meet asian art: Peking Glass

Contrary to the Middle East and Europe, glass had been known in China for about 2 ½ millenniums but played a minor role for a long time. Only after Jesuit scholars at the Peking Court were commissioned with the establishment of an imperial glassworks in the late 17th century, a very distinct style of glass art evolved that manifested surprisingly little Western influence. The art of glassmaking reached its peak under Emperor Qianlong (reign: 1736-95) but continued into the 19th and early 20th century.

This show presents masterpieces from the Museum Angewandte Kunst’s Peking glass collection, which comprises over one hundred works and is one of the most important of its kind in Europe. The multicoloured cameo glass from China subsequently had a defining impact on European Jugendstil, especially on Émile Gallé, who is known to have studied Chinese glass intensively. Likewise monochrome Peking glass of the 18th and 19th century often manifests surprising forms that anticipate the modernism of Bauhaus.