Sam Herman | Frieze Masters | London

Frestonian Gallery, London, is delighted to be showing for the first time at this year’s edition of Frieze Masters, London, exceptional works by the pioneering glass artist Sam Herman (1936–2020), focusing on his highly influential work made from mid-1960 to the 1980s in the UK, Australia and Belgium. 

 

As both artist and teacher, Herman did more than any to shape the international Studio Glass Movement.  He transformed modern glassmaking through his emphatically experimental practice and his influential teaching. More so than any of his peers, perhaps, Herman instigated and advocated for a Studio Glass Movement that from the 1960s onwards elevated glass to an artistic medium in which artists could achieve free and original expression.

 

 

Herman’s life and career encompassed a series of displacements and migrations. His mother, a Polish Jew, had left her homeland in the early 1930s and moved to Mexico City, where Herman was born in 1936. In 1944, mother and son relocated to the US, eventually settling in Queens, New York. Following a spell in the US Navy, Herman studied first anthropology and sociology in Washington State and then, from 1963–65 whilst studying at the University of Wisconsin under the tutelage of Harvey Littleton, Herman became a central figure in the development of the principles, tools and skills of the new Studio Glass Movement. A moment that changed glass as an art form forevermore. 

 

In a sense, movement and migration informed all that followed. A feeling for movement, for the fluidity of his material, came to govern Herman’s practice as he innovated with glass forms and methods. But the migration of techniques, too, consistently informed his approach – as did the opportunity to carry knowledge across borders and impart it from one group of students to the next.  Arriving in the UK in late 1965 on a Fulbright Scholarship to study cold-working techniques in Edinburgh, he was soon exhibiting Studio Glass objects and in 1966 was invited down to the Royal College of Art, London to demonstrate Studio Glass and its radical new methods. He was immediately persuaded to stay and within a year had become the head of the newly named Glass Department (formerly known as the Industrial Glass Department). His highly experimental work from this period are spontaneous and fluid and often diverse in form, colour and pattern, each work demonstrating the exciting development of early techniques. To give some indication of Herman’s stratospheric rise and the development of this work, in 1971, within five years of arriving at the RCA, he was given the honour of becoming the first living glass artist to enjoy an exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Some of these prized works will be exhibited during Frieze Masters.

 

 

From 1974-79, on the invitation of the South Australian Government, Herman ran a glassmaking studio at The Jam Factory, Adelaide, introducing Studio Glass to Australian artists and audiences. His work from this period can often be distinguished by more earthy and sandy tones, as well as iron reds and muddy greens. Some of the mottling effects from earlier RCA works appear, but here they seem more indigenous to the surrounding landscape in which they were made.  

 

In 1979, Herman returned to the UK and for the first time opened and ran his very own studio space, in Lots Road, London. His mature work from this period, demonstrate a return to some of the forms and styles created at the RCA, but with greater use of colour and surface pattern. During this period, he also continued his successful commissioned work with Val Saint Lambert in Belgium. The works made there are some of his most ambitious in scale, reflecting the quality of the glass that was made available to him. In 1984, Herman took the dramatic decision to close his London studio to spend more time in Mallorca, Spain, and develop his sculpture and painting practice, only returning to the furnace on a handful of separate occasions to the clamour of his supporters and fans. 

 

Herman’s impact on modern glass art is incalculable. Exemplary students at the RCA, and the artists he mentored at the Glasshouse in Covent Garden, which he co-founded in 1969, became significant proponents of Studio Glass in Japan, the Czech Republic and Sweden, as well as in the US and UK. Under Herman’s tutelage, a whole generation of artists came to understand that glass need not be either an industrial pursuit or a collaboration between a designer at the drawing-board and an artisan at the furnace; instead, individual artists could create unique glass objects themselves, within their own studios. ‘Glass is a dance of immediacy,’ he said.

 

 Herman’s work and impact deserve renewed critical and institutional attention. He was an artist whose personal identity – Jewish, Mexican, American and eventually British (he became a British citizen in 1994) – evokes a complex pathway to the pinnacle of his profession. His work, which often achieves ambitious sculptural forms, now looks ahead of its time in the affinities it establishes between the body of the glass object and the physical presence of its maker. And his unstinting innovation, testing the properties of glass, the possibilities of palette and pattern, and the felicities of chemicals in the kiln, remains an inspiration to anyone who encounters his vessels or glass sculptures. ‘Use glass to make things that glass allows you to make naturally,’ he insisted. ‘You can’t control the glass, it controls you. […] You’re lucky if, at some point, you and the glass work together.’

 

Herman exhibited extensively in the UK, US, Europe, Australia & Japan and his work can be found in leading international collections, including the V&A, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C., Corning Museum of Glass, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh, Aberdeen Art Gallery, and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. Herman became an Honorary Fellow of the RCA in 1983.