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Design at the Christmas tree

Art Glass – tree decoration from around 1920

17 November 2018 – 10 February 2019

This year, our small Christmas show is dedicated to a very special and little-known tree decoration: so-called Art Glass from the period around 1920. Its artistic development into handcrafted glass decoration was influenced by the new era of Art Deco.

These new hollow glass animals, which normally stood on dressers as knickknacks, were equipped with melted-on glass hooks or metal fasteners around the year 1920 and made as Christmas decorations. Such Art Deco decorations, usually made of white translucent glass, were freely blown in Lauscha (Thuringia) and the surrounding towns. A wide variety of animals, such as dogs, geese, deer, cranes, elephants, and giraffes, were also made of colored translucent glass with stripes or reflective glass. Sparkly and textured glass, which were commonly used in traditional Christmas decorations until that time, were consciously avoided for this new kind of glass decoration. The point was to purposefully emphasize the beauty of the material, the glass.

These extraordinary and extremely delicate Christmas decorations are freshly restaged in the special exhibition. Using the exhibits on loan from collector Alfred Dünnenberger of Switzerland, we have been able to decorate five Christmas trees with glass animals and other glass ornaments. The blue color of the trees comes together with the glass decorations to form a unique whole.