Glass in Washington by age 30). Chihuly was enthralled by how time had transformed the woven baskets into bowed and slumping objects. This touchpoint precipitated a breakthrough not only in Chihuly’s forms but also in his techniques for achieving them. He harnessed the interconnected powers of heat, gravity, centrifugal force, breath, and glass to achieve impossible thinness and dynamic asymmetry. Chihuly has stated: “Baskets was the first series that I did that really took advantage of the molten properties of the glassblowing process. Now, for the first time, I really felt I was breaking new ground with an ancient technique.” His earliest Baskets, such as Tabac Basket Set with Oxblood Jimmies (1979), are daring and seemingly effortless. Like an alchemist Chihuly uncouples form from function and instead forges undulant containers of hue and luminosity. The muted palette reminiscent of Native American baskets defines the early work but is also an enduring muse. The extraordinary forms of Tabac Basket with Drawing Shards and Oxblood Body Wraps (2008) are like feats of Art Nouveau architecture writ in glass. This series is done in natural fiber tones akin to the objects that informed them, but the native formline design of the baskets is abstracted in Chihuly’s hand. These forty years of Baskets are not a linear progression, wherein one builds upon the next until superiority is achieved; rather they are a collection of transcendent moments through time. While some works have maintained an aesthetic affiliation with the baskets Chihuly saw in the 1970s, others are merely kindred spirits. Jasper Black Basket Set with Red Lip Wraps (2000) revels in the drama of the color black; opaque obsidian is complemented by deep blues and shimmering violets, sheathed in a sanguine red. Six nested containers produce a panoply of shapes and crevices where light is absorbed and refracted by the lustrous surfaces. With the recent Golden Sapphire Basket Set with Midnight Blue Lip Wraps (2017), Chihuly continues to push the limits of the material. The outer vessel is turned on its side—its form part basket part sea creature, variegated blues dancing around the cresting and plunging contours. Nested inside this frame, six unique forms coalesce in a masterpiece of blown glass, the splendid blues enhanced by peeks of golden yellow.
Entwined with the narrative of the Baskets are Chihuly’s drawings, in which we see the artist’s instinctive and spontaneous creativity most viscerally. In a medium not bound by gravity, design elements can be liberated from their surfaces, nested forms emancipated, circles need not close. Not studies for specific works, the gestural drawings express Chihuly’s big ideas to both his glassblowing team and his viewers. Then, as if the works on paper could shatter like glass into “shards,” details from the drawings become design elements of the Baskets themselves, exemplifying the creative loop that characterizes Dale Chihuly. Pablo Picasso once said that “to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” Such a prophetic statement could only usher from a true conceptual innovator, one who inspired a paradigmatic shift in art-making without seeming like it was any effort at all. Dale Chihuly has done the same for modern studio art glass, and the Baskets are the bellwether of this movement. Chihuly’s magic is intangible and unmistakable—a mix of technical genius, limitless imagination, fearlessness, experimentation, and an unfailing eye for the beautiful.
Jeanne Koles is an independent museum professional with a focus on cultural communications.
Tabac Basket Set with Oxblood Jimmies 1979 6 x 14 x 14"
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Jasper Black Basket Set with Red Lip Wraps 2000 6 x 13 x 13"
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Roman Lake Basket Set with Jet Lip Wraps 2003 12 x 19 x 17"
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Tabac Basket with Drawing Shards and Oxblood Body Wrap 2008 10 x 11 x 12" (detail next)
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"One of the most important inspirations for me is the glass itself — the glassblowing process." — Dale Chihuly
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Tabac Basket Set with Drawing Shards and Oxblood Body Wraps 2008 15 x 23 x 21" (detail next)
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"I've always tried to push the medium as far as I could in terms of the shapes that it can go, how far you can stretch something, how far you can spin something open. We work with fire, and gravity and centrifugal force all these elements of nature and I like my work to appear as if maybe it did come from nature, not necessarily man made." — Dale Chihuly
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Tabac Basket with Drawing Shards and Oxblood Body Wrap 2008 16 x 11 x 10" (detail back cover)
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Tabac Basket with Drawing Shards and Oxblood Body Wrap 2008 8 x 10 x 9" (detail next)
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"I thought it was the hot glass that was so mysterious, but then I realized it was the air that went into it that was so miraculous." — Dale Chihuly
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Tabac Basket with Drawing Shard and Oxblood Body Wrap 2008 10 x 14 x 10"
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Golden Sapphire Basket Set with Midnight Blue Lip Wraps 2017 19 x 22 x 22" (detail next)
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"Glass itself, of course, is so much like water. If you let it go on its own, it almost ends up looking like something that came from the sea." — Dale Chihuly
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Windstar Basket Drawing 2006 30 x 22"
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Windstar Basket Drawing 2006 30 x 22"
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Burned Black Basket Drawing 2007 30 x 22"
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Basket Drawing 2007 30 x 22"
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Burned Black Basket Drawing 2007 22 x 30"
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Burned Basket Drawing 2008 30 x 22"
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Burned Black Baskets Drawing 2008 30 x 22"
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Basket Drawing 2009 30 x 22"
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Basket Drawing 2013 30 x 22"
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Dale Chihuly The Boathouse hotshop Seattle, 1993
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B
orn in 1941 in Tacoma, Washington, Dale Chihuly was introduced to glass while studying interior design at the University of Washington. After graduating in 1965, Chihuly enrolled in the first glass program in the country, at the University of Wisconsin. He continued his studies at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he later established the glass program and taught for more than a decade.
In 1968, after receiving a Fulbright Fellowship, he went to work at the Venini glass factory in Venice. There he observed the team approach to blowing glass, which is critical to the way he works today. In 1971, Chihuly cofounded Pilchuck Glass School in Washington State. With this international glass center, Chihuly has led the avant-garde in the development of glass as a fine art. His work is included in more than 200 museum collections worldwide. He has been the recipient of many awards, including twelve honorary doctorates and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Chihuly has created more than a dozen well-known series of works, among them, Cylinders and Baskets in the 1970s; Seaforms, Macchia, Persians, and Venetians in the 1980s; Niijima Floats and Chandeliers in the 1990s; Fiori in the 2000s. He is also celebrated for large architectural installations. In 1986, he was honored with a solo exhibition, Dale Chihuly: objets de verre, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Palais du Louvre, Paris. In 1995, he began Chihuly Over Venice, for which he created sculptures at glass factories in Finland, Ireland, and Mexico, then installed them over the canals and piazzas of Venice. In 1999, Chihuly started an ambitious exhibition, Chihuly in the LIght of Jerusalem; more than 1 million visitors attended the Tower of David Museum to view his installations. In 2001, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London curated the exhibit Chihuly at the V&A. Chihuly’s lifelong fascination with glasshouses has grown into a series of exhibitions within botanical settings. His Garden Cycle began in 2001 at the Garfield Park Conservatory in Chicago. Chihuly exhibited at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, near London, in 2005. Other major exhibition venues include the de Young Museum in San Fransico in 2008; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2011; and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, in 2013. Chihuly Garden and Glass, a long-term exhibition, opened at Seattle Center in 2012.
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SPECIAL THANKS TO DALE AND LESLIE CHIHULY AND TEAM CHIHULY All photographs and artwork Copyright © Chihuly Studio DESIGN: Jeanne Koles and Kim Saul © SCHANTZ GALLERIES, 2017 3 Elm Street, Stockbridge, MA 01262 (413) 298-3044 www.schantzgalleries.com contact@schantzgalleries.com
Schantz Galleries contemporary
glass