Complementing and competing with nature at Botanical Garden
Chihuly’s art on par with what grows in New York
Dale Chihuly is the most famous glass artist of our time, and admirers see his work as inventive, colorfully dazzling, technically virtuosic and exuberant.
And yet the art critics have never warmed to him, regarding his sculptures as brash and empty. Washington Post critics, over the years, have labeled his artwork "utterly vapid" and "pure bombast."
This lack of critical affirmation does not seem to matter much to an artist who has been pushing the boundaries of his medium and his own brand for more than 40 years.
Nor does it diminish the affection of his fans, who find simple delight in the way he has turned glass, that most hard, brittle and lifeless of substances, into something soft, fluid and alive.
On a recent sunny afternoon, friends Lisa Gorman and Debi Taffet, both from suburban New Jersey, found themselves at the New York Botanical Garden, which is staging a major exhibition of 20 Chihuly installations.
"I just love the color and the shapes," said Gorman as they stood at the end of a lily pond in which flat panels of colored polycarbonate are reflected. The glass dome of the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory loomed behind.
"The way they have set it up," Taffet said, "you can't take a bad picture. It's like I could be shooting for a magazine."
Chihuly seems ready to step into the pages, with his cherubic face, mop of curly hair and eye patch (a result of a car crash in 1976). He is 75 and gave up blowing his own glass several years ago, serving instead as the head of a creative team that includes glass blowers, installation experts and lighting designers, based at his Boathouse studio in Seattle.
In his work and in its staging, Chihuly follows themes. The New York show, named simply "Chihuly" and which runs until Oct. 29, is the latest in a number of exhibitions he has taken to botanical gardens since 2001. But in its scope and survey – it includes a gallery display of early career drawings and art glass – it has the feel of a retrospective tracing the arc of an artist's career. The botanical garden occupies 250 rolling acres in the Bronx.
Most of the sculptures have been seen elsewhere. Four were made for the show, and some, the "Koda" studies, consist of the polycarbonate panels set in reflecting pools.
They reprise panels he made in 1975 at Artpark, an arts venue in Upstate New York, and conspicuously do not foreshadow his later work. The Koda works are flat, and the matte colors are subdued, in contrast with the multidimensional, biomorphic pieces such as the "Seaforms" series from the 1980s and what he calls "Persians" from the following decade. The former are light and transparent, redolent of urchin shells, clam shells and jellyfish. The "Persians" are cupped disks with similar wavy edges and striated patterns but brighter and more opaque.
His "Chandelier" sculptures are his signature form, flamboyant pendants of hundreds of individually blown horns, spirals and other forms he calls feathers, stingers and goosenecks. Three "Chandeliers" are on display at the garden's Visitor Center. The major piece at the entrance to the conservatory, redolent of a "Chandelier" but free-standing, is an explosion in lemon yellow and lime green blown glass – 1,248 horns and curlicues, 14 feet across, and named "Sol del Citron."
Elsewhere, "Red Reeds on Logs" consists of 150 scarlet, slender glass tubes rising 12 feet from an armature of logs. The sheer length of the tubes is a glass blower's tour de force.
One of the most interesting – and different – installations is of a 35-foot-long sculpture of neon tubes, "Neon 206."
There's something about the more biomorphic forms that connect to a gardener's sense of organic beauty, said Todd Forrest, the botanical garden's vice president of hor- ticulture and living collections. "They're tapping into the same gene that makes us all love gardens," he said.
Another aspect of the show's broad range is that even the most grudging Chihuly fan may find something to like.
After three decades, the "Seaforms" still have an arresting delicacy of color, pattern and translucence. More than 50 are displayed in the atrium of the Beaux-Arts Library Building.
Within the conservatory, the works are modest in scale and integrated into carefully chosen plantings. The conservatory's glass is whitewashed for the summer, giving a bright but diffuse interior that serves to flatter the sculptures.
Gregory Long, the garden's chief executive and president, favors the relatively demure "Garden Fiori," an installation of 129 forms redolent of grasses and reeds integrated into beds of harmonious plant blooms and foliage in silvers, grays, blues and yellows. Visitors "can't tell the difference" between the plants and the glass, he said.