Тимо Сарпанева: Финн дизайнерасы мен суретшісінің шығармашылығы

Finnish designer, sculptor and educator

Timo Tapani Sarpaneva (31 October 1926 – 6 October 2006) was an influential Finnish designer, sculptor, and educator best known in the art world for innovative work in glass, which often merged attributes of display art objects with utilitarian designations. While glass remained his most commonly addressed medium, he worked with metal, wood, textiles, and porcelain (china). Sarpaneva has entered homes around the world through his industrial design of upscale, artistically conceived items, including cast iron cookware and porcelain dinnerware. His work was among the key components that helped to launch Finland's reputation as a trailblazer of design.

Sarpaneva was a prolific designer of glass art, both sculpture and functional objects. He pioneered many new methods in glass making, together with the glassblowers of Iittala glassworks. Among the new methods developed was the wet stick method where spherical spaces within glass are created not by blowing, but by protruding a wet stick into the glass mass. The contact with the hot mass causes the water to evaporate whereupon the vapor blows a cavity into the glass. The glassmakers of Iittala developed a habit of picking up, on their way to work, fallen branches of apple trees, a type of wood particularly well suited for the purpose. This method is central to many of Sarpaneva's glass art series, such as Kajakki and Orchid. that included Sarpaneva's series Orkidea ("Orchid"), Kajakki ("Kayak"), and Lansetti ("Lancet") adopted for production by Iittala. He said of his favorite material:<blockquote>Glass is very mysterious. It's changing all the time. That's what makes it magical. It released me from the conventional and the three dimensional. It opened its deepest reaches to me and took me on a journey to a fourth dimension. I understood the opportunities that clear, transparent glass gives to an artist and designer. "Lancet II" of the latter series, an asymmetrical clear glass vase whose shape is only partly echoed by its hollow center, was selected by the U. S. magazine House Beautiful as "The Most Beautiful Design Object of the Year" 1954. At his hands distinctions between pure and applied art gradually became less and less meaningful – the glass vases he created in the 1950s exhibited clear sculptural qualities long before he decided to sever his connection with the vessel as a form in 1964 and to make pure sculpture in glass. The Lancet went on to inspire future generations of artists, including architect Ian Simpson whose London skyscraper One Blackfriars was inspired by its shape.

The Finlandia line of "bark glass" vases produced by Iittala in 1964 1970 brought about another innovation, mass produced household objects each of which was, in a way, exclusive. The collection was distinguished by the presence of thick glass with a rough surface that brought to mind snow and ice, replacing in one blow the smooth, thin, streamlined colored glass of the 1950s. Sarpaneva recalled:<blockquote>I found a heap of discarded wooden molds used for making polished glass and decided to make a different kind of glass with them. Each piece was slightly different in its shape and surface.

Sarpaneva made his and Finland's largest glass sculpture, Ahtojää ("Pack Ice," renamed from Jäävuori, "Iceberg"), for the Finnish pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal in 1967. Sarpaneva expanded his original concept by attaching Meren peili ("Mirror of the Sea") below Ahtojää, mirror panes interpreting the surface of the sea (the Baltic Sea is partly covered with ice around Finland in the winter, but ice free in the summer), in order to reminisce on fluidity and the cycle of life, which also subsumed a Finnish take on the two manifestations of the country's denotative multitude of lakes – white ice in the winter and a blue mirror in the summer. Nordic art specialists often compared Sarpaneva's ability to capture light along with its hues to looking through ice beneath the sea.

Glass was also the material of his rare work that addressed trans Atlantic cultural influences. The small, black blown glass piece Smile with a glossy finish features two large Disneyesque ears rising above a mouth and refers to Mickey Mouse. The ears signify Mickey's state of being, while the sculpture transforms Mickey into a set of abstract geometric relationships.

Sarpaneva's artistically conceived design lines gained in resale value to the degree that forgeries became profitable. The Finnish police estimated the total value of the forgeries of his and some of his peers' designs reached millions of euros and expected it to grow. Occasional, partly tongue in cheek, criticism of some of the designs – that the versatile teak handle with the cast iron pot would get lost, that white Suomi showed tea stains unlike classic British brown tea pots – did not undermine their appreciation. Historically, Christie's executives commented on growth in resale value especially with Sarpaneva's glass creations for the Italian Venini company. Older objects from the same series would be more valuable, for instance, an item from the first year of the Kajakki (Kayak) series, which ran from 1953 to 1959, might fetch 50% more than the same object from the last year of production. Bargain hunters occasionally reported high returns, including the purchase of a Sarpaneva glass plate for 25 cents in a garage sale, which turned out to have a resale value of US$1,000.