Novy Bor Cam Okulu 1870’te bölgede cam üretimi yapan iş adamlarının üretimde yer alacak usta, işçi ve çırakların kalitesini arttırmak ve bölgenin endüstriyel gelişimini hızlandırmak, geliştirmek amaçlı kurulur. Bu amaç doğrultusunda hem bölgesel hem de Avrupa çapında cam endüstrisinin hem sanatsal hem de teknolojik gelişimine etkili olduğu söylenebilir.
Okulun bünyesinde bulunan üç ayrı eğitim alanı da - 4 yıllık ortaöğretim ve çıraklık eğitimi ve 3 yıllık yüksekokul - eğitimsel ve artistik açıdan kayda değer sonuçlar vermiştir. Tasarımcılar, atölye eğitmenleri, teorik ve teknik derslerin uzman öğretmenleri öğrencilerine sıcak şekillendirme, soğuk şekillendirme, boyama, çökertme, füzyonlama, kalıpla şekillendirme, vitray, gravür gibi cam işleme tekniklerinde gerekli teorik ve uygulama bilgisini kazandırmaktadır. Farklı teknikler öğreten bölümlerin yaratıcı sürecinin farklılığı dışında ortak noktası hem otomatik seri üretimde, hem sınırlı sanatsal seri üretimde, hem de yaratıcı sanatsal stüdyo üretimindeki yetkinlikleridir.
1224 öğrenci kapasiteli kurumun 45 çalışanı bulunmaktadır. Okul beş cam boyama atölyesine, iki gravür atölyesine, iki soğuk şekillendirme atölyesine , vitray, kalıpla şekillendirme, füzyon ve çökertme tekniklerinin uygulandığı atölyelere sahiptir. Projemiz açısından en fazla öneme sahip olan sıcak şekillendirme atölyesi ise; farklı camların ergitilebildiği, farklı şekillendirme teknikleri ve teknolojilerinin kullanıldığı, 2 şer potalı 3 ayrı cam ergitme fırını, tavlama fırınları, ısıtıcı tromeller ve şalümolar ve çeşitli cam şekillendirme aletlerine sahiptir.
Ayrıca sıcak şekillendirme atölyesinin yanında bir de kalıba üfleme tekniğinde kullanmak üzere hazırlanan ahşap kalıpların yapıldığı bir kalıp atölyesi vardır. Sıcak şekillendirme atölyesi bulunduğu bölgenin en modern ve en donanımlı stüdyolarından birisidir. Bir diğer atölye de ise öğrecilerinin işlerinin dökümantasyonunu yapabileceği profesyonel stüdyo ekipmanının bulunduğu bir fotoğraf stüdyosu bulunmaktadır. Ayrıca okula ait cam işlerin satışa sunulduğu bir mağaza ve sergilerin düzenlendiği bir galeri bulunmaktadır. Yılda en az 10 tane öğrenci işleri sergisi hem bu galeride hem de yurtiçi ve yurtdışında farklı galerilerde düzenlenmektedir. Teorik derslerin düzenlediği dersliklerde ise bilgisayar sunumlarının yapılabileceği ekipman bulunmaktadır. Bunların yanı sıra üç desen atölyesi, bir heykel ve alçı atölyesi, öğrencilerin sürekli kullanımına açık bilgisayar dersliği bulunmaktadır. Okul ayrıca bir öğrenci misafirhanesi ve yemekhanesine de sahiptir.
Detaylı bilgi için: www.glassschool.cz
The Glass School in the years 1870 – 2000
In the last year of the second millennium the Glass Nový Bor school celebrated the 130th anniversary of its foundation. The school has always been oriented more on the future than thinking about the past, however there are also questions that could be answered only due to its knowledge of the foregoing development. Some problems the school had to face already before are very similar to the actually interesting ones.
From the very beginning the school strategy has been based on the particular demands of the manufacture and answering them by means of the professional education of pupils, activities of professors and by the co-operation especially with the manufacturers who have been interested in its activities and have been able not only to listen to advices of the teachers attentively and with understanding but also to follow them.
The Glass Nový Bor school was founded in 1870, as the local glass businessmen appreciated its necessity not only due their own interests but also due to the further industrial development of the whole region. The actually built railway from Bakov to Rumburk via Česká Lípa and Nový Bor linked not only Nový Bor with the world but also the world with Nový Bor. The transportation of semi-products from the other Bohemian glass regions to the town as well as of coal and other raw materials, necessary for the glass manufacture became easier, faster and first of all cheaper. After their processing in the new glassworks Nový Bor got rid of the dependence on the production of semi-products in the regions of Českomoravská highlands, Jizera Mountains, Sázava Valley and South Bohemia. The possibility of the railway transportation of the finished products both for inland and foreign customers was probably even more important for Nový Bor.
The 70s and 80s of the 19th century represented the period of construction of new glassworks and refineries. It was also a time of revolutionary intellectual changeovers in the production changing slowly its character from the art-and-craft into the industry. The most progressive oriented glass manufacturers understood very soon that – so as not to lose their positions both in the most important foreign markets and in the inland ones – it remained nothing but to response the changing market demands more responsively and first of all more flexibly by means of new products and to invite appropriate experts to co-operate. Ludwig Lobmeyr from Vienna indicated - thanks to his success at the Vienna World Exhibition - the way of seeking the experts: graduates of the schools of applied arts and curators of collections of the museums of applied arts. It was necessary to train the prospective associates for their new tasks. Only a part of them could be trained according to the demands of the art-and-craft manufacture at the schools of applied arts at Vienna and Prague. The manufacture needed midrange technicians and professionals, educated technologists and designers, but also qualified masters and workers. When speaking about the second half of the 19th century we mean the period of still prevailing hand manufacture above the machinery and of the beginning of formation of the proper professional educational system in the Austria-Hungary. The entrepreneurs of Nový Bor had appreciated the usefulness of qualified glass workers and masters already before. They realized the necessity of skillful painters and engravers with the essential knowledge of drawing and for that reason they trained them in painting and drawing according to graphic patterns in the Piarist school already from the 60s of the 18th century. After closing of the school they wished to compensate it by a professional painting and modelling school. At its opening the school didn’t offer more theoretical knowledge and practical experience than the Piarist one: painting and modelling were taught but drawing was taught to be the very basis of everything. The Nový Bor school taught it until the end of 1930s not only in the regular day classes but also in the afternoon, evening and Sundays classes for the pupils of primary and basic schools and for trained glass workers and masters.
At the moment of adopting of the full responsibility for the professional schools at Austria-Hungary by the state the administration was transferred first to the Ministry of Industry, than to the Ministry of Culture and Education and the schools became already institutions nearing - due to their orientation and education plans - to our conceptions of theoretical and practical education of prospective glassmakers at the secondary industrial schools.
Besides painting and modelling the schools taught also common educational and professional subjects, as well as the workshop practice, in case of the Nový Bor school it was painting and engraving, later on cutting, and finally hot shaping of glass.
An important moment not only for the further development of the professional education represented its submission to Vienna and following emphasis on the participation of qualified, usually from a school of applied art graduated architects, sculptors and painters, on the professional orientation of schools and on the education of pupils. Therefore, they were appointed by Vienna in the posts of both directors and professors-designers. The suitable personalities for the posts of workshop teachers were sought after in the regions. (In the same way the directors, professors and teachers were chosen both in the Czechoslovak Republic and nowadays as well.)
Initially, the professional schools had provided only a basic overview of the contemporary design and development tendencies. Any independent designing activities were neither awaited nor required. The activities appeared first in the schools where the pedagogues with their own design and skill ambitions were active. The schools started also taking part in exhibitions (the Nový Bor school took part already in the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873) and co-operating with local manufacturers. The contact with them was facilitated thanks to the historical and current pieces allowed for the schools to borrow for their expositions from the Viennese or Liberec museums as well as due to the own industrially usable designs and patterns prepared for the local entrepreneurs both by teachers and pupils. The Nový Bor school became soon the most active especially thanks to the design activities of its director Daniel Hartel and other professors.
The art-and-skill and design activities (not only in the glass manufacture) in the second half of the 19th century was influenced by the historizing tendencies – return to the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles. The Nový Bor school was influenced by them as well as by the contemporary interest in the oriental art and possibilities of its use first of all in the glass painted with the colour enamels and gold. It the proper time the school oriented its interests also on the Art Nouveau, adopted its design conceptions and made possible also the manufacturers, especially the glass and china painters, to meet the new art. The glass professional education history has documented the decisive share of personalities overlapping the regional borders due to their knowledge, artistic authority and organizing abilities, on its results. Both before and after 1945, the glass Nový Bor school have had comparatively many good glass pedagogues-designers, on the other hand better-than-average directors were only an exception.
Undoubtedly, the first successful director was Daniel Hartel, however we don’t know too much about his artistic activities. He was entitled to lead the school in 1881 and there he stayed as director until 1907. In 1892 the Nový Bor school was moved into the building used until now.
The second director Heinrich Strehblow, a Viennese painter, for the school undoubtedly even more important, changed the glass school within a short time after his arrival to Nový Bor (1907) into an exceptional institute due to its educational and non-educational activities, with results that could be probably compared only with the contemporary ones. Strehblow enriched the workshop training by glass cutting, built the hot shop and the research and experimental institute as parts of the school. Among his greatest successes there was the enforcement of the direct school influence onto a group of manufacturers based on his demonstration of the firm J. Oertel & Co. that a progressively oriented manufacture can be interested also economically. The school had offered its designs to the glass and chandeliers’ manufacturers already before, but they usually changed them. Strehblow deprecated such co-operation and persisted on manufacture of the school designs without a change. Otherwise they were not allowed to use the label “made according to the school design”. He checked the observance of the co-operation principles. Strehblow was an educated artist familiar with the most progressively oriented applied art shielded by the production of the Wiener Werkstätte. At the school he leant on the other able designers and workshop teachers. The school was very successful also in the glass research and in its hot shop.
The school works were influenced by designs of the “Viennese” late Art Nouveau painted glass, but its most important artistic contribution to the glass manufacture before the World War I was the hot pre-shaped, colour overlayed and finally cut through glass, pieces thanking for their origin both to the creative invention and to the co-operation of the school hot shop and cutting workshop.
The leading status in the region was kept by the school also in the twenties as the glass in the Art Deco style – the view more confidential to the local manufacturers than Functionalism suppressing the decoration - using the traditional decorative painting technologies of Nový Bor broke through. The influence of the school wasn’t as convicting as before, however it remained considerable. In 1922 two graduates of the school – Artur Pleva and František Pazourek - became students of the Prague School of Applied Arts. They were the very first students of professor Drahoňovský mastering the glass engraving and helped him to overcome problems with the technique he wanted to pursue preferentially together with the glyptics in his atelier (as well as in his own creative activities). Strehblow was the director till 1929 (from 1926 he was also the director of the Kamenický Šenov school). In the 1930s the Nový Bor school got no director comparable with Strehblow but its professors became artistically and socially ambitious designers, for example Alexander Pfohl and Jaroslav Holeček, whereby the former studied at the Viennese School of Applied Arts and the latter at the Prague one.
The Nový Bor school graduates with artistic ambitions applied for studies at the art oriented universities since 1882 when the first two of them were admitted, followed by others. Some of them returned to Nový Bor. Also in the 1920s and 1930s they preferred to study in Vienna against Prague more due to the nationality then to professional reasons. When entering the Nový Bor school Alexander Pfohl was very experienced in the glass manufacture. Jaroslav Holeček was interested in the glass for architecture. He realized several large painted and lead sealed windows in the school workshops. His importance for the school was multiplied by the fact that he was the first Czech pedagogue in the German school, that he gained recognition in opening first Czech business department and later Czech design department in the time when the number of Czech glass businesses grew in the region of Nový Bor, as well as that his pre-war Czech pupils became important after-war glass artists, pedagogues and other professionals.
For the next personality in the post of the director the school had to wait until 1945. It was RNDr. Jaromír Špaček, a pre-war Czech teacher, who was confided to take over the German glass schools in Nový Bor and Kamenický Šenov and to revive the professional education after the World War II however now already with Czech pedagogues and pupils. He fulfilled the task as both the schools started the education already in September 1945. Dr. Špaček had got reliable colleagues both in artists and in workshop teachers, among them the pre-war pupils of the glass Nový Bor school as Stanislav Libenský, Miloslav Babický, Otakar Novák and Vlastimil Pospíchal as well as Josef Hospodka and Karel Hrodek. Similarly to their German predecessors they didn’t limited their teaching and creative activities only onto the school. They adopted a very demanding and also – as showed later – just very hardly performable task: to get the Czech glass industry and to modernize it. Therefore in the first several after-war years they were never missing throughout where it was decided about the Czech glass production in the region of Nový Bor. In August 1945 they arranged together with other glassmakers from the region under the Lusitanian Mountains the first collective exhibition of the “Block of Czech Glass” members. They initiated a countrywide glass competition, many of them took part in the imposing exhibition in Liberec and they weren’t also missing in other exhibitions. In 1948 after the establishment of the national enterprise Umělecké sklo at Nový Bor they became designers of its Studios as still believing in the possibility of influencing the glass industry not only in the region of Nový Bor but also in the whole republic by its means. After their entering the school they were interested in engraving, cutting and painting of glass and in the glass techniques and technologies most important for the region. In the stained glass creation they employed both the possibilities based on putting the glass into lead and the cutting equipment for the relief processing of the flat glass installed in the school at the end of the 1930’s. They have got significant results in the engraved glass based on the pre-war and war artistic tradition the author of which was Karel Hrodek, as well as in the irregularly relief cut glass which was the beginning of Josef Hospodka already at the school under professor Holeček. But especially the painted glass designed by Stanislav Libenský and realized by his pupils using transparent enamels and etching was represented as an artistic acquisition due to both its untraditional use of traditional technologies and figural motifs inspired by Christian traditions, Czech history, folk art and black people culture. It was this most positively appraised Libenský’s glass, which was short after the February communist putsch both the reason of accusation of the school of cosmopolitism, formalism and idealism and of the submission of a proposal for its closing. The threat was executed at the beginning of the 1950’s.
Dr. Špaček who founded also the chemical-glass melting department of the school already in the first after-war years, became in 1950 the director of the chemical-glass melting and apprentice school at Chřibská, moved two years later after closing the High Professional Glass School oriented onto design to Nový Bor. He was the director of the school till 1969 when he became the National Committee Chairman.
With the opening of the Secondary Industrial School of Glass a new chapter of the local glass school history began, a chapter adumbrated by the shameful and for the Czechoslovak glass industry fatal liquidation of the glass schools in Nový Bor and Kamenický Šenov. The original decision to build up in the region a school oriented onto technology and chemistry couldn’t be challenged. The glass industry with the breaking through machine industrial production based on scientific knowledge, with the growing interest in special chemical, technical and optical glasses needed such a school, but together with a school oriented on the art.
The Nový Bor school tried (without a success) to follow its predecessor, for example in use of the school glassworks for an experimental glass production. In the middle of the 1950s before the reunion of the school fellows the school proposed to revive the glass education in the traditional techniques of painting and cutting enhanced by a new subject of construction and manufacture of lighting appliances in Kamenický Šenov. The idea was realized, the education was revived and in 1957 – 1962 the school of Kamenický Šenov acted as a branch of the Nový Bor one. Dr. Špaček supported the lasting connection of both institutes. In 1964 he enforced opening of the hot glass shaping department as a part of the chemical-technological Nový Bor school. The first pedagogue-designer of the department became Oldřich Lipský who was later on, in the 1970s and 1980s the director of the schooL. The Nový Bor school had stayed primarily chemical-technologically oriented till 1980s. In 1988 due to the decision of the Ministry of Education the professional training of glassmakers for hot shaping has been enhanced by glass painting and cutting. After the Velvet Revolution in November 1989 and finishing the 40 years long communist domination the school has taken advantage of the decision. The people have got back the right to live free, to undertake and also to develop their ideas and initiatives. Thanks to the new creative departments the academic sculptor Václav Machač responsible for the artistic orientation of the hot shaped glass has been joined by the academic painter Zdenka Štipáková and academic sculptor Miroslav Čermák for painting and the academic sculptor Pavel Werner for glass cutting.
In 1990 Mgr. Pavel Zatloukal became the school director. Under his management the school results in the 1990s were comparable with the most successful ones from the previous times. First of all, he managed to set up material supports for the education of glass professionals in the fields of technique and design. The buildings on the Palacký Street and Palacký Square were reconstructed where there were built up the school gallery and shop in the historical building, the headquarters were complemented by professional classrooms and a gym. The school concluded with the town an contract of the 20 years long lease of the glassworks which begun its operation in June 1994 after being equipped with glass melting furnaces and other technical and technological equipments. It has become both the material basis for the education of the hot shaping department and the manufacturing center for objects and semi-products for the painting and cutting departments.
Efforts for modernization of the school and its approach to the needs of the Czech glass industry culminated in the opening of the triennial High Professional School of Glass preceded by the authorization of the complete basic documentation prepared by the school, by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Physical Education of the Czech Republic in 1996.
The High Professional School of Glass Nový Bor was founded in order to develop and to finalize the education of the secondary art schools’ graduates in the field of the art and skill, to make them possible to study other glass techniques and producing operations they couldn’t meet during their previous studies. It has been oriented onto the manufacture of the high skilled demanding and technical sophisticated art glass and onto the development of artistic conditions of students in order to prepare them for posts of designers and top craftsmen both in private glass workshops and in art glass studios and/or for individual glass designing activities.
The gradual enlargement of the high school needed an enlargement of the pedagogical staff. Academic painter Pavel Homolka, academic sculptor Stanislav Honzík, academic sculptor Antonie Jankovcová and Mgr.A. Karolína Kopřivová were engaged as external teachers for the art subjects.
Both schools – the four years Secondary Industrial and the triennial High Professional – have achieved noticeable pedagogic and artistic results. The designers and the workshop teachers together with the teachers of professional and generally educating subjects have created necessary conditions for the pupils both for getting the required theoretical knowledge and for manufacture of the hot shaped and decorated, painted, etched, cut, slumped and melted glasses. The results of individual departments differ in the creative processes, but are similar in the interest in the glass, in the approach to the material destined by its properties for use both in the automatic mass production and in the demanding art-and-skill limited serial workshop and studio creative manufacture.
For the Czech glass industry equally, if not more important chemical-technological branch has been still existing at the school, however wrongfully in the shade of the creative, more easily presentable and more popular departments and, despite of the major interest of the glass industry for its graduates, still marginalized by the students.
The destiny of the glass school Nový Bor has reflected the social, economical and cultural events, life stories of individuals and interest groups, successes and failures. They have helped the school to live and in the scope of given opportunities to influence the glass industry development not only in the North Bohemia.
The High Professional School of Glass and the Secondary Industrial School of Glass Nový Bor confirm their abilities to enter the third millennium.
The Glass Nový Bor school was founded in 1870, as the local glass businessmen appreciated its necessity not only due their own interests but also due to the further industrial development of the whole region. The actually built railway from Bakov to Rumburk via Česká Lípa and Nový Bor linked not only Nový Bor with the world but also the world with Nový Bor. The transportation of semi-products from the other Bohemian glass regions to the town as well as of coal and other raw materials, necessary for the glass manufacture became easier, faster and first of all cheaper. After their processing in the new glassworks Nový Bor got rid of the dependence on the production of semi-products in the regions of Českomoravská highlands, Jizera Mountains, Sázava Valley and South Bohemia. The possibility of the railway transportation of the finished products both for inland and foreign customers was probably even more important for Nový Bor.
The 70s and 80s of the 19th century represented the period of construction of new glassworks and refineries. It was also a time of revolutionary intellectual changeovers in the production changing slowly its character from the art-and-craft into the industry. The most progressive oriented glass manufacturers understood very soon that – so as not to lose their positions both in the most important foreign markets and in the inland ones – it remained nothing but to response the changing market demands more responsively and first of all more flexibly by means of new products and to invite appropriate experts to co-operate. Ludwig Lobmeyr from Vienna indicated - thanks to his success at the Vienna World Exhibition - the way of seeking the experts: graduates of the schools of applied arts and curators of collections of the museums of applied arts. It was necessary to train the prospective associates for their new tasks. Only a part of them could be trained according to the demands of the art-and-craft manufacture at the schools of applied arts at Vienna and Prague. The manufacture needed midrange technicians and professionals, educated technologists and designers, but also qualified masters and workers. When speaking about the second half of the 19th century we mean the period of still prevailing hand manufacture above the machinery and of the beginning of formation of the proper professional educational system in the Austria-Hungary. The entrepreneurs of Nový Bor had appreciated the usefulness of qualified glass workers and masters already before. They realized the necessity of skillful painters and engravers with the essential knowledge of drawing and for that reason they trained them in painting and drawing according to graphic patterns in the Piarist school already from the 60s of the 18th century. After closing of the school they wished to compensate it by a professional painting and modelling school. At its opening the school didn’t offer more theoretical knowledge and practical experience than the Piarist one: painting and modelling were taught but drawing was taught to be the very basis of everything. The Nový Bor school taught it until the end of 1930s not only in the regular day classes but also in the afternoon, evening and Sundays classes for the pupils of primary and basic schools and for trained glass workers and masters.
At the moment of adopting of the full responsibility for the professional schools at Austria-Hungary by the state the administration was transferred first to the Ministry of Industry, than to the Ministry of Culture and Education and the schools became already institutions nearing - due to their orientation and education plans - to our conceptions of theoretical and practical education of prospective glassmakers at the secondary industrial schools.
Besides painting and modelling the schools taught also common educational and professional subjects, as well as the workshop practice, in case of the Nový Bor school it was painting and engraving, later on cutting, and finally hot shaping of glass.
An important moment not only for the further development of the professional education represented its submission to Vienna and following emphasis on the participation of qualified, usually from a school of applied art graduated architects, sculptors and painters, on the professional orientation of schools and on the education of pupils. Therefore, they were appointed by Vienna in the posts of both directors and professors-designers. The suitable personalities for the posts of workshop teachers were sought after in the regions. (In the same way the directors, professors and teachers were chosen both in the Czechoslovak Republic and nowadays as well.)
Initially, the professional schools had provided only a basic overview of the contemporary design and development tendencies. Any independent designing activities were neither awaited nor required. The activities appeared first in the schools where the pedagogues with their own design and skill ambitions were active. The schools started also taking part in exhibitions (the Nový Bor school took part already in the Vienna World Exhibition in 1873) and co-operating with local manufacturers. The contact with them was facilitated thanks to the historical and current pieces allowed for the schools to borrow for their expositions from the Viennese or Liberec museums as well as due to the own industrially usable designs and patterns prepared for the local entrepreneurs both by teachers and pupils. The Nový Bor school became soon the most active especially thanks to the design activities of its director Daniel Hartel and other professors.
The art-and-skill and design activities (not only in the glass manufacture) in the second half of the 19th century was influenced by the historizing tendencies – return to the Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque styles. The Nový Bor school was influenced by them as well as by the contemporary interest in the oriental art and possibilities of its use first of all in the glass painted with the colour enamels and gold. It the proper time the school oriented its interests also on the Art Nouveau, adopted its design conceptions and made possible also the manufacturers, especially the glass and china painters, to meet the new art. The glass professional education history has documented the decisive share of personalities overlapping the regional borders due to their knowledge, artistic authority and organizing abilities, on its results. Both before and after 1945, the glass Nový Bor school have had comparatively many good glass pedagogues-designers, on the other hand better-than-average directors were only an exception.
Undoubtedly, the first successful director was Daniel Hartel, however we don’t know too much about his artistic activities. He was entitled to lead the school in 1881 and there he stayed as director until 1907. In 1892 the Nový Bor school was moved into the building used until now.
The second director Heinrich Strehblow, a Viennese painter, for the school undoubtedly even more important, changed the glass school within a short time after his arrival to Nový Bor (1907) into an exceptional institute due to its educational and non-educational activities, with results that could be probably compared only with the contemporary ones. Strehblow enriched the workshop training by glass cutting, built the hot shop and the research and experimental institute as parts of the school. Among his greatest successes there was the enforcement of the direct school influence onto a group of manufacturers based on his demonstration of the firm J. Oertel & Co. that a progressively oriented manufacture can be interested also economically. The school had offered its designs to the glass and chandeliers’ manufacturers already before, but they usually changed them. Strehblow deprecated such co-operation and persisted on manufacture of the school designs without a change. Otherwise they were not allowed to use the label “made according to the school design”. He checked the observance of the co-operation principles. Strehblow was an educated artist familiar with the most progressively oriented applied art shielded by the production of the Wiener Werkstätte. At the school he leant on the other able designers and workshop teachers. The school was very successful also in the glass research and in its hot shop.
The school works were influenced by designs of the “Viennese” late Art Nouveau painted glass, but its most important artistic contribution to the glass manufacture before the World War I was the hot pre-shaped, colour overlayed and finally cut through glass, pieces thanking for their origin both to the creative invention and to the co-operation of the school hot shop and cutting workshop.
The leading status in the region was kept by the school also in the twenties as the glass in the Art Deco style – the view more confidential to the local manufacturers than Functionalism suppressing the decoration - using the traditional decorative painting technologies of Nový Bor broke through. The influence of the school wasn’t as convicting as before, however it remained considerable. In 1922 two graduates of the school – Artur Pleva and František Pazourek - became students of the Prague School of Applied Arts. They were the very first students of professor Drahoňovský mastering the glass engraving and helped him to overcome problems with the technique he wanted to pursue preferentially together with the glyptics in his atelier (as well as in his own creative activities). Strehblow was the director till 1929 (from 1926 he was also the director of the Kamenický Šenov school). In the 1930s the Nový Bor school got no director comparable with Strehblow but its professors became artistically and socially ambitious designers, for example Alexander Pfohl and Jaroslav Holeček, whereby the former studied at the Viennese School of Applied Arts and the latter at the Prague one.
The Nový Bor school graduates with artistic ambitions applied for studies at the art oriented universities since 1882 when the first two of them were admitted, followed by others. Some of them returned to Nový Bor. Also in the 1920s and 1930s they preferred to study in Vienna against Prague more due to the nationality then to professional reasons. When entering the Nový Bor school Alexander Pfohl was very experienced in the glass manufacture. Jaroslav Holeček was interested in the glass for architecture. He realized several large painted and lead sealed windows in the school workshops. His importance for the school was multiplied by the fact that he was the first Czech pedagogue in the German school, that he gained recognition in opening first Czech business department and later Czech design department in the time when the number of Czech glass businesses grew in the region of Nový Bor, as well as that his pre-war Czech pupils became important after-war glass artists, pedagogues and other professionals.
For the next personality in the post of the director the school had to wait until 1945. It was RNDr. Jaromír Špaček, a pre-war Czech teacher, who was confided to take over the German glass schools in Nový Bor and Kamenický Šenov and to revive the professional education after the World War II however now already with Czech pedagogues and pupils. He fulfilled the task as both the schools started the education already in September 1945. Dr. Špaček had got reliable colleagues both in artists and in workshop teachers, among them the pre-war pupils of the glass Nový Bor school as Stanislav Libenský, Miloslav Babický, Otakar Novák and Vlastimil Pospíchal as well as Josef Hospodka and Karel Hrodek. Similarly to their German predecessors they didn’t limited their teaching and creative activities only onto the school. They adopted a very demanding and also – as showed later – just very hardly performable task: to get the Czech glass industry and to modernize it. Therefore in the first several after-war years they were never missing throughout where it was decided about the Czech glass production in the region of Nový Bor. In August 1945 they arranged together with other glassmakers from the region under the Lusitanian Mountains the first collective exhibition of the “Block of Czech Glass” members. They initiated a countrywide glass competition, many of them took part in the imposing exhibition in Liberec and they weren’t also missing in other exhibitions. In 1948 after the establishment of the national enterprise Umělecké sklo at Nový Bor they became designers of its Studios as still believing in the possibility of influencing the glass industry not only in the region of Nový Bor but also in the whole republic by its means. After their entering the school they were interested in engraving, cutting and painting of glass and in the glass techniques and technologies most important for the region. In the stained glass creation they employed both the possibilities based on putting the glass into lead and the cutting equipment for the relief processing of the flat glass installed in the school at the end of the 1930’s. They have got significant results in the engraved glass based on the pre-war and war artistic tradition the author of which was Karel Hrodek, as well as in the irregularly relief cut glass which was the beginning of Josef Hospodka already at the school under professor Holeček. But especially the painted glass designed by Stanislav Libenský and realized by his pupils using transparent enamels and etching was represented as an artistic acquisition due to both its untraditional use of traditional technologies and figural motifs inspired by Christian traditions, Czech history, folk art and black people culture. It was this most positively appraised Libenský’s glass, which was short after the February communist putsch both the reason of accusation of the school of cosmopolitism, formalism and idealism and of the submission of a proposal for its closing. The threat was executed at the beginning of the 1950’s.
Dr. Špaček who founded also the chemical-glass melting department of the school already in the first after-war years, became in 1950 the director of the chemical-glass melting and apprentice school at Chřibská, moved two years later after closing the High Professional Glass School oriented onto design to Nový Bor. He was the director of the school till 1969 when he became the National Committee Chairman.
With the opening of the Secondary Industrial School of Glass a new chapter of the local glass school history began, a chapter adumbrated by the shameful and for the Czechoslovak glass industry fatal liquidation of the glass schools in Nový Bor and Kamenický Šenov. The original decision to build up in the region a school oriented onto technology and chemistry couldn’t be challenged. The glass industry with the breaking through machine industrial production based on scientific knowledge, with the growing interest in special chemical, technical and optical glasses needed such a school, but together with a school oriented on the art.
The Nový Bor school tried (without a success) to follow its predecessor, for example in use of the school glassworks for an experimental glass production. In the middle of the 1950s before the reunion of the school fellows the school proposed to revive the glass education in the traditional techniques of painting and cutting enhanced by a new subject of construction and manufacture of lighting appliances in Kamenický Šenov. The idea was realized, the education was revived and in 1957 – 1962 the school of Kamenický Šenov acted as a branch of the Nový Bor one. Dr. Špaček supported the lasting connection of both institutes. In 1964 he enforced opening of the hot glass shaping department as a part of the chemical-technological Nový Bor school. The first pedagogue-designer of the department became Oldřich Lipský who was later on, in the 1970s and 1980s the director of the schooL. The Nový Bor school had stayed primarily chemical-technologically oriented till 1980s. In 1988 due to the decision of the Ministry of Education the professional training of glassmakers for hot shaping has been enhanced by glass painting and cutting. After the Velvet Revolution in November 1989 and finishing the 40 years long communist domination the school has taken advantage of the decision. The people have got back the right to live free, to undertake and also to develop their ideas and initiatives. Thanks to the new creative departments the academic sculptor Václav Machač responsible for the artistic orientation of the hot shaped glass has been joined by the academic painter Zdenka Štipáková and academic sculptor Miroslav Čermák for painting and the academic sculptor Pavel Werner for glass cutting.
In 1990 Mgr. Pavel Zatloukal became the school director. Under his management the school results in the 1990s were comparable with the most successful ones from the previous times. First of all, he managed to set up material supports for the education of glass professionals in the fields of technique and design. The buildings on the Palacký Street and Palacký Square were reconstructed where there were built up the school gallery and shop in the historical building, the headquarters were complemented by professional classrooms and a gym. The school concluded with the town an contract of the 20 years long lease of the glassworks which begun its operation in June 1994 after being equipped with glass melting furnaces and other technical and technological equipments. It has become both the material basis for the education of the hot shaping department and the manufacturing center for objects and semi-products for the painting and cutting departments.
Efforts for modernization of the school and its approach to the needs of the Czech glass industry culminated in the opening of the triennial High Professional School of Glass preceded by the authorization of the complete basic documentation prepared by the school, by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Physical Education of the Czech Republic in 1996.
The High Professional School of Glass Nový Bor was founded in order to develop and to finalize the education of the secondary art schools’ graduates in the field of the art and skill, to make them possible to study other glass techniques and producing operations they couldn’t meet during their previous studies. It has been oriented onto the manufacture of the high skilled demanding and technical sophisticated art glass and onto the development of artistic conditions of students in order to prepare them for posts of designers and top craftsmen both in private glass workshops and in art glass studios and/or for individual glass designing activities.
The gradual enlargement of the high school needed an enlargement of the pedagogical staff. Academic painter Pavel Homolka, academic sculptor Stanislav Honzík, academic sculptor Antonie Jankovcová and Mgr.A. Karolína Kopřivová were engaged as external teachers for the art subjects.
Both schools – the four years Secondary Industrial and the triennial High Professional – have achieved noticeable pedagogic and artistic results. The designers and the workshop teachers together with the teachers of professional and generally educating subjects have created necessary conditions for the pupils both for getting the required theoretical knowledge and for manufacture of the hot shaped and decorated, painted, etched, cut, slumped and melted glasses. The results of individual departments differ in the creative processes, but are similar in the interest in the glass, in the approach to the material destined by its properties for use both in the automatic mass production and in the demanding art-and-skill limited serial workshop and studio creative manufacture.
For the Czech glass industry equally, if not more important chemical-technological branch has been still existing at the school, however wrongfully in the shade of the creative, more easily presentable and more popular departments and, despite of the major interest of the glass industry for its graduates, still marginalized by the students.
The destiny of the glass school Nový Bor has reflected the social, economical and cultural events, life stories of individuals and interest groups, successes and failures. They have helped the school to live and in the scope of given opportunities to influence the glass industry development not only in the North Bohemia.
The High Professional School of Glass and the Secondary Industrial School of Glass Nový Bor confirm their abilities to enter the third millennium.
Antonín Langhamer
For more information: www.glassschool.cz
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