Erwin Eisch: The reason for any kind of artistic activity is deep and chaotic: it is a force coming from the soul

Sinne Lundgaard


The honour is mine, to conclude the series on the Fifty Years of Studio Glass Jubilee with this article about Erwin Eisch, born 1927, Germany.
It is appropriate to close with Eisch who actually was an important factor for the beginning of - and who played a very significant role in the continuing development of studio glass as art form in both Europe and the U.S

While growing up in Germany, Eisch helped his father with the family glass company in Frauenau and at the same period, was a student at Munich Academy of Fine Arts /Akademie der Bildenden Künste which allowed him a broader view of many art forms. Painting, sculpture, glass, printmaking and architecture are forms Eisch continues to work with alone or in different combinations.
Simultaneously, he questions political and philosophical issues both within a broader sense and in the art world. His approach to issues was seen as highly provocatively and probably today would be to a certain extent. An important event occurred in 1960 through artist group RADAMA comprised of Eisch, his future wife Gretel Stadler and Max Strack: they published a biography of a fictitious abstract painter ‘Bolus Krim’ and held a memorial exhibition of the deceased artist. Critics pronounced Krim to be a genius but when truth was revealed, a scandal resulted. This fiction more than questioned art world authorities and touched upon the question of representation that Eisch continued throughout his career to the present.

From this background it is logical that Eisch began to question both the prettiness and functionality of glass production and began to work through what accidents and coincidences suggested. Eisch challenged the assumed functionality of glass. For example, the vase-object illustrating this article poses the philosophical question is the object a vase or not? Rather than the vase being simply a known category, one easily readable, it becomes extra visceral, appealing to both mind and eye.

In 1962, an important meeting took place. Harvey Littleton travelled in Europe with his wife and was so affected by one of Eisch’s works that he was compelled to meet the artist. Eisch and Littleton had their first meeting in Frauenau Germany. Littleton later recalled, “I saw [Eisch’s] work and I realized that he was doing what I wanted to do – play with the glass, make forms that had no other reason for being than that he wanted to make them. Function was something to be used or not used. Totally free... I knew I had met someone of great importance to what I wanted to do.”

At this point, Eisch was working with blown glass. Then he began to develop his glass in ways originally employed in painting and sculpture: mould blown and hot worked sculptures in glass were hand coloured, painted, and engraved. He distanced himself from the obvious qualities of glass - transparency and smoothness – while adding something else – darkness, scratched surfaces, and surprising but still readable forms.
Two other photographs in this article demonstrate some of the variations in objects that Eisch created in these years. The ‘Telephone’ is a familiar object but Eisch’s is twisted and cartoonish thereby expresses a kind of uselessness contradicted by its opposite due to being made being made ‘in gold’. When is a telephone simply a telephone; when is a telephone ‘just’ an object of art?
‘The Eight Heads of Harvey Littleton’ makes a psychological statement of Littleton and his various roles or states of mind. At the same time this work represents so much more by being eight interpretations of the same ‘object’. Or, as Gertrude Stein would say: A head is a head is a head...

At the 2001 Glass Art Society Conference in Corning, U.S., Eisch spoke about his life in glass and in art together with the importance of mindfulness of the experience: “We have to leave the realm of commodities and objects and compulsory behaviour, and return to the essential quality of life... We have to learn to see again, to catch on, to grasp... Knowledge and education have flooded us with light, but at the same time, our shadows and darkness have been taken away, our mysteries and myths banished.”

To learn to see, to catch, to grasp is yet another project throughout the life of Eisch. From the Sixties on, Eisch was guest lecturer/guest professor on several occasions in both Europe and the U.S. Twenty-five years ago he participated in creating Bild-Werk-Frauenau “an international forum for Culture, Art and Education, A stage for Music, and fantasy, and a border situated on the international meeting point situated in the Bavarian Forest in Germany”. Quote: website (see below).
Additionally, 18 April 2009, Gretel and Erwin Eisch, together with the Landkreis Regen regional district as the managing institution, officially began the Erwin and Gretel Eisch Foundation. “It is the aim of the foundation to maintain a permanent portfolio of works of art of the founders and to preserve them for the public for the future. At the same time, and equally important, the Foundation intends to facilitate cultural activities and support institutions, first and foremost Bild-Werk Frauenau”. Quote: from the Erwin Eisch website (see below).

Through Eisch’s observation on his meeting with Harvey Littleton in 1962, we understand the significance of the meeting but more importantly get a grasp of Eisch’s way of working and thinking in general. So, to conclude this article and the year’s celebration of Studio Glass in both Europe and the U.S. in his own words: “It is astonishing how the wind acts, and the spirit wafts... You can call it coincidence if you want to, but I believe that there are mysterious forces (of the spiritual kind) which spin and weave their connecting threads, bringing together what is meant to be.”

Erwin Eisch is included in many permanent museum collections around the world. In addition he is still on display in two exhibitions connected with the 50 years celebration:

Master of Studio Glass: Erwin Eisch
The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY 14830 U.S. on March 15, 2012 to February 3, 2013

50 JAHRE STUDIOGLAS: DIE EISCH-AUSSTELLUNG 1962
Museum Kunstpalast, 40479 Düsseldorf, Germany on October 26, 2012 to January 13, 2013

For general information:
http://flashatel.de/erwineisch
www.bild-werk-frauenau.de/en
http://flashatel.de/erwineisch/html/news/stiftung2009.htm

All quotes by Eisch and Littleton are taken from the article: ‘Master of Studio Glass: Erwin Eisch’ by Tina Oldknow, Curator of Modern Glass, Corning Museum of Glass.

Sinne Lundgaard is artist, writer, and PhD in Aesthetics.

This article was published earlier in Fjoezzz 4/2012