In this series, Lagniappe presents works from the collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art, with commentary from a curator.
This vibrant glass vessel is many things at once. It is a contained riot of color that manages to be both smooth and rough and to evoke both the swirling bubbles of the sea and also orderly corn kernels on land.
Japanese artist Yoichi Ohira worked in Venice’s famous glasshouses on the island of Murano for nearly 40 years, bridging European glass cultures to patterns of Japan. Ohira’s interest in fashion — the artist moonlighted in fashion design in addition to a career in glass — led him from Japan to Italy in the early 1970s. While studying at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice, he became enamored with the city’s rich history in glass craft.
Beginning as early as the 1200s and maturing from the 1400s onward, Venice was at the center of a broad network of international glass exchange centered around the eastern Mediterranean Sea.
The city-state’s history as a wealthy trade and military power, and its development of a merchant class during the Renaissance, led to a flourishing of arts and architecture. After 1291, all Venetian glassmakers were required to operate on the island of Murano.
There, generations of craftsmen perfected clear glass and mirrors, achieved deeply hued glass colors and developed techniques for enameling and gilding on glass.
Many of Ohira’s works of art, like this "Nostalgia Vase No. 2," owe a debt to Japanese ceramics in their shape. This wide bottle shape with a narrow, short neck nods to traditional pottery forms, but the vessel’s saturated blue, yellow, and red colors, and its intricate murrine techniques come from Venetian glass traditions.
Though he personally developed tremendous technological skills over his career, Ohira likened himself to a composer, turning to the Murano glassmakers to create his artistic vision, as a conductor might turn to singers or instrumentalists to perform music.
"Nostalgia Vase No. 2" is on view in the New Orleans Museum of Art's Lupin Foundation Center for Decorative Arts on the second floor, and will be featured in the exhibition "Sand, Ash, Heat: Glass at the New Orleans Museum of Art," beginning Aug. 30.
— Mel Buchanan, RosaMary Curator of Decorative Arts & Design, New Orleans Museum of Art
