Going home after an energetic opening on 14 October 2016, I had with me the book The Wonderful Works of Hans van Bentem & Optical Glass from the Czech & Slovak Republics as a small gleaming present.
 
The book opens with a great text by the author Titus M. Eliëns, the authority on glass art in The Netherlands and former head of collections Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and Professor of industrial design at the University of Leiden. As an art historian, he has focused on the study of the history of the Dutch living culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In his vast oeuvre one finds close on 200 publications, including some forty books. Several of these are dedicated to the interior designs of H.P. Berlage, the architect of the municipal museum. Apart from his publications on living culture, he took care of a number of monographic studies about, among others, the ceramist T.A.C. Colenbrander, the glass artists Peter Bremers, A.D. Copier and Menno Jonker, the ceramic works by Pablo Picasso and Marc Chagall and to the designer Borek Sipek. At the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, he made a large number of exhibitions on handicrafts and design. And so he was responsible for the successful exhibition ‘Berlage total!’ in 2010/2011 and was also guest curator in the Groninger Museum (exhibition Ceramics from Ming to Memphis), and the 'Fraeylemaborg' Slochteren (the exhibition Gas in glass).
 
The pages Sam Jonker & Valentine Zaremba, Dutch Ambassadors for Czechoslovakian Glass, he describes – in the name of the Stichting Modern Glas (Modern Glass Foundation) and together with Hero E. de Boer – the role of the collectors, the history of the collection and the contemporary tasks of this society.
 
Eliëns invited the well-known artist Hans van Bentem to design the exposition in the National Glass Museum Leerdam; the reader will find his design sketches in this book too. Then each artist has pages with good readable text and good photos made of the glass sculptures at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag by Eric en Petra Hesmerg.
 
With these great photos on the works, the text explains the exposition Keep on Dreaming on Tour, Van Bentem's work in the collection Jonker-Zaremba, Van Bentem’s connection to the museum and the solutions for presenting this exposition.
 
As Eliën explained in his opening speech, the knowledge of optical glass is decreasing and it is great to be able to purchase this low-priced book to spread the word among students, teachers and collectors. So, go the museum, see the wonderful exposition and read the book!

Angela van der Burght