"Grand" Collection

Beth Lipman was one of several artists brought to Steuben Glass in 2008 to make a special edition using Steuben’s distinctive and highly refractive colorless glass. While Lipman works almost exclusively in glass, some of the other invited artists, such as Kiki Smith, work in a variety of materials. This program paid homage to Steuben’s 1939 project “27 Contemporary Artists,” in which well-known artists of the day, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Salvador Dali, and Isamu Noguchi, were invited to submit drawings to be made into engraved glass. Lipman’s Grand Collection for Steuben comprises a panoply of 30 fruits, pods, seeds, and leaves—whole or in part—that include a melon, a date, pomegranates, a papaya half, a litchi nut, a love-in-a-puff, a persimmon, apple and peach halves, a Dutchman’s-pipe, a lotus seed pod, a poppy capsule, a pineapple, figs, acorns, a lemon, and a pear. As in the Dutch paintings that have deeply influenced Lipman’s work, the composition is symbolic of the fragility and transience of earthly delights. “My work pays homage to still life paintings made between the 17th and 20th centuries,” Lip-man says. “These luscious historical still lifes can be contemplated on a purely formal aesthetic level or interpreted on a political, moral or theological level. Full of symbolism, they are almost always memento mori capturing a fleeting, fated moment in time when a flower bloomed or the light struck a goblet in a very specific way. As with painting, glass makes perishable objects everlasting, and the compositions are simultaneously in the process of formation and decay.” Signed: “BL Steuben 2/5.” For more information, see Andrea Moody and others, Glimmering Gone: Ingalena Klenell & Beth Lipman, Tacoma, Washington: Museum of Glass, 2011; and Judith Tannenbaum, After You’re Gone, Providence: Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, 2008.