art and craft
The products sold under the “Desná” label were mainly designed in the period between the two World Wars, primarily by creative artists who created their pieces under the influence of the predominant artistic styles of the time, such as art deco, functionalism, and historicizing decorativism.
The cooperation of creative artists with glass producers began to take place to a greater extent in the second half of the twentieth century and is not always commonplace today. In glass production where demanding and expensive metal moulds were not used, the glassmakers themselves created individual glass objects, and in the process either used their own imagination or copied and imitated old or foreign designs at the request of the works foreman.
Otherwise, metal moulds are used to form the molten glass during the manufacture of glassware products. The perfect interaction of the creative artist and the glass producer is the basis for success. To be able to design products that are both beautiful and purposeful, and to make sure that the embossed form becomes apparent in the molten glass and looks natural, the designer must know the qualities of the material being used perfectly, as well as the regularities of the technological procedures. The artist prepares a design, which a modeller transforms into a three-dimensional version mostly in the form of a plaster model. There are other tasks awaiting the technologists and mould makers, since it is necessary to put together and produce an expensive and usually multi-piece metal mould for each product.
It requires a deep understanding and many years experience to create a mould that will transform the liquid molten glass into the required shape and will function perfectly for a number of years. It is during the creation of the mould that the draftsmen, founders, fitters, engravers, and metal chasers really become irreplaceable, even though this type of work has been influenced by new computer-operated technology over the last few years.
There is a wide range of products that were designed by creative artists for the pre-war product lines of the Heinrich Hoffmann Company, and primarily for the company of Curt Schlevogt. These were creative artists such as Zdeněk Juna, Artur Pleva, Mario Petrucci, Antonín Heythum, Josef Bernhard, Bruno Mauder, František Pazourek, Josef Drahoňovský, Josef Frendlovský, Richard Fischer, Eleon von Rommel, Ida Schwetz Lehmann, Adolf Beckert, Franz Hagenauer, Max Schwedler, Ena Rottenberg, Karl Kolaczek, Alexander Pfohl, Vally Wieselthier, André Fau, André Till, and Renzo Basini.
The tradition of cooperation with creative artists did not come to a halt even after 1945, a time when the glassmaking industry in the Jizera Mountains underwent significant transformation. The artists Václav Plátek and Václav Hanuš successfully designed new glass products for the Jablonec Glassworks enterprise. Indeed Hanuš was the in-house designer of the glassworks for many years.
The Jablonex Group a.s. continues to produce glass pieces designed in the past by the artists mentioned above under the “Desná” label. The company has not lost touch with creative artists in the modern era and attempts to design new products that reflect the close relation we have to our rich tradition. There are also a number of products in the collection that are original twenty-first century artefacts in their own right. Cooperation with contemporary designers has yielded new products, pieces worthy of continuing the long tradition.
