Bye Bye Blenko!

Though William H. Blenko Sr. did have the good sense to give the Historic Period designers the opportunity to do their great work, he and the company were lost without them and had little choice but to allow the designers to do their thing. William Blenko Sr. did not even personally choose the designers, they were selected for him by the faculty of Alfred University, he just said "yes" to their selection. Of course knowing how to delegate is an important skill and Mr. Blenko did it very well. In addition it goes without saying that there would be no company if he hadn't also been an incredibly good salesman and a manager with a plan. But his plan hung entirely on having good designers and crumbled without it as the current state of the company proves.

It was the designers who conjured the products that became the company's hallmark. It was the designers who insisted on quality control to ensure the proper production of their designs. It was the designers who took charge of promoting the company with advertising and trade fairs. It was the designers who brought a cosmopolitan and sophisticated worldview to the rough little factory in Milton, West Virginia. Without the designers Blenko would have been no different than it's rivals Rainbow, Pilgrim or Bischoff – largely irrelevant companies producing pretty tchotchkes. But without Blenko the designers would (and did!) still produce many great works. In short, Blenko is the least important element of this equation while Winslow Anderson, Wayne Husted, Joel Philip Myers and John Nickerson are the true stars. I am cutting the Blenko out of Blenko because it distracts from what is important.

So, now rather than my website being organized based on color ranges, which is great for decorators but awkward for serious collectors who appreciate design, it is now organized according to designers. One page each for Winslow Anderson and John Nickerson and two each for Wayne Husted and Joel Philip Myers – the latter two having worked at the Blenko Glass Company for about twice as long as the former two. In addition the items on each page are now displayed in rough chronological order. I say "rough" because it can only be organized by year – contrary to what many people think the third and fourth numerals in the design numbers assigned by the Blenko Glass Company did not relate to the order the pieces were designed in, they were usually just randomly applied. Regardless, organizing items by year of design does give a clear picture of the aesthetic development when you are looking at an inventory as large as mine (over 180 items produced by the Blenko Glass Company!).

This development has been in the works for a long while. As most of you know I am one of the Directors of the Blenko Museum (formerly of Seattle , now exclusively online). The Museum's mission is to promote understanding of the history and work of the Blenko Glass Company. When we re-built the website the other year, after much planning and debate, we realized just how central the four aforementioned designers are to the history of the Blenko Glass Company, and in fact that these designers are the source of the company's reputation and collector interest. In light of that we broke down the company's history into three main areas. These three areas best explain the history and collectors already intuitively understand it; The Early Years (1921-46), The Historic Period (1947-74), and the Late Period (1975 onwards). In terms of collector interest, basically you have the four first designers from 1947-74 and then somewhere in the distance lagging far behind in all respects, is everything else.
 
Well, I'm just taking that one tiny step further; I'm ditching the "everything else" part. In my past articles I have consistently focused on the importance of the four Historic Period designers and made a case for why they are so important. For your reference on this matter I suggest reading  my last article appearing last fall in Modernism Magazine. Essentially, I am doing no more than putting the finishing touches on a path that I have been on virtually from the beginning; focusing on the designers, their work and their development.

The changes to my website this week are by no means limited to Blenko. After much experimentation with many kinds of glass and many companies I have settled on my core interest, all circling around The Blenko Glass Company and the four Historic Period Designers. To this end, I also say good-bye to generic "cased glass." Instead I am now focusing on the glass produced in Empoli, cased as well as the earlier “Verde” glass that was the origins of the cased glass. Not coincidentally Empoli glass was what the Blenko Glass Company first emulated in 1929 when they did not have a designer, and later when Blenko found success with its innovative designers, Empoli companies copied Blenko. Wayne Husted even produced some designs for them after leaving the Blenko Glass Company. So here we have it all on Vintage Modern glasshouse; Historic Period Blenko and Empoli glass brought together again.

There are a few other related companies that I admire and intend to handle with regularity. This includes Erickson Glassworks, as Carl Erickson was the earliest "proto-designer" at Blenko prior to Winslow Anderson. And interestingly enough Erickson produced a Blenko look-alike line in the 1950's, called Holiday, to try to edge in on Blenko's market share. I will also continue to add the occasional piece of Greenwich Flint Craft glass as I think that GFC is to the Blenko Glass Company what Quezal Glass is to Tiffany; a Johnny-come-lately "me-too" company with a limited output, but it's very pretty. Do be aware that on my Scandi. Italian & US page there will also be cased glass by companies like Elme, Holmegaard, Alsterfors and Carlo Moretti, just not Empoli cased glass.

I really hope these changes will help you collectors clarify what it is you are really looking for as much as it did for me, and I hope it will make your time spent on my site (and off) more successful and enjoyable! As a parting thought, I invite you to think of the new changes to my site this way; bye bye Blenko but buy buy Anderson, Husted, Myers and Nickerson!

Damon Crain

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