Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932-1947

The art of Murano glassmaking is going to move to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

It’s a project of the Giorgio Cini Foundation and Pentagram Stiftung, whose exhibition " Le Stanze del Vetro " has been so popular with audience and critics, that it will be moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, with the new title “ Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932 - 1947 ”

The exhibition - organized by Nicholas Cullinan, Curator of the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, with the assistance of Mary Clare McKinley, Research Assistant - is the first ever dedicated by the MET exclusively to glass , and will be opened to the public from November 5, 2013 to March 2, 2014 .

It's an adaptation of " Carlo Scarpa. Venini 1932-1947 ", curated by Marino Barovier and displayed in August 2012 at Le Stanze del Vetro on the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, thanks to a multi-year cultural project by the Pentagram Stiftung and Fondazione Giorgio Cini for studying the art of Venetian glass from the beginning of the 20th Century.

Everything is set up chronologically, following the division by different execution techniques and types of glass. Starting from 1932, the year in which Carlo Scarpa began his career at Venini’s, arriving in 1947, the year in which Scarpa decided to pursue his primary passion: architecture, the exhibition traces fifteen years of the famous Venini glassworks , for which Scarpa desidgned a considerable number of creations and invented some new techniques that are still used today.

The experimentations performed by Scarpa in that period include the study of colour, light, materials combined with form and Murano glass masters’ secrets : an approach that revolutionzed glass making.

This gorgeous exhibition has been made possible thanks to extensive research on the history of Venetian glass performed by the curator, Marino Barovier, with his working team.

In particular, the discovery of important documents from the Venini archive (including original papers, photos, drawings and sketches) allowed an accurate check on the individual objects attributed to Carlo Scarpa, so that it has been possible to extensively show the results of the collaboration between the Venetian architect and Paolo Venini .

For the installation of " Venetian Glass by Carlo Scarpa: The Venini Company, 1932 - 1947 ", the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has been helped by the precious collaboration of Venetian masters: in particular Augusto Capovilla and the company Ott Art of Maurizio Torcellan and James-Andrea Doria. As for the exhibition held last August at Le Stanze del Vetro in Venice, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has decided to collaborate with these realities to ensure a perfect continuity with Venice and Carlo Scarpa’s creativity.

For more information:

http://metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/press-room/exhibitions/2013/venetian-glass-by-carlo-scarpa

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