Точка

Theme:	Abstraction
Technology:	Stained glass
Object:	Plant/Factory
Accessibility:	Permission required
Location:	Byarozawka
Coordinates:	53.7174543,25.5065437
Condition:	Critically Endangered

Neman Glassworks

35 km from the city of Lida and 2 km from the Neman River in the village of Berezovka is the glass factory "Neman". The factory has a long and interesting history, in addition to the production of crystal products and decorative and applied products, the factory occupied an important and unique place in the economic and artistic cycle of monumental painting. The factory had the best conditions in the USSR for the production of cast stained glass: a large palette and powerful furnaces for melting glass. In the early 1880s, the landowner Lensky opened a small glass factory or as they called it at that time, a guta (hutte from German mountain furnace). The place was not chosen by chance, water and sand are the main components of glassmaking. They heated with birch, it is this tree that gives a high temperature, this is how the name of the village appeared. In 1891, the plant was leased by Wilhelm Kraevsky and Julius Stolle, and in 1897, the Novaya Guta factory opened, which was later named Neman. The plant's products became popular, production expanded, and by 1913, the plant had 4 glass-making furnaces and employed more than a thousand people. The plant formed its own working dynasties, some of which continue to work to this day. During the Soviet era, every third resident of Berezovka worked at the plant. The plant had its own orchestra.
After the country was divided in 1921 under the terms of the Riga Peace Treaty into Western and Eastern Belarus, the plant ended up on the Polish side. After the unification in 1939, the plant was nationalized, almost completely destroyed during the war, and restored in the late 1940s.
In the late 1950s, a new period began at the plant: new workshops and a technological laboratory were opened. The new stage was primarily associated with new names of artists, Lyudmila Myagkova and Vladimir Murakhver, graduates of the Leningrad Higher Art and Industrial School named after V. I. Mukhina, came to Neman in 1959. In the 1960s, Valentina Dzivinskaya, Vladimir Zhokhov, Petr and Tatyana Artemov, Isayevich began working at the plant. Estonian artists Silvia Raudve and Kersti Vaks, Anatoly Fedorkov came from Lvov. In the 1970s, a graduate of the Prague School, Arkady Anishchik, came to Neman. This was a generation of innovative and experimental artists. The cultural policy of the time allowed for the creation of original author's works, and not just standards for mass production. The basis for experiments often became the old blowing technique, when the master blew out a glass mass melted to 1000 degrees using a special tube.
In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the next new generation of artists came to the plant: Tatyana Malysheva, Galina Sidorovich, Olga Sazykina, Maire Pyyukko. Thus, in one place, the traditions of several schools were intertwined: Tallinn, Prague, Leningrad, Lvov, Belarusian.
In January 1965, Lithuanian stained glass artists arrived at the Neman glass factory: Algimantas Stoskus. In the early 1960s, Stoskus began experimenting with sculptural compositions consisting of various glass blocks. He spied the idea from Czech artists. Neman had a large color palette - 14-16 colors and 350 kg pots for melting glass, the corresponding technology. The chief technologist of the plant, Evgeny Filippovich Pavlovsky, worked with the stained glass artists. The first stained glass window was made for the Oktyabr cinema in Moscow (1967), the next was the work of Kazimieras Morkunas. Under the direction or supervision of Pavlovsky, stained glass windows were made for all EXPOs in which the Soviet Union participated. A touching story at the 1980 EXPO in Australia, Markunas, his stained glass windows were on display, was able to meet his brother, who worked as a designer for Ford - they had not seen each other for 30 years.
Cast stained glass is assembled from various glass blocks. The blocks are held together with a concrete mesh. The thickness of the block can be up to 30 cm. Glass blocks were cast in special molds made according to the artists' drawings. For iron molds, there were special inserts to give the glass relief or additional facets. The number of facets affects the depth of the color.
Shift (broken glass) was poured into the cooking pot. The dye was usually added immediately, it was necessary to check that there were no bubbles, and if gas formed during cooking, then bubbling was done - a procedure for releasing gases to the surface. The glass was cooked at a temperature of 1300 degrees. Cooking usually took 16 hours. After that, the glass was poured into a mold and cooled for several days in a special lere oven, where the temperature was 200-300 degrees less than during cooking. Initially, the glass had no color, the color appears later. A whole team worked on the palette and technologies. For color, they added cobalt, nickel, chrome, copper sulfate.
The technique of cast stained glass became popular. As a result, people from all over the Soviet Union came to Neman to do work, the queue stretched for several months. Stained glass windows for the Tashkent metro were made here, artist Irena Lipke, and in Kyiv. A monumental artist from Izhevsk, Sergei Medvedev, worked a lot on Neman. The last stained glass window, in the creation of which the chief technologist of the Neman plant participated, was ordered by the last minister of non-ferrous metallurgy Vladimir Durasov. The minister wanted a stained glass window with chemical elements that correspond to the signs of the zodiac and rare earths from all over the Soviet Union. Rare metals and elements were specially delivered by plane.
In the early 2000s, the production of cast stained glass windows ceased, the workshop was closed, the furnaces were destroyed.