PAGE 43 NILS LANDBERG’S TULIP GLASSES
● Nils Landberg is only 18 years old when he enters Orrefors’s newly established engraving school in 1925. The company is scouting new talent and the principal of the Crafts Society’s school in Gothenburg has recommended him as one of the students of interest.
After two years, Nils Landberg is promoted to the drawing studio where he becomes assistant mainly to Edward Hald. His job includes redrawing sketches and in a 1987 interview, Landberg recalls how he drew till the pencil glowed hot and his fingers ached. At the same time, he gains extensive knowledge of glassmaking and is entrusted to work on Hald’s Himmelsglob for the Stockholm Expo in 1930.
In the 1930-s and 40s, Nils Landberg evolves into an artist in his own right. His freehand blown glass for Orrefors subsidiary Sandvik receives much acclaim at Orrefors’s exhibition at NK. Art critic Gotthard Johansson calls them a welcome addition to the somewhat neglected category of More Beautiful Everyday Goods. Over the years, Nils Landberg designs around 700 different beverage glasses for Orrefors Sandvik, including the bestselling Illusion in 1957.
The tall tulip glasses are exhibited for the first time in 1954. Their funnel-shaped foot as well as thin cup and leg draw the gather to its limits and prove a real challenge for master blowers Henry Karlsson and Henry Bjerding.
“It was the most difficult, most fun and most interesting work I ever did… The orders kept coming in, they wanted tulip glasses over a metre tall. And we just had to smile and do it,” Henry Karlsson later tells author Ann Marie Herlitz-Gezelius in the book Orrefors: ett svenskt glasbruk.
Nils Landberg is well aware that the pieces he designed were not for casual use, saying in a 1986 interview: Thin legs are not meant for everyday life.
At the time almost 80 years old, the glass artist said that it had taken him a long time to come up with the technique of making the long thin legs, but that he was “hellbent on making a really thin leg work”.
Between 1954 and 1967, Nils Landberg designs over 100 different tulip glasses, with most of the models – some 25 to 30 – being designed in 1954. His breakthrough comes in 1957, after the Triennale in Milan, where he is awarded a gold medal. All this attention sparked the public’s interest, and many of the tulip glasses are made that year in particular.
– The earlier shapes from 1954 haven’t got the same height as those he designed later in the decade, his idea was constantly refined. He took the tulip glasses with him to Milan, and they’re what gave
