Erwin Eisch
Encyclopedia
Erwin Eisch is a German artist who works with glass. He is also a painter, draughtsman and printmaker. With that of his friend and colleague in glass, Harvey Littleton
, Eisch's work in glass embodies the ideas of the international Studio Glass movement. Along with glass artists Sam Herman
and Sybren Valkema, Eisch is considered a founder of Studio Glass in Europe.
The family lived in the town of Frauenau
in Bavaria
, where Valentin Eisch was employed as a master engraver at the glass factory of Isidor Gistl.
The Eisch family was by no means well-off. The elder Eisch supplemented his income by bringing work home to engrave on Sundays. The family also kept a cow, goats and chickens to put milk, eggs and meat on the table.
With Hitler’s rise to power the village of Frauenau, located near the border with Czechoslovakia, suffered under the Nazi regime. According to Erwin Eisch, his family, as well as most of the people in Frauenau, were Communists during the Weimar Republic
(1919–1933) and unsympathetic to National Socialism (1933–1945).
Eisch entered the German army in 1945 at age 18. He saw three months of service in Czechoslovakia and Denmark before he was taken prisoner by the British. After an internment of three and a half months, he returned to Frauenau where he learned glass engraving from his father. From 1946 to 1948 Eisch worked at this trade in the family’s cutting and engraving shop while studying at the School of Glassmaking in nearby Zweisel, Germany (Zweisel Glasfachschule). After taking his journeyman’s examination in engraving in 1949 Eisch entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (Academie der Bildenden Künste). There he studied glass design, sculpture and interior architecture, returning to Frauenau in 1952 to assist his parents and two brothers, Alfons and Erich, in founding a glassworks there. Within a few years the Eisch Glass Factory (Glashütte Eisch) employed a staff of some 200 people.
Eisch returned to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1956, where he continued his studies in sculpture and painting. He, along with other young artists in the late 1950s, was aware of the Tachisme
and Art Informel movements. Eisch, however, gravitated toward social criticism and anti-art
establishment actions. In 1958 he was a founding member of the artist’s group SPUR at the Munich Academy. Art scholar Susie J.Silbert identified SPUR as a Situationist group intent on revitalizing European culture by emphasizing artistic individualism. Quoting the group's 1958 manifesto, she wrote: "Art relies upon instinct, upon primary creative forces. To the detriment of all intellectual spectators, these free, wild forces always push toward the appearance of new, unexpected forms." Eisch left the group in 1959.
Eisch left the Munich art scene soon after the scandal. In 1962 he and Gretel Stadler married and went to Frauenau to live. There Eisch worked as the designer for the Eisch Glass Factory’s commercial line of glassware, and Gretel learned how to paint on glass. Husband and wife held their first joint exhibition at Tritschler GmbH & Cie in Stuttgart in the spring of 1962. The glass objects shown by Eisch dated from 1952. According to Eisch, the exhibition at Tritschler's was "full of all kinds of provocative themes and very unusual glass work, antifunctional, colorful, grotesque."
free-blown glass objects. “Meeting Erwin confirmed my belief that glass could be a medium for direct expression by an individual,” he wrote.
The two met again in 1964 at the first meeting of the World Congress of Craftsmen in New York City. At the conference Littleton and his students set up a small furnace built by Dominick Labino
and proceeded to blow glass. The demonstration impressed Eisch, who said, “The little furnace is the future.” After the conference Eisch traveled to Madison, Wisconsin where he and Littleton co-taught a four-week summer class at the University of Wisconsin art department. As Eisch remembers it, his first trip to the U.S. was memorable. He wrote,"The Midwest was hot and I was shy, speechless and German in a strange new world. I didn't have an easy time of it. As [a] glassblower I was self-taught and clumsy; I confined myself to making handles. I could never get the first gather properly centered, but luckily we were all beginners."
After his return to Frauenau, Eisch built a small studio furnace in the basement of the factory where he melted his own batch from 1965 to 1975. During these years Eisch worked almost exclusively in glass. Working in a studio environment, rather than on the factory floor, allowed him to develop and refine his personal vision for glass as a sculptural medium. Notable works produced during this time included his environmental sculptures The Fountain of Youth and Narcissus.
In November 1967 Eisch returned to the University of Wisconsin as a visiting professor. For two months he worked in Littleton’s studio, creating about 200 pieces of glass for exhibition in the United States. Watching Eisch develop his forms intrigued Littleton. Working with his assistant, Karl Paternoster, Eisch created “small, involved sculptural forms” that he fumed to unify the forms’ surfaces, giving them the iridescence
that one sees in Art Nouveau glass. Eisch later resorted to enameling the exteriors of his pieces to strengthen his forms.
During the time Eisch worked in Littleton's studio, his influence on his American colleague was strong. For weeks after Eisch's return to Germany, Littleton found himself creating works that were derivative of his friend’s complex, intuitively-shaped forms. This, Littleton said, made him change the direction of his work to simple forms based on the column and the tube. The following summer, Littleton traveled to Frauenau to work in Eisch’s studio, where he created about thirty sculptures for exhibition in Europe. Eisch and Littleton first exhibited together in 1969 in Munich and Cologne.
Eisch described his own glass forms of the sixties and seventies as "poetic or pictorial realism." He made clear that such a realism did not rely on observable fact, but on his inner reality; his fantasies. As important as his reliance on fantasy was to shaping his art, his unwillingness to compromise personal vision to appeal to the marketplace was just as vital. Therefore his early pitchers, vases and teapots are so eccentrically shaped as to seem to be in the process of becoming, rather than being, commonplace objects. Unique and imperfect as Eisch's forms are, it is not much of a step for their creator to anthropomorphize them. Eisch said, "From a glowing inert mass must emerge things of beauty that are endowed with speech. A talent of innovating, creating animatedly, and the breath to blow are requisites. Without blowing nothing happens."
Harvey Littleton has written of Eisch's paintings and drawings that "Erwin...has said that the real landscape no longer exists in art, no more than the classic figure; and so he creates his own vision of the world of the spirit and new relationships of body forms."
(printmaking from glass plates) during a visit to Harvey Littleton’s studio in 1981. Littleton had begun to explore the possibilities of intaglio printmaking
from glass matrices in Wisconsin in 1976; in 1981, after hiring a printer to assist him, Littleton began to invite artist colleagues to experiment in vitreography. Erwin Eisch was one of the first artists invited to engage in printmaking at Littleton Studios. Eisch brought his background in glass engraving to bear on the vitreograph plate. He abraded and cut into the glass surface, which was then inked and printed onto paper under pressure in an etching press. He produced six intaglio prints in four days during that visit. Over the following 26 years Littleton Studios published 64 prints by Eisch, including a 10-print portfolio titled "Kristallnacht
: Night of Crystal Death." According to Eisch, he created the portfolio as a means "to relieve some of the clinging shame that weighs down upon us Germans, and to bring courage to all those who oppose hate and violence and the destruction of the environment, today and forever." Using a palette of primarily red and black ink, Eisch aimed to show in the artworks "the brutality and stupidity" of the November 1938 pogrom
in Nazi Germany that foreshadowed the Holocaust.
in Maine (1972), Foley College of Art, Stourbridge, England (1974) and Alfred University
in New York (1976). In addition he taught various subjects, including drawing, glass painting, sandblasting and engraving at Pilchuck Glass School
in 1981, 1983 and 1984. Eisch lectured at the XIII International Congress on Glass in London, England (1968), the World Crafts Conference in Dublin, Ireland (1970), the World Crafts Conference in Kyoto, Japan (1978), the Glass Art Society Conferences in New York City (1982) and in Corning, New York (1979, 1991). He was also an organizer of the First and Second International Glass Symposia in Frauenau, Germany in 1982 and 1985.
In 1988 Eisch founded the summer school Bild-Werk Fauenau in Frauenau, Germany. In 2008 Bild-Werk Frauenau offered four summer sessions and 36 courses in subjects ranging from painting and drawing, to cutting and engraving glass, to singing. In addition to Eisch and his wife Gretel, artists who have taught at Bildwerk Frauenau include Eisch's friend, the painter (and founding director of the Corning Museum of Glass) Tom Buechner (U.S., b. 1923), glass artist Jiří Harcuba (Czech, b. 1926), puppet maker Peter Hermann (German, b. 1962), glass artist and vitreographer, Ursula Merker (Czech. b. 1939), multi-media artist Gerhard Ribka (German, b. 1955), glass artist Therman Statom
(U.S., b. 1953), multi-media artist Stphen P. Day (U.S., b. 1953), and glass caster Angela Thwaites (U.K., b. 1961). among many others.
, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Glasmuseet Ebeltoft
, Ebeltoft, Denmark; Glasmuseum Lobmeyr, Vienna, Austria; Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin
, Germany; Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Veste Coburg, Germany; Corning Museum of Glass
, Kunstmuseum der Stadt, Düsseldorf, Germany; Metropolitan Museum of Art
, New York City, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Museum Bellerive
, Zürich, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen
, Rotterdam; Nagahama City Museum, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
; Toledo Museum of Art
, and the National Museum of American History
, Smithsonian Institution
.
the summer art academy founded by Erwin Eisch in 1988.
Harvey Littleton
Harvey Littleton is an American educator and glass artist. Born in Corning, New York, he grew up in the shadow of Corning Glassworks, where his father headed Research and Development during the 1930s...
, Eisch's work in glass embodies the ideas of the international Studio Glass movement. Along with glass artists Sam Herman
Sam Herman
Sam Herman is a contemporary glass artist. An early student of Harvey Littleton, Herman is credited as one of the founders of the Studio Glass movement in Great Britain...
and Sybren Valkema, Eisch is considered a founder of Studio Glass in Europe.
Early life and education
Erwin Eisch is the eldest of six children of glass engraver Valentin Eisch and his wife, Therese Hirtreiter.The family lived in the town of Frauenau
Frauenau
Frauenau is a municipality in the district of Regen, in Bavaria, Germany. It is known for its artificial lake, which is used as a water supply of the area around Deggendorf and Passau....
in Bavaria
Bavaria
Bavaria, formally the Free State of Bavaria is a state of Germany, located in the southeast of Germany. With an area of , it is the largest state by area, forming almost 20% of the total land area of Germany...
, where Valentin Eisch was employed as a master engraver at the glass factory of Isidor Gistl.
The Eisch family was by no means well-off. The elder Eisch supplemented his income by bringing work home to engrave on Sundays. The family also kept a cow, goats and chickens to put milk, eggs and meat on the table.
With Hitler’s rise to power the village of Frauenau, located near the border with Czechoslovakia, suffered under the Nazi regime. According to Erwin Eisch, his family, as well as most of the people in Frauenau, were Communists during the Weimar Republic
Weimar Republic
The Weimar Republic is the name given by historians to the parliamentary republic established in 1919 in Germany to replace the imperial form of government...
(1919–1933) and unsympathetic to National Socialism (1933–1945).
Eisch entered the German army in 1945 at age 18. He saw three months of service in Czechoslovakia and Denmark before he was taken prisoner by the British. After an internment of three and a half months, he returned to Frauenau where he learned glass engraving from his father. From 1946 to 1948 Eisch worked at this trade in the family’s cutting and engraving shop while studying at the School of Glassmaking in nearby Zweisel, Germany (Zweisel Glasfachschule). After taking his journeyman’s examination in engraving in 1949 Eisch entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (Academie der Bildenden Künste). There he studied glass design, sculpture and interior architecture, returning to Frauenau in 1952 to assist his parents and two brothers, Alfons and Erich, in founding a glassworks there. Within a few years the Eisch Glass Factory (Glashütte Eisch) employed a staff of some 200 people.
Eisch returned to the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1956, where he continued his studies in sculpture and painting. He, along with other young artists in the late 1950s, was aware of the Tachisme
Tachisme
Tachisme is a French style of abstract painting popular in the 1940s and 1950s. It is often considered to be the European equivalent to abstract expressionism...
and Art Informel movements. Eisch, however, gravitated toward social criticism and anti-art
Anti-art
Anti-art is a loosely-used term applied to an array of concepts and attitudes that reject prior definitions of art and question art in general. Anti-art tends to conduct this questioning and rejection from the vantage point of art...
establishment actions. In 1958 he was a founding member of the artist’s group SPUR at the Munich Academy. Art scholar Susie J.Silbert identified SPUR as a Situationist group intent on revitalizing European culture by emphasizing artistic individualism. Quoting the group's 1958 manifesto, she wrote: "Art relies upon instinct, upon primary creative forces. To the detriment of all intellectual spectators, these free, wild forces always push toward the appearance of new, unexpected forms." Eisch left the group in 1959.
RADAMA scandal, marriage
In 1960, with his future wife, Margarete “Gretel” Stadler and the artist Max Strack, Eisch formed the group RADAMA. RADAMA became notorious for publishing a biography of a fictitious abstract painter, Boris Krim, and holding a memorial exhibition of the "prematurely deceased" artist’s work. The Malura Gallery in Munich mounted "In Memory of Boris Krim" in 1961. According to Eisch the exhibition was intended to reveal “the failure of the avante garde of the time.” Boris Krim’s work, of course, was actually that of the RADAMA members; Eisch showed a number of his glass pieces along with his paintings and sculpture. The ruse worked; art critics lavished praise on the exhibition and pronounced Krim a genius. Those duped by Boris Krim were outraged when the hoax was revealed.Eisch left the Munich art scene soon after the scandal. In 1962 he and Gretel Stadler married and went to Frauenau to live. There Eisch worked as the designer for the Eisch Glass Factory’s commercial line of glassware, and Gretel learned how to paint on glass. Husband and wife held their first joint exhibition at Tritschler GmbH & Cie in Stuttgart in the spring of 1962. The glass objects shown by Eisch dated from 1952. According to Eisch, the exhibition at Tritschler's was "full of all kinds of provocative themes and very unusual glass work, antifunctional, colorful, grotesque."
Contact with Harvey Littleton
Harvey Littleton called his first meeting with Erwin Eisch “a milestone” in his development as a glass artist. In August 1962 Littleton was visiting Germany on a research grant when he noticed, in the showroom of the Kristal-Rimpler glass factory in Zweisel, a piece of glass that was unlike the other objects on display. Littleton was told that it was from the Eisch Glass Factory in the nearby town of Frauenau. Visiting the Eisch factory, Littleton met Erwin Eisch and marveled at his expressionisticExpressionism
Expressionism was a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas...
free-blown glass objects. “Meeting Erwin confirmed my belief that glass could be a medium for direct expression by an individual,” he wrote.
The two met again in 1964 at the first meeting of the World Congress of Craftsmen in New York City. At the conference Littleton and his students set up a small furnace built by Dominick Labino
Dominick Labino
Dominick Labino Dominick Labino was an internationally-known scientist, inventor, artist and master craftsman in glass. Labino's art works in glass are in the permanent collections of more than 100 museums throughout the world...
and proceeded to blow glass. The demonstration impressed Eisch, who said, “The little furnace is the future.” After the conference Eisch traveled to Madison, Wisconsin where he and Littleton co-taught a four-week summer class at the University of Wisconsin art department. As Eisch remembers it, his first trip to the U.S. was memorable. He wrote,"The Midwest was hot and I was shy, speechless and German in a strange new world. I didn't have an easy time of it. As [a] glassblower I was self-taught and clumsy; I confined myself to making handles. I could never get the first gather properly centered, but luckily we were all beginners."
After his return to Frauenau, Eisch built a small studio furnace in the basement of the factory where he melted his own batch from 1965 to 1975. During these years Eisch worked almost exclusively in glass. Working in a studio environment, rather than on the factory floor, allowed him to develop and refine his personal vision for glass as a sculptural medium. Notable works produced during this time included his environmental sculptures The Fountain of Youth and Narcissus.
In November 1967 Eisch returned to the University of Wisconsin as a visiting professor. For two months he worked in Littleton’s studio, creating about 200 pieces of glass for exhibition in the United States. Watching Eisch develop his forms intrigued Littleton. Working with his assistant, Karl Paternoster, Eisch created “small, involved sculptural forms” that he fumed to unify the forms’ surfaces, giving them the iridescence
Iridescence
Iridescence is generally known as the property of certain surfaces which appear to change color as the angle of view or the angle of illumination changes...
that one sees in Art Nouveau glass. Eisch later resorted to enameling the exteriors of his pieces to strengthen his forms.
During the time Eisch worked in Littleton's studio, his influence on his American colleague was strong. For weeks after Eisch's return to Germany, Littleton found himself creating works that were derivative of his friend’s complex, intuitively-shaped forms. This, Littleton said, made him change the direction of his work to simple forms based on the column and the tube. The following summer, Littleton traveled to Frauenau to work in Eisch’s studio, where he created about thirty sculptures for exhibition in Europe. Eisch and Littleton first exhibited together in 1969 in Munich and Cologne.
Free-blown work of the 1960s and '70s
Although many of Eisch's pieces of the 1960s and '70s was rooted in functional forms such as the vase, the bottle, the pitcher and the stein, the usefulness of these vessels was never Eisch's goal. "The purely plastic form, with glass as medium, was a means of art free of an end," he wrote.Eisch described his own glass forms of the sixties and seventies as "poetic or pictorial realism." He made clear that such a realism did not rely on observable fact, but on his inner reality; his fantasies. As important as his reliance on fantasy was to shaping his art, his unwillingness to compromise personal vision to appeal to the marketplace was just as vital. Therefore his early pitchers, vases and teapots are so eccentrically shaped as to seem to be in the process of becoming, rather than being, commonplace objects. Unique and imperfect as Eisch's forms are, it is not much of a step for their creator to anthropomorphize them. Eisch said, "From a glowing inert mass must emerge things of beauty that are endowed with speech. A talent of innovating, creating animatedly, and the breath to blow are requisites. Without blowing nothing happens."
Portrait heads
By 1972 Eisch was putting less time into free-blown glass sculpture. Instead, he devoted himself to the creation of sculptures from which ceramic molds for glass-blowing were made. His series of heads, including those of Harvey Littleton, Thomas Buechner, Picasso and the Buddha, and his “Blister-finger” series of works, were all mold-blown. This allowed Eisch to concentrate his efforts not only on sculpting but also on engraving and painting on glass. In using different cold-working techniques to create imagery on each piece in his series, along with distorting the hot glass sculpture as it came from the mold, Eisch made virtually identical mold-blown pieces into individual, unique statements.Painting and drawing
Beginning in the mid-1970s Eisch began to create more and more in the traditional art forms of painting on canvas and paper, drawing and printmaking. Eisch draws daily, often working in thematic series. While his imagery can be purely whimsical, the artist also uses it to make political statements. Above all, his guiding idea is the physical relationship of male and female, of human contact through touch with an emphasis on the hand.Harvey Littleton has written of Eisch's paintings and drawings that "Erwin...has said that the real landscape no longer exists in art, no more than the classic figure; and so he creates his own vision of the world of the spirit and new relationships of body forms."
Vitreographs
Eisch first tried his hand at vitreographyVitreography
Vitreography is a fine art printmaking technique that uses a float glass matrix instead of the traditional matrices of metal, wood or stone. A print created using the technique is called a vitreograph...
(printmaking from glass plates) during a visit to Harvey Littleton’s studio in 1981. Littleton had begun to explore the possibilities of intaglio printmaking
Intaglio (printmaking)
Intaglio is a family of printmaking techniques in which the image is incised into a surface, known as the matrix or plate, and the incised line or area holds the ink. Normally, copper or zinc plates are used as a surface, and the incisions are created by etching, engraving, drypoint, aquatint or...
from glass matrices in Wisconsin in 1976; in 1981, after hiring a printer to assist him, Littleton began to invite artist colleagues to experiment in vitreography. Erwin Eisch was one of the first artists invited to engage in printmaking at Littleton Studios. Eisch brought his background in glass engraving to bear on the vitreograph plate. He abraded and cut into the glass surface, which was then inked and printed onto paper under pressure in an etching press. He produced six intaglio prints in four days during that visit. Over the following 26 years Littleton Studios published 64 prints by Eisch, including a 10-print portfolio titled "Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht, also referred to as the Night of Broken Glass, and also Reichskristallnacht, Pogromnacht, and Novemberpogrome, was a pogrom or series of attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on 9–10 November 1938.Jewish homes were ransacked, as were shops, towns and...
: Night of Crystal Death." According to Eisch, he created the portfolio as a means "to relieve some of the clinging shame that weighs down upon us Germans, and to bring courage to all those who oppose hate and violence and the destruction of the environment, today and forever." Using a palette of primarily red and black ink, Eisch aimed to show in the artworks "the brutality and stupidity" of the November 1938 pogrom
Pogrom
A pogrom is a form of violent riot, a mob attack directed against a minority group, and characterized by killings and destruction of their homes and properties, businesses, and religious centres...
in Nazi Germany that foreshadowed the Holocaust.
Teacher and lecturer
In addition to teaching in the glass program at the University of Wisconsin in 1964 and 1968, Eisch has been a guest instructor at San Jose State University (1968), Haystack Mountain School of CraftsHaystack Mountain School of Crafts
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, commonly called "Haystack," is a craft school located on the coast of Deer Isle, Maine.Haystack was founded in 1950. It took its name from its original location near Haystack Mountain, in Montville, Maine...
in Maine (1972), Foley College of Art, Stourbridge, England (1974) and Alfred University
Alfred University
Alfred University is a small, comprehensive university in the Village of Alfred in Western New York, USA, an hour and a half south of Rochester and two hours southeast of Buffalo. Alfred has an undergraduate population of around 2,000, and approximately 300 graduate students...
in New York (1976). In addition he taught various subjects, including drawing, glass painting, sandblasting and engraving at Pilchuck Glass School
Pilchuck Glass School
Founded in 1971 by Dale Chihuly, Anne Gould Hauberg and John H. Hauberg , Pilchuck Glass School is an international center for glass art education. The name "Pilchuck" comes from the local Native American language and translates to "red river"...
in 1981, 1983 and 1984. Eisch lectured at the XIII International Congress on Glass in London, England (1968), the World Crafts Conference in Dublin, Ireland (1970), the World Crafts Conference in Kyoto, Japan (1978), the Glass Art Society Conferences in New York City (1982) and in Corning, New York (1979, 1991). He was also an organizer of the First and Second International Glass Symposia in Frauenau, Germany in 1982 and 1985.
In 1988 Eisch founded the summer school Bild-Werk Fauenau in Frauenau, Germany. In 2008 Bild-Werk Frauenau offered four summer sessions and 36 courses in subjects ranging from painting and drawing, to cutting and engraving glass, to singing. In addition to Eisch and his wife Gretel, artists who have taught at Bildwerk Frauenau include Eisch's friend, the painter (and founding director of the Corning Museum of Glass) Tom Buechner (U.S., b. 1923), glass artist Jiří Harcuba (Czech, b. 1926), puppet maker Peter Hermann (German, b. 1962), glass artist and vitreographer, Ursula Merker (Czech. b. 1939), multi-media artist Gerhard Ribka (German, b. 1955), glass artist Therman Statom
Therman Statom
Therman Statom is an American Studio Glass artist whose primary medium is sheet glass. He cuts, paints, and assembles the glass - adding found glass objects along the way – to create three-dimensional sculptures. Many of these works are large in scale. Statom is known for his site-specific...
(U.S., b. 1953), multi-media artist Stphen P. Day (U.S., b. 1953), and glass caster Angela Thwaites (U.K., b. 1961). among many others.
Public collections
Eisch’s work has been collected by the Chazen Museum of ArtChazen Museum of Art
The Chazen Museum of Art is an art museum accredited by the American Association of Museums located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. It was known as the Elvehjem Museum of Art until 2005...
, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Glasmuseet Ebeltoft
Glasmuseet Ebeltoft
Located in Ebeltoft, Denmark, Glasmuseet Ebeltoft is a museum dedicated to the exhibition and collection of contemporary glass art worldwide. Its mission is to educate a broad audience in the appreciation of glass as an art form.-Establishment:...
, Ebeltoft, Denmark; Glasmuseum Lobmeyr, Vienna, Austria; Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin
Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin
The Kunstgewerbemuseum, or Museum of Decorative Arts, is an internationally important museum of the decorative arts in Berlin, Germany, part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin...
, Germany; Kunstsammlungen der Veste Coburg, Veste Coburg, Germany; Corning Museum of Glass
Corning Museum of Glass
The Corning Museum of Glass, in Corning, New York, explores every facet of glass, including art, history, culture, science and technology, craft, and design....
, Kunstmuseum der Stadt, Düsseldorf, Germany; Metropolitan Museum of Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a renowned art museum in New York City. Its permanent collection contains more than two million works, divided into nineteen curatorial departments. The main building, located on the eastern edge of Central Park along Manhattan's Museum Mile, is one of the...
, New York City, Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; Museum Bellerive
Museum of Design Zürich
The Museum of Design, Zurich is a museum for industrial design, visual communication, architecture, and craft in Zurich, Switzerland.- Overview :...
, Zürich, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen
Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
The Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is the main art museum in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The museum began in 1847 with the collection of Frans Jacob Otto Boijmans . Much of the museum's original collection was destroyed in a disastrous 1864 fire...
, Rotterdam; Nagahama City Museum, Japan; National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto
The is an art museum in Kyoto, Japan.This Kyoto museum is also known by the English acronym MoMAK .-MoMAK history:...
; Toledo Museum of Art
Toledo Museum of Art
The Toledo Museum of Art is an internationally known art museum located in the Old West End neighborhood of Toledo, Ohio, United States. The museum was founded by Toledo glassmaker Edward Drummond Libbey in 1901, and moved to its present location, a Greek revival building designed by Edward B....
, and the National Museum of American History
National Museum of American History
The National Museum of American History: Kenneth E. Behring Center collects, preserves and displays the heritage of the United States in the areas of social, political, cultural, scientific and military history. Among the items on display are the original Star-Spangled Banner and Archie Bunker's...
, Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution is an educational and research institute and associated museum complex, administered and funded by the government of the United States and by funds from its endowment, contributions, and profits from its retail operations, concessions, licensing activities, and magazines...
.
Foundation
On April 19, 2009 the Erwin and Gretel Eisch Foundation was formed. The foundation's purpose is to maintain and present to the public a collection of the artists' works from the 1950s to the present. Administered by the Landskreis Regen, the works will be available for loan to exhibitions. The artists have made an initial donation of 300 paintings, 350 drawings, 227 glass objects and 207 graphic works to the foundation. The artists anticipate that any money raised by the foundation will be donated to Bild-Werk Frauenau,the summer art academy founded by Erwin Eisch in 1988.