On a recent Venice excursion with my dear friend Nicolò Rubelli, we visited the island of San Giorgio Maggiore to see Sean Scully’s Bienniale exhibition. We then visited the Stanze del Vetro and were thoroughly enchanted by an exhibition of the work of 20th-century French glass master Maurice Marinot.
Marinot worked exclusively at the Viard glassworks in France until its closure in 1937. He designed many of the forms that would greatly influence contemporary glass for the next 60 years, and invented many of the techniques required to realize his visions.
We were seduced by the elegance, the seeming impossibility of his inventiveness and the extraordinary beauty of the objects.
In 1944, during the war, his studio in Troyes was bombed, destroying 2,500 objects. The collections of his sister and his daughter fortunately survived to be included in this important survey exhibition.