A collaborative glass practice
Stanislav Libenský trained as a painter and glass artist in Czechoslovakia. In 1954 he began working with Jaroslava Brychtová, whose training was in sculpture. He developed drawings and painted designs; she translated designs into sculptural models. Their partnership continued until his death in 2002.
Libenský began studying glass in 1937 at the Specialized School of Glassmaking in Nový Bor and graduated from the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in 1944. His first notable series, made in Nový Bor between 1945 and 1948, was thin crystal vessels, delicately etched and enamelled with biblical and Renaissance themes. In 1953 he became director of the Specialized School of Glassmaking at Železný Brod, where he met Brychtová, daughter of the school’s co-founder. She had been experimenting with casting and carving glass since the late 1940s and in 1950 founded the school’s Center for Architectural Glass.
Their collaboration began in 1954, when Brychtová made a sculptural glass bowl modelled on Libenský’s sketch of a bowl-shaped head. Libenský said they worked well together because he was trained as a painter and she as a sculptor. Brychtová continued to produce castings after his death. They married in 1963.
Drawing, modelling and depth
Their Animal Reliefs for the 1958 Brussels exhibition used cast glass with animal forms in negative relief on the reverse. Viewed through the smooth front, the forms appeared within the glass. Later collaborations included abstract windows for the St. Wenceslas Chapel in Prague’s St. Vitus Cathedral and large sculptures for Expo 67 in Montreal.
The Animal Reliefs, later known as Zoomorphic Stones, were cast glass “stones”, smooth on the front. On the reverse the animals, inspired by the cave paintings of Altamira and Lascaux, were cast in negative low relief. The work was set into a concrete wall in the pavilion’s glass gallery and won a Grand Prix. The original did not survive, and a recreation was installed at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva. The negative modelling technique developed here became the foundation of most of their later sculptural work.
For the St. Wenceslas Chapel, which the Czech government reconstructed between 1961 and 1964, they won a competition to replace stained glass dating from 1912 to 1913. Their abstract design departed from the chapel’s ornate decoration, but to relate new to old they took the dominant colours, muted grey-brown, grey-green and pink, from the chapel’s frescoes. At Expo 67 they made three large sculptures, Blue Concretion, Sun of the Century and Large Conus. Corning Museum of Glass curator Tina Oldknow called them “a revelation” to American Studio Glass artists who saw them, including Harvey Littleton, Dale Chihuly and Marvin Lipofsky.
Where to begin
Begin with the relationship between a drawing, a model and the depth of a cast object. That sequence gives both collaborators a visible role and makes glass more than a transparent surface. Compare a freestanding work with an architectural commission to examine how setting changes the encounter. A brief devoted to Libenský should retain Brychtová’s contribution wherever it discusses their jointly made work.
