1. Robert Sowers was an American painter, photographer, stained glass artist, and seminal figure in the re-emergence of stained glass as an architectural art in the United States.
23 Facts About Robert Sowers
1. 2.
Robert Sowers was an exceptional photographer documenting his own as well as other artist's glass work and spent many hours walking the streets and parks of Manhattan and Brooklyn with camera in hand.
3.
Robert Sowers sold his first painting through OK Harris Gallery, and reviewed the first printing of his fourth book almost simultaneously with his untimely death in March 1990.
4.
Robert Sowers's archives are located at the Rakow Research Library, Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York.
5.
Robert Sowers's family moved to Florida in 1932 because his father Ray Sowers, a respected educator, was offered a position in the state.
6.
Robert Sowers's high school art teacher, Max Bernd-Cohen, encouraged his creativity, was a profound influence, and became a lifelong friend.
7.
Robert Sowers began to pursue stained glass commissions though it was an uphill battle to get the attention of Modernist architects of that time.
8.
Robert Sowers developed personal relationships and enduring friendships with a number of them and, most importantly, brought awareness of their work to a younger generation of glass artists and designers around the world.
9.
Robert Sowers stressed that artists in Germany operated as independent designers associating with the established studios as fabricators.
10.
Robert Sowers was antithetical to the prevalent system in the United States where the studios retained their own in-house designers to produce essentially commercial stained glass windows.
11.
Robert Sowers felt that as a number of services were conducted at nighttime any stained glass should work in some way under reverse conditions.
12.
Robert Sowers immersed himself in photography when he first spent time in Europe and it became a way to document his work.
13.
Robert Sowers spent time in Germany photographing the work of fellow glass artists primarily for illustrating his books but for dissemination back home.
14.
In 1979 Robert Sowers went back his first love of painting full-time.
15.
Robert Sowers had moved to a loft building on Degraw Street in Brooklyn where the space and light were perfect.
16.
Robert Sowers was an ambitious thinker and writer, always wishing to complement his stained-glass art with critical reflection.
17.
Robert Sowers drew upon his experience with English stained glass but reflected on the status of the art as a problem of modernism.
18.
Around 1960, Robert Sowers was increasingly struck by the tendency to pictorialize stained glass.
19.
Robert Sowers sensed that this was symptomatic both of modernism and an inability to understand the true nature of stained glass.
20.
In 1965, Robert Sowers published his second major work on stained glass: Stained Glass: An Architectural Art [New York: Universe Books].
21.
Robert Sowers was challenged by both historical variety but the latest contemporary art.
22.
Robert Sowers argued that there are three primary modalities: the pictorial, the sculptural and the architectural.
23.
Robert Sowers did not valorize purity of modality but argued that each was a kind of "center" that organized artistic practice.