glass
art-nouveau
glass
decorative-art
Copyright: No Known Copyright
This stem glass was made by Otto Prutscher, an artist active in Austria in the early 20th century. The deep burgundy colour and clear glass cut-outs give this object a certain gravity but also a playful, architectural quality. I wonder what Prutscher was thinking when he came up with the design? There’s something about the grid-like composition of the stem, alternating between a square and an empty rectangle, that makes me think of early modernist buildings. The glass is solid, yet the overall impression is airy and light. It reminds me a bit of Josef Hoffmann’s work, especially his furniture designs, which also play with geometric forms and negative space. The precision of the cut glass! It must have taken a lot of skill. All these designers inspire me to look at the world in new ways, and to find beauty in the unexpected.
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Otto Prutscher was born in Vienna and studied under Josef Hoffmann at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Vienna School for Applied Art). He then worked as an architect, decorator, and designer for Hoffmann at the Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna as well as several other manufacturers. For the workshops he designed textiles, glass, leatherwork, metalwork, and furniture. Prutscher's glassware for the Wiener Werkstätte is characterized by the use of the cameo process, whereby a clear glass object is encased with a layer of colored glass. The colored glass is then selectively cut or polished away, revealing the clear glass underneath. Prutscher's glass designs employ the geometric motifs favored by Hoffmann, whose designs are also shown in this case.
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