Erwin Eisch

Erwin Eisch (18 April 1927 – 25 January 2022) was a German artist who worked with glass.

He was also a painter, draughtsman, and printmaker.

Eisch's work in glass, along with that of his friend and colleague Harvey Littleton, embodies the ideas of the international studio glass movement.

Eisch is considered a founder of the studio glass movement in Europe.

Eisch was the eldest of six children of glass engraver Valentin Eisch and his wife, Therese Hirtreiter.

The family lived in the town of Frauenau in Bavaria, where Valentin Eisch was employed as a master engraver at the glass factory of Isidor Gistl.

The Eisch family was by no means well-off.

His father supplemented his income by bringing work home to engrave on Sundays.

The family also kept a cow, goats, and chickens to put milk, eggs and meat on the table.

With Hitler's rise to power the village of Frauenau, located near the border with Czechoslovakia, suffered under the Nazi regime.

According to Erwin Eisch, his family, as well as most of the people in Frauenau, were Communists during the Weimar Republic and unsympathetic to National Socialism.

Eisch was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1945 at age 18.

He saw three months of service in Czechoslovakia and Denmark before he was taken prisoner by the British.

After an internment of three and a half months, he returned to Frauenau where he learned glass engraving from his father.

From 1946 to 1948 Eisch worked at this trade in the family's cutting and engraving shop while studying at the school of glassmaking in nearby Zwiesel.

After taking his journeyman's examination in engraving in 1949 Eisch entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste), where he studied glass design, sculpture and interior architecture, returning to Frauenau in 1952 to assist his parents and two brothers, Alfons and Erich, in founding a glassworks there.

Within a few years the Eisch Glass Factory (Glashütte Eisch) employed a staff of some 200 people.

He, along with other young artists in the late 1950s, was aware of the Tachisme and Art Informel movements.

Eisch, however, gravitated toward social criticism and anti-art establishment actions.

The glass objects shown by Eisch dated from 1952.

He described the works as "full of all kinds of provocative themes and very unusual glass work, antifunctional, colorful, grotesque."

Harvey Littleton called his first meeting with Erwin Eisch a milestone in his development as a glass artist.

Eisch returned to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1956, where he continued his studies in sculpture and painting.

In 1958 he was a founding member of the artist's group SPUR at the Munich Academy.

Art scholar Susie J. Silbert identified SPUR as a Situationist group intent on revitalizing European culture by emphasizing artistic individualism.

Quoting the group's 1958 manifesto, she wrote: "Art relies upon instinct, upon primary creative forces. To the detriment of all intellectual spectators, these free, wild forces always push toward the appearance of new, unexpected forms."

Eisch left the group in 1959.

In 1960, with his future wife, Gretel Eisch and the artist Max Strack, Eisch formed the group RADAMA.

The group became notorious for publishing a biography of a fictitious abstract painter, Bolus Krim, and holding a memorial exhibition of the "prematurely deceased" artist's work.

The Malura Gallery in Munich mounted "In Memory of Bolus Krim" in 1961.

According to Eisch, the exhibition was intended to reveal "the failure of the avante garde of the time."

Bolus Krim's work, of course, was actually that of RADAMA members; Eisch showed a number of his glass pieces along with his paintings and sculpture.

The ruse worked; art critics lavished praise on the exhibition and pronounced Krim a genius.

Those duped by Bolus Krim were outraged when the hoax was revealed.

Eisch left the Munich art scene soon after the scandal.

In 1962 he and Gretel Stadler married and settled in Frauenau.

There Eisch worked as the designer for the Eisch Glass Factory's commercial line of glassware, and Gretel learned to paint on glass.

The couple held their first joint exhibition at Tritschler in Stuttgart in the spring of 1962.

In August 1962 Littleton was visiting Germany on a research grant when he noticed, in the showroom of the Rimpler Kristall glass factory in Zwiesel, a piece of glass that was unlike the other objects on display.

Littleton was told that it was from the Eisch Glass Factory in the nearby town of Frauenau.