Marvin Lipofsky’s “Australian Landscape 2004 No. 3.”
Marvin Lipofsky, Ceramist / Dies at 77
Artist Elevated Blown Glass to Fine Art
Marvin Lipofsky, a founder of the studio-glass movement, which took blown glass from the realm of interior decoration and functionality and showed its potential as a fine-arts medium, died on Jan. 15 in Oakland, Calif. He was 77.
At the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s, Mr. Lipofsky was a student of Harvey K. Littleton, a ceramist who created the first glassblowing classes in the United States. “He asked me if I was interested in glass, and I said, well, I’ve never heard of it,” Mr. Lipofsky recalled in an interview at the Oakland Museum of California, describing his first day in Mr. Littleton’s ceramics class.
After experimenting with the medium, Mr. Lipofsky set up glass programs at the University of California, Berkeley, and at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland (now the California College of the Arts).
Marvin Lipofsky in his Berkeley, Calif., studio in 2009. Credit M. Lee Fatherree
In his own practice, he worked glass into small-scale biomorphic shapes with a dazzling array of surface textures produced by cutting, grinding, sandblasting, acid-washing or flocking — an idea that came to him when he saw a hot rod with a peach-fuzz exterior at an auto show.
“Marvin was especially important in working with blown glass in a sculptural way,” said Tina Oldknow, the recently retired senior curator of modern and contemporary glass at the Corning Museum of Glass. “He stretched it, he ripped it apart, he hot-worked it — he did whatever he could to make it not a container but at the same time retain the characteristics of blown glass.”
Marvin Bentley Lipofsky was born on Sept. 1, 1938, in Elgin, Ill., and grew up in nearby Barrington, a Chicago suburb where his family owned the local department store. After earning a degree in industrial design from the University of Illinois in 1962, he pursued graduate studies at Wisconsin, concentrating on ceramics and metal sculpture as well as glassblowing.
Marvin Lipofsky’s “California Loop Series No. 28.” Credit M. Lee Fatherree
Almost immediately after receiving his master’s degree in fine art in 1964, he was asked to join the decorative arts department at Berkeley and create a glassblowing program. He taught at Berkeley and in 1967 also began teaching part-time at the California College of Arts and Crafts, where he became a full-time teacher in 1972 and remained until 1987.
In 1967 he started the Great California Glass Symposium, an annual event that he organized for the next 19 years. In the 1970s he also helped found the Glass Art Society and the Glass Art Society Journal.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Mr. Lipofsky explored his new medium restlessly, applying decals to glass, painting the surface and creating opacity with fuming metal salts.
Marvin Lipofsky’s “Russian Group 2006 No. 4.” Credit M. Lee Fatherree
In the “California Loop Series,” which he began in 1969, he stretched glass into thin necklike shapes that ended in bulbous pods, often with rayon flocking applied to impart a matte finish. He then turned out hamburgers and hot dogs in his “Great American Food Series” (1973).
Often he traveled to foreign glassworks, working with local artisans to produce an initial form that he completed at his studio in the United States. The brilliant colors used by Gianni Toso at the Venini Glass Factory in Murano, Italy, for example, inspired his “Venini” series (1972-1978), delicate, dimpled doorknob forms with wavy horizontal stripes.
Mr. Lipofsky returned many many times to the Crystalex-Hantich glass factory in Novy Bor, in what is now the Czech Republic, to make the complex seashell forms of his “Crystalex-Hantich” series and his “IGS” series, named after the annual International Glass Symposium held in Novy Bor.
He was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, “Marvin Lipofsky: A Glass Odyssey,” at the Oakland Museum of California in 2003.
tangentwithtanner
stormborns
ellievsbear
areudirty
2087
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
jacobvanloon
gracieabrams
dailybridgerton
