|
The artist, Francis Robert White (Bob White), was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa, April 19, 1907. By the time he was 10 years old, his interest in art was intense. He spent much of his time learning all he could by drawing, studying color, attempting to make statues, and other creative efforts.
 He told his mother that, rather than prepare for a formal college education, he preferred to go to Europe to view and study at first hand the works of art about which he’d been reading. His mother was “remarkably understanding,” White says, and at age 17 he travelled to Europe.White spent two years there. He lived on an allowance of about $50 a month. At one time he worked in a Ford assembly plant in Trieste, Italy, while he continued to draw and study works of the great masters. It was in 1926 that he first saw Chartres Cathedral. The French Cathedral’s magnificent stained glass inspired him to study every major European glass work he could find.
After his return to the U.S., White studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Arts for about a year. He then worked as an apprentice Wilkes-Barre Art Glass Company in Pennsylvania. There he learned the basics of glazing and handling glass.
White’s career didn’t follow an unbroken line of progress, however. At one time he went to work for the Willett Glass Co. He was hired, worked about half a day, and then was fired by Mrs. Willett because of his inept glass handling. (Several years later, Willett Glass owner Crosby Willett visited First Presbyterian Church and saw the Creation Window. He called it the finest work of its kind he’d ever seen.)
White lived in New York and supported himself by making modern Gothic styled stained glass windows. At the same time, the Whitney Studio Gallery, later to become the Whitney Museum of American Art, was looking for new works by American artists for their collection and commissioned an abstract window from Bob White for their collection. This recognition by the nation's leading institution devoted to American art led, in 1930, to a Guggenheim fellowship on which White returned to Europe to make an intensive study of medieval glass techniques.
 Returning to the United States during the height of the Depression, White was asked by Grant Wood to design stained glass windows in Iowa, but with no funding available for production, no windows resulted. White moved to Chicago where he became an administrator of Easel/Design for the Chicago offices of the Illinois Arts Project, IAP, a part of Works Project Administration, WPA. He was assigned to a small, struggling art museum in Sioux City for a while, then to a Wyoming CCC camp near Yellowstone National Park.During World War II he served as a naval officer in the Pacific. He also attended Guadalajara University in Mexico where he earned a Master of Fine Arts Degree. In 1954 he returned to Chicago to work for the Clinton Glass Company. Upon its closing White bought a portion of their glass stock and set up his own studio on Wrightwood Street.
When the first fully fused piece, a three-panel abstract study of Christ, was shown in 1964, it won Bob White a much-coveted Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation prize. Several windows by Bob White can be seen in the North Shore Unitarian Church, Deerfield, Illinois, in a coach house in the alley of 158 W. Burton, and in Holy Name of Mary Church, 11200 S. Loomis Street, Chicago.
First Presbyterian Church in Mason City, Iowa worked with Bob White for 27 years. The first window, the creation window, was completed in September of 1973. The Messiah Windows were the next portion of the project to be completed. The project was completed with the Apocalypse window dedication on October 17, 1982. The Artist’s signature is in the very lowest left hand corner of the Creation Window.
Bob White returned to Mason City where he passed away on May 23, 1986.
Mason City as a community has been blessed with fused glass by Bob White in several other local buildings. The Tom MacNider House has six panels installed in the original construction of the home in 1959. The Greek Orthodox Church of Transfiguration has several donated in 1970s. First Congregational United Church of Christ has White’s fused glass windows in the Willson Chapel. The MacNider Art Museum has seven representations of White’s fused glass technique along with two paintings, three etchings and two charcoal and chalk cartoons in their permanent collection.
|
Fused Glass 