Born: 1892 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)
Died: 1955 London, England
Year of Migration to the UK: 1938
Biography
Designer and glassblower, Fritz Lampl was born to an affluent Jewish family in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1892. In his early years he became a poet and writer, mixing in Viennese artistic circles. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was exempted from the army due to ill health and he was subsequently assigned to write propaganda material. Afterwards, seeking a new career path and inspired by the fantasy shapes in glass he had seen at an exhibition in Berlin, he founded the Bimini Glass company in 1923, which produced lampwork glass sculptures of figures, animals and vases, as well as drinking glasses and decanters. Bimini became famous for its glass figurines, described by Lampl as 'frozen poetry', and designed by Lampl himself and his brother-in-law, the architect, Joseph Berger. The success of the firm was considerable and it was awarded a number of prizes, exhibiting throughout Europe and the USA.
In 1938 Lampl was forced to leave Austria due to the rise of Nazism and increasing anti-Semitism, and fled to London. By November 1938 he had received his certificate from the National Register of Industrial Art Designers in England, and in December his hand-blown glass featured alongside painted fabrics by Bettina Ehrlich in an exhibition held at 4, St. James's Street in central London. The Jewish Chronicle described his glass as ‘delightful’, adding: ‘there are little scent bottles with delicate figures inside, graceful vases reminiscent of the loveliest Venetian glass, beads looking like translucent green grapes with the bloom on them – each piece is a work of art’ (H. K. 1938, p. 46). From 1938–40 Lampl’s glassblowing venture was relaunched in a workshop in Soho, employing British glassblowers. He chose a new name for the company, 'Orplid', based on a German poem, Orplid by E. Morike. In 1939 his glass was included in the Christmas Exhibition organised by the Free German League of Culture (FGLC), a politically inspired left-leaning organisation offering cultural support to anti-Nazi German refugees in Britain throughout the war. Lampl and Berger were interned on the Isle of Man as enemy aliens in 1940. When Lampl was released a few months later, he discovered that his Soho workshop had been destroyed during the Blitz. Undaunted, he converted the basement of his rented house into a workshop. His decorative glass objects were in high demand and he started to produce glass buttons, for some using plaster casts of Roman coins supplied by the British Museum. Pressing the buttons was relatively unskilled work, and Lampl employed many émigré friends from Vienna, among them the potter, Lucie Rie, and writer, Erich Fried. In addition to making buttons, Lampl began producing tiny, charming glass decorations to put onto hatpins, which became very popular during the grim war years in Britain. A steady stream of brooches, glasses, and tableware was now being produced from the basement workshop in Hampstead, north London where Lampl and his wife now lived. Articles about Orplid were published in Vogue, Design Magazine and The Courier, among others, where Lampl was described as 'the Poet in Glass' and 'the Wizard in Glass'. In 1940 Lampl participated in the first exhibition of the International Craftsmen's Centre, held at Heal's furniture store on Tottenham Court Road. The Jewish Chronicle noted: ‘The purely decorative glassware by Fritz Lampl is exquisite. I suppose there is no one else in England capable of blowing a perfectly modelled and designed figure an inch or so high inside a glass bottle hardly bigger than and as delicate as a bubble’ (H.K. 1940, p. 25). In 1951, Orplid's glass contributed to the revival of postwar design at the nationwide Festival of Britain. After the war mass-produced imports flooded the market and Lampl's hand-made products struggled to survive the competition.
Fritz Lampl died of a heart attack in London, England in 1955. His work is represented at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, among others.
Related books
- Angela Bowey and Raymond F Berger, Bimini Glass and the Politics of Survival (Angela M. Bowey, 2019)
- Emanuel Cooper, Lucie Rie: Modernist Potter (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021)
- AJR Journal, September 2019 (https://ajr.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/6036-AJR-Journal-September-2019-FINAL.pdf), p. 14
- Jutta Vinzent, Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain (1933-1945) (Kromsdorf/Weimar: VDG Verlag, 2006) pp. 113, 259, 273, 287
- 'Languishing Behind Barbed Wire', The Jewish Chronicle, 6 September 1940, p. 17
- H. K., 'Artist-Craftsmen', The Jewish Chronicle, 22 March 1940, p. 25
- H. K., 'Painted Fabrics and Hand-Blown Glass', The Jewish Chronicle, 9 December 1938, p. 46
Public collections
Related organisations
- Free German League of Culture (member)
- Austrian Centre (member)
Related web links
- Bimini and Orplid Glass, The Glass Museum
- Bimini Glass, The Glass Encyclopedi
- Getty Images
- V&A collections
Selected exhibitions
- Festival of Britain (1951)
- International Craftsmen's Centre Exhibition, Heal's, London (1940)
- Christmas Exhibition organised by the Free German League of Culture, London (1939)
- Austrian Centre
Ben Uri archive
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Fritz Lampl]
Ben Uri library
Publications related to [Fritz Lampl] in the Ben Uri Library