Glass

Glass is an amorphous inorganic substance made by fusing silica with a basic oxide; it is generally transparent but may be translucent or opaque. At ordinary temperatures glass is hard, while at elevated temperatures it can be worked plastically — the hot methods of working it artistically rest on this, whereas the cold ones — cutting, grinding, engraving — work the glass in its hard state. Glass first appeared in Mesopotamia about 3500 BCE as a glaze; the first objects made wholly of glass date from about 2500 BCE.

Art glass is classified by the way the material is worked. Hot-worked glass (Ukrainian hutne sklo) takes its final form hot, at the furnace: it is free-blown or blown into a mould, modelled, and overlaid with coloured layers and threads. Stained glass is a work of monumental decorative art made of pieces of coloured glass held in a framework, traditionally of lead, and meant to be seen by transmitted light. “Glass” in this glossary is thus the name of a material, not of a single technique.

In Ukraine glass ornaments and vessels were already made in the time of Kyivan Rus. Glassworks, called huty, are mentioned in documents from the sixteenth century; the word itself came from German together with Bohemian and German glass. Ukrainian hot-worked glass flourished from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century: square bottles, small casks, figural bear-shaped bottles. The art was revived after the Second World War by artists of the Lviv region; a hot-glass workshop opened in Lviv in 1962, and international symposia of blown glass have been held there since 1989. Artists of the Lviv school include Andrii Bokotei.