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Harvey K. Littleton (American, born 1922)
Red Schizoid Form, 1977, glass.
Partial and promised gift, Adele and Leonard Leight Collection 1992.18.31

When Harvey Littleton organized a glass blowing workshop at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1962 he became a leader of the studio glass movement. In the seminar he introduced the idea that glass could be melted, blown and worked in the studio as an artistic medium. Up to that point, glass in the United State was mostly a highly industrialized mass produced commercial product. Littleton challenged people to see free-blown glass as a viable medium for individual artists. His experiments in glass led him to create work where the forms reveal the way it was made. In Red Schizoid Form two drooping, bulbous pods look as though they are flowing off the end of the glassblower’s pipe. These forms are a frozen record of their own creation. These silhouettes are truncated and arranged so that they appear as two pieces of a whole, and two forms in opposition creating an abstract sculptural composition.