There are objects in this world that do not merely hold flowers. They complete them. A vase is not a container — it is a collaborator. And like any collaboration worth having, the relationship between a flower and its vessel demands a certain kind of attention: to proportion, to material, to the quality of light passing through glass or across ceramic, to the particular way a stem leans when it knows it is being held by something worthy of it.
This is not a guide to buying vases. It is an invitation to look at the vessels in your home — the ones holding supermarket tulips and the ones sitting empty on a shelf because nothing you put in them ever looked quite right — and see them differently. Through the lens of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary glassmakers and ceramicists, we are going to explore what makes a vase a sculpture, and what a sculpture can do for a flower.
Venini and the Invention of Modern Glass
The story of the twentieth-century vase begins, as so many design stories do, on the island of Murano. By the 1920s, Murano had been the centre of European glassmaking for six centuries. Its master glassblowers could produce forms of astonishing technical complexity — but aesthetically, Murano glass was stuck in the nineteenth century. Elaborate chandeliers, ornate goblets, decorative figurines: technically brilliant, creatively stagnant.
Then came Paolo Venini. A Milanese lawyer with no glassmaking experience, Venini arrived in Murano in 1921 and did something that must have seemed absurd to the island’s old-guard maestros: he hired painters, architects, and sculptors to design his glassware, and told the master blowers to execute their visions rather than their own. The result was a revolution. Venini’s collaborators — Carlo Scarpa, Gio Ponti, Fulvio Bianconi — brought the language of modernism to Murano: clean lines, asymmetric forms, colour used as a structural element rather than decoration.
Scarpa’s contribution to the vase as we know it cannot be overstated. Working for Venini from 1932 to 1947, Scarpa developed a technique he called “sommerso” — submerged — in which layers of differently coloured glass were built up inside each other, creating an optical depth that made the glass appear to glow from within. A Scarpa sommerso vase does not merely sit in a room; it actively collects and redistributes light, changing in hue and intensity as the sun moves across the sky. Put a single stem in it — anything, really — and the flower appears to be growing out of a block of solidified colour.
What Scarpa understood, and what makes his vases so extraordinary as vessels for flowers, is that a vase should not compete with its contents. The sommerso technique creates a visual field that is simultaneously present and recessive — it draws the eye without demanding it. A flower placed in a Scarpa vase is never overwhelmed by its container; it is elevated, given a context that makes the flower’s own colour and form more legible, not less.
Orrefors and the Swedish Light
While Murano was perfecting colour, a very different kind of glass was developing in the forests of southern Sweden. Orrefors, a small ironworks that had pivoted to glassmaking in 1898, became the epicentre of what we might call the Scandinavian vase tradition: crystal clear, optically pure, engineered to capture and manipulate light with almost scientific precision.
The great genius of Orrefors was Simon Gate, who joined the company in 1916, and Edward Hald, who arrived a year later. Together, and in a productive rivalry that spanned four decades, they developed the “Graal” technique — a method of engraving and layering that produced vases of staggering optical complexity. A Graal vase is not painted; the image or pattern is physically carved into successive layers of glass, then encased in a final layer of crystal. The result is a three-dimensional image suspended inside solid glass, like a fossil of pure light.
What makes an Orrefors vase so remarkable as a flower vessel is its almost aggressive transparency. Where a Venini vase wraps a flower in colour, an Orrefors vase refuses to intervene. The water in the vase, the stem inside the water, the slight distortion where stem meets liquid meets glass — all of these are visible with a kind of hyperreal clarity that makes the act of putting a flower in water feel like a deliberate artistic statement. For flowers with architectural stems — tulips, amaryllis, arum lilies — an Orrefors crystal cylinder is arguably the only vessel that does them justice.
Collecting Orrefors is a study in restraint. The most sought-after pieces — the “Ariel” vases designed by Edvin Öhrström in the 1940s, with their trapped air bubbles forming abstract patterns inside the glass — regularly sell at auction for between two thousand and eight thousand pounds. But the company’s simpler production pieces — the “Fuga” series of minimalist crystal cylinders, designed by Nils Landberg in the 1950s — can still be found for a few hundred pounds, and they are arguably more useful as actual flower vessels than the museum pieces.
The Mid-Century Ceramicists: When Clay Met Modernism
Glass is not the only material that matters. The mid-century ceramicists — particularly those working in Britain, Japan, and California — produced vases that redefined what a flower vessel could be, moving decisively away from the decorative tradition and toward something closer to abstract sculpture.
In Britain, Lucie Rie and Hans Coper — Austrian émigrés who set up a shared studio in London after fleeing the Nazis — created ceramics that seemed to have more in common with Brancusi’s sculptures than with traditional pottery. Rie’s vases are characterised by impossibly thin walls, flared rims, and surfaces marked with scratched lines of manganese and copper oxide that create a visual texture almost like woven fabric. A Rie vase weighs almost nothing; it feels, in the hand, like a dried seed pod or a piece of bark — something organic that happens to be made of fired clay. Put a handful of dried grasses or a single branch of winter-flowering witch hazel in a Rie vase, and the dialogue between vessel and contents reaches a kind of perfection: both are expressing the same idea — fragility, temporariness, the beauty of things that are almost but not quite gone.
In Japan, the mingei (folk craft) movement led by Shoji Hamada produced a parallel tradition — one that emphasised the beauty of the handmade, the irregular, the obviously touched-by-human-hands. Hamada’s vases are thick-walled, generously proportioned, glazed in the deep browns and iron reds of traditional Japanese pottery. They demand flowers with presence — branches of flowering quince in February, heavy-headed peonies in May, the skeletal seedheads of lotus in October. A Hamada vase does not disappear into the background like a glass cylinder; it asserts itself, and the flower must rise to meet it.
In California, the post-war studio pottery movement — Peter Voulkos, John Mason, and the remarkable Japanese-American ceramicist Toshiko Takaezu — pushed clay into territories that had little to do with function. Takaezu’s “closed forms” — ceramic vessels with sealed tops, essentially hollow sculptures that only happen to be shaped like vases — are perhaps the most radical statement in this tradition. You cannot put a flower in a Takaezu closed form. And yet, placed next to an open vessel that does hold flowers, they create a dialogue about containment, emptiness, and the relationship between interior and exterior space that enriches the entire composition.
How to Collect (and Use) Twentieth-Century Vases Today
The word “collect” suggests something rarefied and expensive. But the joy of twentieth-century studio glass and ceramics is that the market for all but the most famous names and rarest pieces remains remarkably accessible. A 1950s Orrefors crystal cylinder by Nils Landberg can be found at auction for between one hundred and fifty and three hundred pounds — less than a new designer vase from a contemporary brand. A small Lucie Rie bowl might set you back two to three thousand pounds, but a piece by one of her less famous contemporaries — say, a stoneware bottle by the English potter Bernard Leach — might cost two hundred.
The key to collecting is to ignore the auction-house hierarchies and instead develop your own eye. What matters is not whether a vase is by a famous name but whether it creates the right conditions for the flowers you love. A deep, narrow neck is for single stems and branches. A wide, shallow bowl is for floating camellias or a mass of short-stemmed anemones. A tall cylinder is for tulips, which continue to grow after cutting and need the support of a straight wall to keep their heads from drooping. The vase should be chosen not for itself but for the flowers it will hold — and the flowers, in turn, should be chosen for the vessel.
“A great vase is never empty, even when it holds nothing. It contains the memory of every flower that has ever stood in it, and the anticipation of every flower that will.” — The Editors
