Robert Willson: Image Maker

Robert Willson (1912-2000) was one of the most complex and contradictory American artists of the past century. Among the first American sculptors to use solid glass in a small factory setting, he was at once regional and international, steeped in pre-Columbian art as well as Texas folklore. Educated in the Southwest and Mexico, he discovered the glass studios of Murano, Italy, at the age of forty-four and never looked back. In Robert Willson: Image-Maker, author Matthew Kangas fills in a gaping niche in American art history, the tale of the gangly fellow who sounded like actor James Stweart, fell in love with Venice, and spent the next thirty-seven summers there making solid glass sculptures.