Glassmaker Maurice Marinot’s ‘breath’ captured at NOMA | Arts

In this series, Lagniappe presents works from the collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, with commentary from a curator.

For 4,000 years, the history of glass has been the history of art, culture, technology and science. Through objects like bottles, beakers, and even today’s smartphones, glass has connected us through the exchange of ideas. Glass is often beautiful, and is often made to be decorative, but in the late 19th century some artists began to look at glass in a new way: as art.

At that time, glass experiments moved from a focus on production and utility to instead highlight manipulations of color and decorative effects purely for aesthetic enjoyment. Glass not only took on new looks, but also became a material for personal artistic expression.

In his late teens, Maurice Marinot left the staid historicism of the French École des Beaux-Arts academy to instead exhibit paintings with the Fauves (“wild beasts”), artists who filled their canvases with vibrant colors and obvious brushstrokes.

After 1913, Marinot turned entirely to glassmaking. He embraced a new aesthetic, purposely incorporating entrapped bubbles into thick, sturdy vessels that contrasted with the material’s traditional association with lightness and delicacy.

Marinot poetically spoke about the work of a glassmaker conceptually, as if the glass was capturing the breath of mankind into a frozen form.

From 1920: “To be a glassmaker is to blow the transparent substance beside blinding furnaces, using the breath of one’s lips and the tools of one’s art, to work in roasting heat and smoke, eyes full of tears, hands sooty and burned.

“It is to draw up simple lines within the molten matter through a rhythm conjugated with the very life of a glass in order to find, a little later, within the brilliant immobility of glassware, the life of human breath which will bring out the living designs.”

Marinot’s 1926 bottle is on view in “Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass” at the New Orleans Museum of Art, opening Friday, Aug. 30.

— Mel Buchanan, RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts & Design, New Orleans Museum of Art