Vintage art glass from Modernistglass.com - We only sell beautiful glass

Latest art glass listings

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How do I display my glass?
Hi. I found your site and looked at a few pieces and thought they might go well with our house, which is vaguely modern. But my concern is with displaying them - I'd want to show them off properly but don't have a good sense of how to do thi...

US $55 + shipping

1964 Finnish Oiva Toikka Kastehelmi (dewdrop) plates for Nuutajaarvi
This is a very cool, collectible design from 1964. As you can see, they display very well, but I would buy them to use. You could spend much more on a brand new set of plates and get much less for your money. Professor Oiva Toikka began designi...

US $1190 + shipping

Set of three 1950s signed Lindstrand Kosta off-centre sommerso vases
This is the first time we've been able to offer a set like this in green since October 2006. The largest one, in particular is getting very hard to find. A set like this graces our personal collection. The pictures and the videos should speak ...

US $320 + shipping

Large Fratelli Toso bowl with copper aventurine and feathered pattern
It's not exactly 'modernist', but this is a very fine piece of its type and very good value at this price. It's an example of the best of more traditional Murano mid-century design - swirling patterns of canes. feathering, and scalloped edges. We ...

US $470 + shipping

1960s Pavel Hlava signed Exbor Czechoslovakian art glass vase with cut glass windows
This piece really needed more than the ten photos our website allows. It has interesting surface decoration from the application, I believe, of a metallic oxide to the hot blue-cased glass. It also has window cuts on opposite sides of the vase; th...

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Sold 3 day(s) ago

Sold 13 day(s) ago

Sold 13 day(s) ago

CONGRATULATIONS to our Swedish colleagues, Pernilla and Hans, proud parents of another baby girl, Ester, on 20 June 2008.

Photo by Hans

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Our June preview went out to those on our mailing list on 3 June and of course a number of pieces sold immediately. It appeared on the website on 9 June. To get the earliest possible chance to see the preview, subscribe to our mailing list, in the left-hand column of any page of our website. Every month, we'll send you a link to some beautiful glass and some interesting information about it. Even if you never intend to buy anything, you'll brighten up your day by seeing and learning some more about some beautiful art glass.

See also our April and May previews.

"When I opened the box, the glass was so beautiful that I cried."

Who wouldn't love selling a product where you can get feedback like this? We don't get it every time, but we were pretty pleased to get it once - how many retailers did you ever hear of who made a customer cry with joy?

If you want to learn more about Scandinavian and Italian mid-century vintage art glass, and work out what you should be buying, we think this website is one of the best resources on the Internet. We used to try to list fresh pieces every day but at the moment we're trying to go with the big listing once a month idea - see above.

If you have questions, feel free to ask! And if you want to build a wonderful collection, tell us, and we'll help make it happen.

As you've probably seen, there is much more "vintage" art glass for sale on the Internet which is wrongly described than vintage art glass which is described correctly. Look at our site. You'll see that we know what we're doing. We don't buy junk and try to pass it off as treasure. We also pack really well. We've had thousands and thousands of pieces of glass sent to us through the post. We know the heartbreak of receiving a box that clinks with the sound of broken glass. We therefore pack really carefully ourselves, and of all the glass we've shipped, we've only had one breakage.

We have a money-back guarantee. If you don't love it, tell us straight away, then send it back, and we'll give you your money back.

Kind regards,

Viv and Peter Hattaway
Directors
Modernistglass.com Ltd

Some questions you might have

What is modernist glass?
Where is our glass located? What's our Swedish connection?
What makes glass an inherently beautiful art form?
Why is mid-century art glass such a bargain?
Why is vintage art glass an ethical purchase?
How do I use this site?

What is modernist glass?

The message in Modernist design is, "life is complex so remove the complication by surrounding yourself with things that are beautiful but simple." I think a lot of us can relate to that. So modernist glass tends to be elegantly simple.

That ties in with what we're trying to do in this business. We want to make your life easy and simple. It's like finding a good tradesman. When you find a plumber, say, who is honest and competent, and wants your business for the long term, you go back to him (or her) again and again, and you recommend him to your friends. We aim to be the equivalent in glass dealers.

Or here's another example: we know that when we go to a particular wine retailer in our city, we can trust the owners to point us to the best deal in a particular style of wine and price range. They can judge better than us because they taste a lot more wine than us; they have an incentive to direct us to something that we will like, so we keep coming back; and we know that they know their stuff because we learnt about wine at their regular Tuesday night tastings (before we had kids and our social life stopped). Again, we aim to be the equivalent in glass dealers.

Where is our glass located? What's our Swedish connection?

The test of good service is when something goes wrong. We once bought a piece of glass from a glass trader named Pernilla in Sweden. There was a minor problem with it but we were very, very impressed with the way she bent over backwards to make it right. "This," we thought, "is a person we can do business with." Several years later, Pernilla, (who we've still never met) is a trusted friend and business colleague.

We generally buy in Europe, then have it sent to Pernilla, who photographs, weighs, measures, and checks the pieces for damage or imperfections. The details and pictures go onto our website, along with our words. When the piece sells, Pernilla packs it and ships it. The process ensures that we can source glass from Europe which wouldn't otherwise be easily manageable. It's a wonderful example of the Internet making the world a smaller, friendlier, and more efficient place. Importantly, it reduces shipping costs, and the end prices, for our customers. It's one of the reasons that we can compete realistically on price and quality with retailers anywhere else in the world, even though we are based in New Zealand, far from many of our customers.

What makes glass an inherently beautiful art form?

Some materials are inherently beautiful - gold, silver, diamond... and glass. Glass is fluid and refracts and reflects light. The way it flows, lends itself to being made into beautiful objects, and good designers and craftsmen can make even functional and mundane objects which are things of beauty. Of course, there is plenty of ugly glass around, too. Our motto, and our guiding principle is, "we only sell beautiful glass," so that's our number 1 criterion in sourcing glass for our website.

A lot of modern art provokes and disturbs and challenges. There's certainly a place for this, but in limited doses. In my house I generally want things that are beautiful and interesting and fun and make me feel happy. It can provoke and challenge me too, but it has to be beautiful. Why surround yourself with things that are not beautiful?

Why is mid-century art glass such a bargain?

In a nutshell, it's because relatively few people realise yet that it is a bargain. It's the advantage of vintage. Say that 50 years ago, someone paid quite a lot of money for a beautiful object. It sat in grandma's house for 50 years, and then was sold off cheap. But it's still beautiful and stylish and very very collectable, if you can recognise its value and beauty. Ironically, it's often cheaper than art glass made today, even when the art glass made today tries to mimic vintage techniques and designs.

The 1940s to the 1970s was a dramatic period in the history of modern design - the time of a flowering of creativity in Italian and Scandinavian glass after the Second World War. It's the period when the glassblowers handed over the design role to trained designers, and modern design met traditional craftsmanship to create wonderful works of glass art. From around the 1970s, those traditional skills began to be lost as automation entered the glass industry and made craftsmanship uneconomic. Hand-made, mouth-blown glass, with slight variations from piece to piece, is always, in our view, superior to glass made by machine.

The cost of real craftsmanship today is the reason that quality modern mouth-blown glass is often much more expensive than vintage mouth-blown art glass. Buy the original!

We believe vintage glass is going to boom. It's really only just starting to be collected. We believe that it must appreciate. We believe we're in at the start of a flood of demand for mid-century art glass. Most people don't realise that glass can be as beautiful as it is. When we show it to them, they want some. But of course, every day there's less and less of it.

Why is vintage art glass an ethical purchase?

It may be overstating things to claim that you can save the planet by buying vintage glass, but essentially this is a form of recycling. Vintage glass doesn't burn any new energy; it's already made. And we pack using recycled material.

How do I use this site?

Glass for sale shows everything we have for sale on the site, in reverse order (most recently listed first), 10 to a page. Most people go through page by page, opening up particular pieces they like the look of. Many pieces will include links to other pieces by the same maker or designer.

Alternatively, you can click on any piece of glass, then click the Previous or Next link at the top of the page to move through the site, piece by piece.