Sam Herman obituary

Artist who spearheaded the studio glass movement in Britain

The glass artist Sam Herman, who has died aged 84, was an important contributor to the British craft renaissance of the 1960s and 70s. Studio ceramics (ceramics designed and made by the same person) had been established as a new art form in Britain since the 20s but it was not until the mid-60s that Herman brought the technology to work with hot glass in studio to the UK from the US, enabling individual creative engagement with this dangerous but alluring medium. His mature work was characterised by powerful flowing forms with occasional figurative references and by vibrant colour and iridescent effects. Herman appeared to work in an unpremeditated fashion, following his instincts, responding above all to the ductility of the medium.

At the University of Wisconsin at Madison (1962-65) Herman had majored in sculpture under Leo Steppat and, more importantly, had taken glass courses with Harvey Littleton, a potter whose father had been head of research at the great Corning glass works, in upstate New York. But Littleton himself had seen small family-run workshops in Murano, Italy, and was attracted by the neoprimitive inter-war glass made by the French painter Maurice Marinot. With the technical help of Dominick Labino he set about creating a small tank furnace that made it possible for hot glass to be worked outside the factory environment.

Herman was one of the first students on the programme that Littleton set up at Wisconsin. The atmosphere was one of excited camaraderie: “Once I’d tried it, glass became my first love … everyone helped each other – there were no secrets.” For Herman glass was “like a dance … it requires immense attention and foresight to handle a material that has what amounts to a life of its own in a molten state”.

Herman arrived from Wisconsin on a Fulbright scholarship in 1965 to study cold glass techniques at Edinburgh College of Art, becoming an ambassador for hot glass made in studio. He organised a show of work by his fellow students and tutors from Wisconsin that toured from Edinburgh to Stourbridge College of Art, in the West Midlands, and to the Royal College of Art in London.

There it was seen by the head of the ceramics and glass department at the college, David Queensberry, who immediately recognised the potential of direct engagement with hot glass and invited Herman to become a research fellow. In 1966 Herman built a small tank furnace at the college and in 1967 became tutor in charge of a reconfigured glass department. The first degree show at the RCA that included student-made hot glass – by Pauline Solven, John Cook and Asa Brandt – took place in 1968.

Blowing hot glass under Herman’s guidance became the epitome of cool, aided by Herman’s New York wit and a humour tempered with flashes of counterculture Zen wisdom and tough love if a student’s work did not fulfil expectations. He found a creative home at the college. The sculptor Clifford Rainey recalled of Herman: “I would be in awe, watching him at the bench balancing large gobs of molten glass on a blow pipe, adding colours and minerals … working the mass to give it a sculptural form.”

In 1969 Herman had a landmark show at the Crafts Centre of Great Britain in Covent Garden (now renamed Contemporary Applied Arts, and based in Marylebone) and Herman, Graham Hughes, the centre’s chairman and Susannah Robins, its director, set up the Glasshouse in a warehouse near the Crafts Centre, intended as a co-operative staging post for the graduates coming out of the RCA glass department – who included Solven, Dillon Clarke, Stephen Newell and Fleur Tookey. Hughes put his own money into the enterprise and the Glasshouse became the only place in Britain where the general public could see hot glass being blown and buy work by young glass artists.

The studio glass movement spearheaded by Herman transformed glass activity in British art schools, where previously students had drawn out designs for blown glass on paper. The movement influenced industrial glass, with the long-established Whitefriars Glass factory producing a “Studio” range from 1969, with designs by Peter Wheeler, another RCA graduate. Herman also supervised the production of free glass designs for the Belgium manufacturer Val St Lambert and at Rosenthal in Germany.

In 1971 the Victoria and Albert Museum staged Flöckinger/Herman, showing 69 pieces by Herman alongside equally daring work by the jeweller Gerda Flöckinger. Herman built furnaces at other art schools and aided cross-fertilisation, inviting leading glass artists from Czechoslovakia, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany to the College. He also appeared in the border-crossing show 1969 Vrij Glas – Free Glass, in Rotterdam, with the German glass artist Erwin Eisch, Littleton and Marvin Lipovsky, a former Wisconsin student.

At the height of his success, in 1974 Herman moved to Adelaide, South Australia, where he was invited to help create an arts centre and workshops, building furnaces and creating a hot glass production workshop, taking The Glasshouse as a model. The development of the Jam Factory – which continues to this day – was a wonderful if gruelling experience in which he juggled training a glass-making team with his own work and satisfying a business model imposed from above.

His marriage to Judith Christiansen, whom he had wed in 1963, came to an end and in 1979 he returned to London with his two children, setting up a new hot glass studio in Lots Road, Chelsea, where for five years he was able to work with great freedom and productivity, making around 1,500 pieces. Thereafter he worked as a sculptor and painter, with the encouragement of his partner, Joanna Shellard.

A tough childhood had prepared Herman for his adventurous career choices. His Jewish mother and three aunts had left Poland in the mid-30s, the rest of the extended family perishing in Nazi concentration camps. Herman never knew his father, Moises Herman. After a privileged existence in Mexico City, he and his adoring mother, Chana Rosa Dorf, moved on to New York when he was eight. She worked as a seamstress for a furrier; mother and son lived in a small one-bedroom apartment in Queens, later relocating to the Bronx when his mother married.

With poor school grades Herman joined the US Navy (1955-59), which enabled him to qualify for a grant to attend Western Washington University, where he studied anthropology and sociology. On graduating he was encouraged to study for an MFA in fine art, beginning a course at Seattle, dropping out, and finally arriving at the University of Wisconsin.

If Herman’s career as a glass artist was hugely influential, his subsequent commitment over nearly three decades to painting and to sculpture attracted less attention. In the new millennium he returned to glass, and in 2019 the Frestonian gallery in London held a retrospective exhibition.

In 2005 Herman was interviewed for the National Life Stories collection in the British Library. His work is in UK collections, including that of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in public collections in the US, Europe and Australia.

He is survived by Joanna, whom he married in 2010, his son, David, and daughter, Sarah, from his first marriage, and a granddaughter, Alice.

Samuel Jacob Herman, glass artist, born 25 July 1936; died 29 November 2020

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJmiqa6vsMOeqqKfnmR%2FcX6QaJ2eml9lhnC%2FwKZkoZ2ioq6vec6boK2tkafG