Wright Auction

The Sentinel of Venice is a sculpture, not a vase, and an incredibly abstract and conceptual one at that. Today this might not seem particularly significant, but in 1962, the very year in which the American studio art glass movement began, the creation of this conceptual sculpture at Venini was a statement of almost reckless individuality, and at the same time a tribute to a thousand years of glassmaking in Venice as seen through the eyes of an American visionary artist.

By all accounts, Stearns’ time at Venini was difficult, emotionally traumatic, and artistically challenging. His initially maligned asymmetrical forms were in fact carefully considered sculptural objects—an ambitious blend of historical reference, late abstract expressionist vigor, pop-art, and direct personal narrative. The Capello del Doges are a fine example of this; more conceptual than biomorphic, a true departure from Murano’s unspoken naturalism, more radical, and coming from a place of creative enthusiasm and relative innocence, even naiveté. But this has always been the great strength of American art and artists: free to face the creative void unburdened by the demands of culture and history.

Originally conceived as a three element installation, only two of the Sentinels survive today (the third was destroyed in transport and exists only as a fragment). As the last works created by Stearns at Venini, the Sentinels are a final outpouring of admiration, fantasy, pain, love and veneration, and are therefore appropriately composed of all the elements and technique for which Murano’s craftsmen have become famous—complex glass canes, murrine, vivid opaque and smoky transparent colors, etching, carving and amazingly difficult hot-work manipulation.

To say that La Sentinella di Venezia is rare, or important, or a masterwork is far less than sufficient. This work is certainly the greatest work by Stearns ever to come to market and perhaps the most important piece of glass ever created at Venini. Beyond that, the Sentinel represents the most ambitious and pure type of artistic creation of which humans are capable. Stearns said it best himself:

“All my artistic endeavors have been based on responses, which is to say they are products of my experience and inner feelings. Implicit in this is the sense that any individual with an open receptive mind’s eye can move though any aesthetic media without a fear of artistic self-delusion. It seems to me that any artistic endeavor should move freely and at will. This concept is not merely a fleeting notion, but reflects a continuum of self-purpose. Mediums become vehicles, and a variety of vehicles make for a variety of realms. Each conceives and brings about the existence of a not yet inhabited domain.”