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Exotic, dramatic,
and yet largely undiscovered, vintage Blenko glass is without peer. With
so much to recommend it — stunning and vibrant colors, unprecedented
scale, extravagant modern designs, and internationally renowned designers
— the only surprise is that Blenko has remained a Sleeping Beauty for so
long. With a 73-year history of making tableware, the Blenko Glass Company
has produced hundreds of exciting and thoroughly original designs.
Blenko’s early history provides an essential context for understanding
the company’s production. The company was founded in 1921 by William J.
Blenko (1854-1933) as the Eureka Art Glass Company, a producer of
“antique” sheet glass for stained glass windows. William Blenko was
born in London, England, and was working in glass factories by age 10. He
went on to study glass and chemistry and became an innovator of new
production methods for sheet glass that reproduced the rough look of
Medieval glass. Prior to Eureka, William Blenko had made three failed
attempts at founding a sheet glass company in the U.S. With the Depression
in 1929, the company almost failed again. It was saved only by the
decision to diversify and produce tableware, which quickly became its
primary product.
Blenko’s initial line was modeled after the wares produced by other,
mostly Italian, companies sold by the Carbone and Sons Company of Boston,
through whom Blenko sold its first tableware. Pictured in a 1931
Carbone and Sons catalogue are photographs of Blenko’s tableware,
providing some of the earliest documentation of Blenko’s production.
Carbone did not identify Blenko by name, instead calling it “Kenova
glass, made in the foothills of West Virginia…blown by foreign
craftsmen.” (Kenova is about 28 miles directly west of Blenko’s
factory in Milton, West Virginia. The Kenova area has seen several
glasshouses but none by the name of Kenova or with Kenova in its name.)
Carbone and Sons had a reputation of being a purveyor of the highest
quality items, and William H. Blenko Sr. (1897-1969, son of the founder,)
was undoubtedly aware of the standard that his glass needed to live up to.
The May 1932 issue of Carbone’s The Shard, a sales brochure, contains an
editorial written by a person only identified as the director of the
Kenova glass factory, with the initials W.H.B., presumably William Henry
Blenko. The article, titled “Off Hand Glass Blowing,” describes the
attributes of off-hand glass, namely tool marks and unevenness, and
promotes these qualities as assets. Clearly Blenko knew that they could
not compete with Carbone and Son’s other suppliers on technical grounds.
To this day, the quirks, irregularities, and tooling marks remain an
appealing hallmark and part of the identity of Blenko glass. Such flaws
are usually secondary to the overall form; and it is best to see them on a
gray scale of acceptable to unacceptable — while always bearing in mind
that there are certainly many poorly executed examples, or “bad
blows.”
The early part of Blenko’s production, prior to 1947, is informed by
both Italian, Scandinavian, and traditional historical designs. The
Italian influence was a direct result of Blenko’s association with
Carbone and Sons. The Scandinavian influence originates from the Swedish
brothers Louis Miller (a finisher) and Axel Muller (a blower), whom
William Blenko hired from the Huntington Tumbler Co., circa 1930, to
execute Blenko’s first line of tableware. A later and very noteworthy
Scandinavian influence is the Swede Carl Erickson, who worked at Blenko
from 1937 until 1942, when he left to start his own company, the now
famous Erickson Glassworks. A third major influence on their early work
was the Williamsburg Restoration reproductions that Blenko was licensed to
make beginning in 1936. This work familiarized Blenko with executing
certain historical techniques such as the air twist.
During the very first years, the
overall production was uneven in both execution and style. Designs
were primarily functional and occasionally somewhat clumsy copies of
existing traditional items. Partly accounting for this is that the
selection of designs for production was largely made by sales
representatives and distributors rather than by a designer.
In fact, it is fair to say that in this period there were very few
moments of design innovation. Yet these moments serve as clarion call for
Blenko’s future and established a strong foundation for the company’s
later success. In works of
this period, one must look for the use of techniques that Blenko later
expanded upon in more meaningful ways, works that hint at the company’s
willingness to innovate and experiment. An excellent example of this would
be the “Web” line. This line was vastly different from other things
Blenko produced. It was adventurous, specific, and likely more costly to
produce. A second example is designs that make use of the controlled
bubble technique, most likely a result of the influence of the foreman
Carl Erickson.
The
most significant turning point in the company’s history was marked by
the decision to hire a full time design director, Winslow Anderson, who
began work in the late spring of 1947. Winslow Anderson was responsible
for Blenko’s new designs from 1948 to 1953. Anderson was born in 1917.
He graduated from Alfred University in 1947 and went directly to work for
Blenko. His training was as a ceramicist; he had no glass knowledge, yet
Blenko gave him free reign to design the line without any interference.
For a company to demonstrate such faith in a designer was new, daring, and
virtually unheard of. In doing this Blenko became an industry leader and
role model. Anderson re-invented Blenko’s line, producing daring organic
and free-form Scandinavian influenced designs. Anderson’s tenure also
resulted in an entirely new type of product: non-functional sculptural
designs. Anderson’s work laid the foundations for later designers and
established Blenko’s vanguard reputation. He remained at Blenko until he
was lured away by Lenox China.
Blenko’s second designer, Wayne Husted (b. 1927) was also a fresh
graduate of the Alfred University ceramics program with no glass
experience. Husted was responsible for Blenko’s new designs from 1954 to
1963. His design approach was much more extreme and sculptural, playing up
non-functional designs. Husted’s legacy and signature works are his
“architectural scale” floor pieces. These pieces, ranging in height
from 27 to 38 inches tall were suited to being displayed as freestanding
sculptures on the floor. The oversized scale and outrageous forms of these
floor pieces are perfect Modernist icons – symbols of an era. Another
important contribution of Husted’s was his figural works, which are more
intimately scaled, whimsical, and unlikely forms of animals and people.
Husted was both a maverick and an innovator whose work cemented Blenko’s
place in glass history.
Joel
Myers was Blenko’s next resident designer, responsible for
Blenko’s new designs from 1964 to 1970 and part of 1971. Myers was a
graduate of Parsons and Alfred University. Myers brought with him the
instinct of a craftsman as well as designer, and his work demonstrates a
more rational and progressive exploration of form and technique. The
emerging Studio Glass movement and 60s psychedelic re-interpretation of
Art Nouveau aesthetic both imparted strong influences on Myer’s designs.
As Myers himself said, “Had I not been aware of the Toledo glass
seminars I wonder if I would have seen the dual possibilities of producing
glass myself while designing for the factory.” Without a doubt Myers is
Blenko’s most famous and
accomplished designer. Myers left Blenko to establish the glass department
of Illinois State University. Today Myers ranks as one of the most
exhibited and recognized glass artists in the world.
Beyond these first three, Blenko has had four more designers as follows:
John Nickerson (1971 to 1974), Don Shepard (1975 to 1989), Hank Adams
(1990 to 1995), and finally Matt Carter (1996 to 2002). Altogether, Blenko
has had seven official designers, each with a dramatically different
approach to design.
Identifying Blenko begins with knowing its most elementary
characteristics, which are a result of being mouth blown. Blenko almost
always has a pontil mark on the base, which is only very occasionally
polished. The thickness and heft of the glass is another important
characteristic; the walls of Blenko vessels are thicker than most. The
vast majority of Blenko’s rims are fire-polished, meaning rounded and
slightly uneven, an effect produced by briefly reinserting the item into
the furnace to eliminate shearing and tooling marks after it has been
shaped. Vintage Blenko is also very “soft,” or porous, which means
that it stains easily when used to hold liquids. This is a result of the
fact that original formula for Blenko glass was meant for stained glass
windows, not for vessels. Finally, the quality of the glass itself is
quite high. Blenko was known to have used only the best and purest
ingredients for its batch. Signatures are of very little use, as they were
only used for a portion of 1958 through to the early part of 1961. The
silver foil “hand” shaped labels, mostly used prior to 1982, are
unreliable identifiers not only because they can easily be peeled off, but
also because rolls of unused labels are known to be available.
Beyond such basic and somewhat vague characteristics, one must rely
on documentation and production catalogues to identify Blenko. With the
publication of many of Blenko’s catalogues, it is not reasonable to
feign ignorance on the subject of age, designer, or how widely produced a
given design is. One can now easily determine what designs were produced,
in what colors, and for how long between the years 1959 and 2001, as
reprints of those years' catalogues are widely available. Information on
earlier production though is not readily available beyond the invaluable
overview provided by the out-of-print book Blenko Glass 1930-1953 by Eason
Eige and Rock Wilson. A word of caution though: as is often the case, no
book is perfect. There are a significant number of misattributions and
other errors in all Blenko books outside of the catalogue reprints.
The production of other contemporaneous West Virginia glasshouses is often
mistakenly attributed to Blenko (Zeller, Rainbow, Bischoff, to name a
few). This is not surprising given that to the untrained eye they seem to
share some simplistic characteristics (bright colors, simple forms, rough
pontils). The West Virginia companies were also often influenced by each
other, and they sometimes produced similar products (a common situation in
Italy, too). Italian production glass also often gets misattributed as
Blenko, particularly the pieces that are outright copies of Blenko
designs, mostly circa late 1950s to early 1960s.
As the market for both glass and all things Modern has heated up and
matured, few stones have been left unturned in the quest to mine our
recent past. Blenko is one of the few gems remaining to be fully
reclaimed. Increasingly turning up in museums, books, and magazines,
Blenko is rapidly gaining an appropriate prominence and its moment of
glory is surely at hand. |