Bertil Vallien
Updated: 3 days ago
Åfors and Kosta, Småland · from 1963
Bertil Vallien is the Swedish artist behind the glass boats: long hulls cast in sand, with small objects suspended inside the glass. Since 1963 he has worked for the glassworks of Småland, and for most of those years he has done two jobs at once - glass for the table, and glass made only to be looked into.
Who is he, how is glass cast in sand, and what helps when a piece of his turns up secondhand?
From clay to glass
Vallien was born in Stockholm in 1938 and grew up in Sollentuna, north of the city, one of seven children of a house painter who was also a preacher. The household was strictly religious.
He trained as a potter. At Konstfack, the Stockholm school of art and design, he studied ceramics under Stig Lindberg and graduated in 1961. He then went to Los Angeles, designed for a small ceramics factory and won a prize in the Young Americans competition in New York.
Glass came with an offer. The Åfors glassworks in Småland asked him to come and design, and in 1963 he returned to Sweden. He first made a few pieces for the centenary of the Boda glassworks, then started at Åfors on a six-month contract. The same year he married Ulrica Hydman, a ceramics student he had met at Konstfack. From the early 1970s she designed for Åfors too.
Two jobs at one glassworks
At Åfors, Vallien had two roles from the start. As a designer he drew everyday glass, to be made in long runs and sold at a modest price. As an artist he made pieces with no use at all. In 1979 he said it felt almost like having two professions.
The series paid for the art and kept people in work. Kosta Boda counts this among the main forces behind his work: jobs, and a glassworks that keeps going.
In the 1960s he drew at least one set of glasses a year, twelve in all. Dragon (1964), Husar (1965) and Picnic (1967) were the big successes. They share straight, roomy bowls and fairly thick walls - drawn against the thin, fragile glass of the 1950s.
One of the first, Basun ("trombone", 1963), was also made in blue: a tulip-shaped bowl, a short stem with a knop, a round foot. Among the MYT' finds are twelve blue glasses of this form, four in each of three sizes, still with their paper stickers: "BODA, Åfors Bruk, Sweden".
In 1981 came Château: thin stemware, blown by mouth, with an optic pattern and a twist in its shape. Kosta Boda says he drew it in about a month, as a glass that machines could not make. It is still in production.
The Blenko notes mention that a trained designer on the staff of a glassworks was, in the 1940s, a common arrangement in Scandinavia. Vallien's years at Åfors show it from the inside.
Glass cast in sand
The technique he is known for began early. In 1966, at Åfors, Vallien made a small sculpture by pouring glass into sand. Nationalmuseum in Stockholm bought it the following year. The museum notes that he "has not tried to tame the viscous molten glass, but rather to follow it".
The first casts were rough. Mastering the method took close to twenty years: colour entered the casts in the early 1980s, the first boat that worked came in 1983, faces in relief around 1987. The Corning Museum of Glass dates his pioneering of sand casting to the 1980s; the piece of 1966 shows where it began.
This is how a cast is made, as Vallien described it in the mid-1990s:
Damp sand is packed into a metal box. A light wooden template is pushed through it, back and forth, until the hollow has the shape of the piece.
The walls of the hollow are marked with pens and sticks, fingers and fists, found objects. Each mark comes out in relief on the glass.
Graphite powder keeps the sand from sticking. Coloured oxides are sieved over chosen areas, and the molten glass takes them up.
Glass is carried from the furnace in ladles and poured, several ladles in quick succession. Between pours, small objects - glass rods, crosses, figures - are laid in, to stay held inside.
The mould goes into the annealing oven to cool slowly, for one to three weeks depending on size. The move to the oven is the most anxious moment: falling sand or a sudden loss of heat can ruin the piece.
The sand leaves a skin on the glass. On some pieces it stays, rough and red; on others it is blasted off and the surface polished.
Vallien has taught widely: in the United States from 1974, then as artist-in-residence at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Pilchuck in Washington State. The Corning Museum of Glass credits him with influencing a generation of glass artists in Europe and beyond. In 1995 the King of Sweden awarded him the Prince Eugen Medal for artistic achievement.
The boats
Vallien cast small clear-glass boats as early as 1977. In January 1979 an exhibition of his stoneware sculptures in Stockholm, Farkoster ("Vessels"), showed the boat to the public for the first time. From 1983 came the large hulls cast in sand.
The Corning Museum of Glass links them to Viking boat burials and to journeys, memory and time. The cargo varies: rods, crosses, figures, signs that seem to float in the glass.
One of them is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London: Destination X, about 1986, a hull on a granite base. Its record names two people: Vallien as designer, and Roland Johansson as glassblower.
Others stand in public places. Precious Cargo (2002) is a glass hull set on a wall of rusted steel outside the Gothenburg Opera, facing the river. A votive ship of glass (2005) hangs in the church at Ryssby, in Småland.
Reading a piece
His series glass was made in runs; the cast pieces, one at a time. A few facts help with both.
Château has been in production since 1981, so the name alone does not date a glass.
Åfors, Kosta and Boda belonged to one group, later named Kosta Boda. Åfors closed in 2013; since then Vallien's glass has been made at Kosta.
Some of his Åfors glass carries the Boda name: the stickers on the blue glasses, an advertisement for his Baccus set ("Boda, Åfors Bruk, Sweden"), a sand-cast vase of the 1960s in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, engraved "Boda - Åfors" and "B. Vallien".
A cast piece may carry a signature and number cut into the glass. The V&A boat is incised "B Vallien", a nine-digit number and "Kosta".
Nationalmuseum, the V&A, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Corning Museum of Glass show their pieces online, with dates and makers: a way to check a form or a signature.
Two kinds of glass
A blue Basun glass on a table and a boat in a museum case were drawn by the same man, for the same few glassworks in Småland. One is made to be used, the other to be looked into. Both are worth keeping.
Sources: Nationalmuseum, Stockholm - artist and object records; Victoria and Albert Museum, Destination X*; The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, C.2-2014; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Corning Museum of Glass,* Behind the Glass*, 18 April 2015; Kosta Boda - designer and artist pages, Château; Sveriges Kungahus, Prince Eugen Medal 1945–2009; Galleri Glas, CV Bertil Vallien, 2024; Traver Gallery, biography; Nicola Brady,* Form and Process in Bertil Vallien's sandcasts*, NCAD, 1995; bertilvallien.se (Björn Önnerhag, after Gunnar Lindqvist, 1990); Swedish Wikipedia - Bertil Vallien, Åfors glasbruk, Orrefors Kosta Boda.*
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