Are There Glass Snakes in Dale Chihuly’s Fragile Eden?
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Version 0 of 1. The single-word, all-caps title — “CHIHULY” — of a new show at the New York Botanical Garden conveys immediately exactly what visitors will be getting: vibrant glass sculptures in a familiar style, one that often recalls nature, and sometimes competes with it. For the exhibition, which runs through Oct. 29, the Seattle glassmaker Dale Chihuly and his team have spread 20 different installations throughout the garden’s 250 acres. Visitors who head to the Bronx will find a 30-foot-tall “Scarlet and Yellow Icicle Tower” and the spiky blue supernova “Sapphire Star.” Tucked away in the grand old Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, 14 bright red and lily-pad-shaped “Persians” and 18 slender “Blue Herons” emerge from a pond, alongside lush green plants. Mr. Chihuly’s exhibition here in 2006 attracted some 360,000 people, the largest crowd in the Garden’s history then. But his showmanship has also attracted a certain ambivalence, from both the art world — the website Artinfo ran an article in 2012 called “Top 10 Favorite Mean Things That Have Been Said About Dale Chihuly” — as well as from garden visitors. When it opened last weekend, however, many viewers said they came to the garden specifically to see the Chihuly works. “We have gardens in Indianapolis, too,” said Sarah Wasson, who was visiting New York. “But the way he juxtaposes glass, which is hard, with plants that are soft — that’s what I like.” Others felt the glass pieces were superfluous, “like seeing remnants of a nice meal on a table,” said Altan Kolsal, a city planner who lives in Manhattan. “I’m looking past them. I’m glad they’re there. But I’m here for my nature walk.” The mild-mannered and curly-haired Mr. Chihuly, 75, certainly doesn’t seem like a lightning rod. He came to town for the opening of the show with his wife of 25 years, Leslie Jackson Chihuly, who’s the president and chief executive of Chihuly Studios. Sometimes adjusting his eye patch — his left eye was blinded in a 1976 car crash — the artist noted that he had never taken to actual gardening himself. Rather, his work on the “Garden Series” was influenced by his mother’s green thumb. “She loved that garden, and she was out there every day,” he said, recalling her azaleas and rhododendrons in Tacoma, Wash., where he grew up. Mr. Chihuly was jet-lagged from a trip to Venice, where, as a young man, he once studied glassmaking for eight months. He said his love of his signature material remained undimmed from his student days. He started by weaving glass into tapestries but, eventually, the weaving part, once his primary technique, fell away. “There is something about glass, one of the few materials that light goes through,” Mr. Chihuly said. “You’re looking at light itself.” The shapes that Mr. Chihuly has spread to institutions worldwide remind many people of organic forms. But he has always maintained that copying nature has never been his goal. “I’m not conscious of mimicking,” he said. “I don’t study plant books. Glass wants to make forms like that, if you let it.” Chihuly Studios now makes some 30 site-specific commissions a year, ranging in price from $200,000 to millions of dollars. The website sells handmade editions of pieces for between $5,000 and $8,500 each. In addition, the studio mounts special exhibitions, like his 20-part “Garden Series.” Edward Cooke, a professor of American decorative arts at Yale, compared him to another prolific glassmaker who found a way to master both the high culture of museums as well as the popular market. “You could say he’s the contemporary version of Louis Comfort Tiffany,” said Mr. Cooke, who is very familiar with the work of both artists. Like many people in the art world, Mr. Cooke, though, is of two minds about Mr. Chihuly. He admires some work, but noted, “There’s a crassness to it at times,” which he attributed to “color, sensory overload, scale and ubiquity.” However he derives his forms, “having artwork in the landscape changed how people view the plants, and the entire garden,” said Karen Daubmann, associate vice president for exhibitions and public engagement at the New York Botanical Garden, referring to the 2006 show. “People thought of us as an exhibition venue from that point on.” (The Botanical Garden had 525,000 visitors to “Frida Kahlo: Art, Garden, Life,” in 2015.) And Ms. Daubmann had a ready response for any purists who think that Mr. Chihuly is merely gilding lilies. “There are people who are not fans, but our answer to that is that this is a temporary display,” she said. “We say, ‘Come check it out,’ but it will be gone by November, and it’s back to your favorite flowers and shrubs.” Mr. Chihuly, who has three studios and a staff of 80, long ago gave up blowing glass himself. His current role, he said, was simple: “I tell the team what I want to have made, and I select from there what I want to use.” But he emphasized that he was still involved in developing techniques in his art. “I’m now doing these enamel paintings on glass,” he said. “We fire it at 1,200 degrees.” Though Mr. Chihuly didn’t say so, framing himself as an experimenting pioneer may have been on his mind when he decided to add more austere versions of his early work to “CHIHULY.” Back in the ’70s, he placed blown-glass panels in a rocky landscape, and some along a river, in ways that call to mind the Land Art movement of that era. The colored panes of polycarbonate that form the “Koda” works in the current show lean up against one another in a pool of water and, in another installation, hang together in a large grid over a pond. Glenn Adamson, a former director of the Museum of Arts and Design in Manhattan, said he recognized Mr. Chihuly as a leader of the glass movement and, recently, as someone who has a real genius “as an inventor of forms.” He added that, to his mind, a garden was better than a museum as a setting for Mr. Chihuly’s pieces: “I would say his work is at its best in a natural environment. It competes very well with plants.” Over lunch — Mr. Chihuly ordered a bunless hamburger and ate half of it — his wife said that he had a naturally positive attitude. “Dale gets up every morning and goes to the studio to make work,” Ms. Chihuly said. “He’s not going to fold up like an old lawn chair just because someone didn’t like his work.” She added — perhaps slyly, given his success — “He’s been getting just enough encouragement to keep him going.” Of some criticism, Mr. Chihuly said, “It bothers you for a while, and then you forget about it.” But his one blue eye did twinkle a bit when he made a comparison to another era when many makers competed for favor in a crowded landscape of potential patrons. “I wonder how that worked in the Renaissance,” Mr. Chihuly said, musing on what the ambitious denizens of the 15th-century art world said about one another. He paused. “I wonder if they were as critical as the ones now?” |