Modern Italian glass was rediscovered in the 1980s,” says Barry Friedman, whose New York gallery helped fuel the revival. “People were looking at modern design again, and these pieces had the same appeal as abstract paintings. Art dealers and art collectors were among the early buyers.” In truth, the appeal transcended that for abstract paintings. Delicate, luminous and often exquisitely colored, these objects speak the universal language of beauty.
 | | A VENINI vase by Fulvio Bianconi from his Pezzato series in Arlechino color, circa 1950, valued at $15,000 to $18,000. (Photograph courtesy of Barry Friedman, Ltd.) |
In the 1980s, an aficionado could have assembled an interesting collection for $10,000. No longer. “It’s much harder to find great things now. But it’s easier to sell them,” says Sara Blumberg who with her partner, Jim Oliveira, deals privately in New York. “You can still put together a great collection of five or six pieces for $50,000. But in many cases, truly rare works begin at that figure.”
The category of modern Italian glass refers to a brief but amazing era of creativity in glassmaking that began in the early 1920s on the Venetian island of Murano and spanned through the 1960s. Much of the credit for this renaissance goes to the artistic daring and business savvy of Paolo Venini, a former lawyer from Milan. Venini was eager to bring the fresh aesthetic of modernism to Venetian glass, a longtime love. In 1921, he founded a workshop along with a Venetian dealer in antique glass, Giacomo Cappellin.
Bringing a radical new design approach to Murano was a bold endeavor. Its virtuosi glassmakers resented change and interference from outsiders. Theirs was an inbred, Byzantine world, where most were content to make tchotckes for the tourist trade—an irony indeed, since during the Renaissance, Venice was not just a cosmopolitan trading power, but the enterprising capital of the glass industry. The Venetians created diaphanous crystal and transparent-hued glass.
 | | AN AURELIANO Toso vase designed by Dino Martens, circa 1950s.(Photograph courtesy of The Loschs.) |
Before Venini’s arrival, there was but a handful of progressive glass workshops, notably the furnace of Artisti Barovier. In the early 1910s, it produced a series of a murrine and floreali a murrine vases, crafted out of fused glass disks, which in their wild coloring and flattened patterns resembled the cutting-edge paintings of the Nabis and Fauves. While Tiffany in the United States and Gallé and Daum and Lalique in France were imitating nature in their glass designs, the Baroviers were using it as a springboard for abstract conceptions. Cappellin-Venini hired as its art director Vittorio Zecchin, a painter from a family of glassblowers and a former Barovier collaborator. He advanced the art by mining the past. Zecchin copied the fluid-lined, subtly tinted glass vessels depicted in paintings by such Venetian Old Masters as Titian and Veronese. These classic forms immediately won acclaim for the firm. Despite their quick success, Cappellin and Venini, both strong personalities, did not mesh well. They severed the partnership after just four years and established individual workshops. The glass objects Zecchin made for Cappellin-Venini, and later M.V.M. Cappellin, are among the most exquisite examples of handblown glass crystal ever produced. Prices are beginning to move, according to Oliveira, who notes that examples that just a year ago might have been had for $3,500 now cost $6,000. The most rare of Zecchin’s pieces run up to $12,000. At least for now, however, these pieces remain undervalued as most collectors gravitate to more colorful works.
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