A Passion For Chihuly -- In A Thrilling Exhibition, A Portland Businessman Showcases His Large, Varied Collection Of The Glass Master's Works

Visual arts preview "Dale Chihuly: The George R. Stroemple Collection and Chihuly Over Venice," through Jan. 18 at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 S.W. Park Ave., Portland. Tickets are $11 for adults, $10 seniors and students, $6 children. Tickets are sold for a specific day and time; to ensure entry, purchase tickets in advance at 206-292-ARTS.

PORTLAND - George Stroemple doesn't seem like a man prone to obsessions. Friendly, plain-spoken, often wearing a broad grin, the 49-year-old Stroemple carries his burly, 6-foot-2-inch frame with the square-shouldered posture of the U.S. Marine he once was.

So at first it's difficult to figure just how the Portland businessman has come to own 500 artworks by Dale Chihuly. Stroemple owns more Chihulys than anyone else in the world, except for Chihuly himself. Since 1990, when Stroemple bought his first five Venetians - the flamboyant, highly ornate vessels covered in Technicolor flowers and vines that Chihuly started making in the early 1990s - Stroemple has been on a Chihuly buying binge. He has bought them dozens at a time. The result is that he now owns the most comprehensive, and certainly most interesting, collection of Chihuly glass art anywhere in the world.

But walk through the Portland Art Museum's current show with Stroemple as guide, and his passion for collecting Chihuly glass sculpture becomes more understandable. Called "Dale Chihuly: The George R. Stroemple Collection and Chihuly Over Venice," the show is an extraordinary and often thrilling exhibition of 350 pieces from Stroemple's treasure trove, many of them on display for the first time. Many also are rare, highly unusual pieces that Chihuly made in collaboration with Lino Tagliapietra and Pino Signoretto, two Venetian master glass blowers who almost never work together.

Stroemple moves close to a piece called "Cobalt Blue Venetian No. 410," a 3-foot-tall, trumpet-shaped vessel of brilliant blue covered in a dizzying swirl of yellow, orange and chartreuse flowers, the kind of giddy posies that might pop up in Oz as Dorothy trips down the Yellow Brick Road. Though he bought the piece seven years ago, he is obviously still enchanted.

"Just look at that. Just the odds of this coming out of the annealer are one in a million," he said, referring to the great fragility of such pieces during the cooling-off process.

In a room full of outrageously tour de force vessels decorated with delightful (and anatomically correct) chubby putti, his voice lowers to a whisper. He stands in front of a shallow glass dish, adorned on its edges with golden leaves. It stands on three feet that look like gold-leafed lobster tails. Inside is a golden dragon with a fearless little putto in its jaws. The entire piece is chartreuse and gold. It suggests fabulous Venetian tables overflowing with wine and feast food.

"It's such an old Venetian shape," said Stroemple with the same kind of awe that some might use to describe moonlight on Yosemite's Half Dome. "But to put a dragon and putti in it. Only Dale would do that. It's just such a beautiful, beautiful thing."

Also on exhibit are 10 of the huge, so-called "chandeliers" that Chihuly has been making at various sites around the world since 1995. These are the wasp-nest-like assemblages that Chihuly hung last year around Venice as the culmination of his Chihuly Over Venice project, in which he and his Seattle team of glass blowers traveled to Finland, Ireland and Mexico to collaborate with local glass blowers. Chihuly owns the chandeliers. They already have been on exhibit at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art and Design in Kansas City and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The combined show is so large that the Portland Art Museum has cleared out all of its upstairs galleries to display it. Four of the 12- to 25-foot-long, thousand-pound chandeliers are hanging downstairs in the sculpture court like giant jeweled necklaces dangling seductively from the ceiling.

There are five more upstairs, including the maelstrom of clear glass that Chihuly installed in the Doge's Palace in Italy last year as part of an international glass exhibition. Thanks in part to PAM's elegant, minimalist installation and excellent lighting, most of the objects in this show look dazzling. Even people who usually pooh-pooh Chihuly exhibitions as garish displays of decorative eye-candy will likely be impressed.

PAM is billing the show as a blockbuster, charging a surcharge of $5 to its usual entry price of $6, and advising people to get tickets in advance. The museum hopes to attract some 100,000 visitors during the show's three-month run, which ends Jan. 18. The museum says the show will likely travel, though there are no firm commitments yet.

For a man whose savvy in international business has made him millions - Stroemple founded and runs Trans Pacific, a hardware and building-supply export business - his unbridled enthusiasm for his collection, and what he believes to be Chihuly's great gifts as an artist and innovator, is charming. He is boyishly excited about the show, even though he admits he was at first reluctant to exhibit his collection.

He has shown only a small portion of it before, but Stroemple's Chihuly collection seems like an obvious choice for a PAM show as he is a member of PAM's board of directors.

Kathryn Kanjo, PAM's curator of contemporary art, said the challenge was to figure out how to mount a show that wasn't just another Chihuly extravaganza, the sort of total environment makeover that Chihuly now favors in his museum shows and in the decorative projects he undertakes for Asian corporate clients. Despite grandiose, publicity-generating projects such as Chihuly Over Venice, much of Chihuly's income these days comes from designing immense installations of glass for hotels and office buildings in Asia, where his work is much admired.

"With George's collection we got a select group of Chihulys," said Kanjo. "George is a very intense and idiosyncratic collector. He goes about it with a connoisseur's eye. Part of his insight is that he catches Chihuly on the cusp of something new. I think that's what a lot of this show is about."

Indeed people who think they are familiar with Chihuly's oeuvre will find surprises in this show. For instance, though his languid "seaform" shapes are among his most popular and most exhibited, there are almost none in this show.

Instead there are some rare works such as a group of 44 cylinders that Chihuly made in 1975, just before the car accident in which he lost the use of his left eye. Made at the Rhode Island School of Design with assistance from artists Seaver Leslie and Flora Mace, the group is known as the "Irish Cylinders." That's because the modest-sized objects - many are 8 to 12 inches tall - are illustrated with drawings and text from Irish folk tales and passages from James Joyce's "Ulysses."

Wrapping drawing transfers and text into the layers of glass was a highly experimental technique in those early days of the studio glass movement. And the charm of these cylinders is partly in realizing how far the studio glass movement, and Chihuly's aesthetic, has advanced in the subsequent 22 years. Stroemple said he wanted the cylinders, which are mostly milky opaque shades of white and green, from the moment he saw them clustered under a table in Chihuly's storehouse in Tacoma. Chihuly at first didn't want to sell them.

"They were literally the last things he blew," said Stroemple. After the car accident, Chihuly was no longer able to gauge depth perception and that makes it impossible for him to do the physical, potentially dangerous work required in glass-blowing, which involves plunging molten balls of glass into blazing furnaces with precision and speed.

"To have made all those cylinders in three or four days was a Herculean task,' said Stroemple. "Dale didn't want to let them go but then he realized that if he let me have them, they'd all stay together."

Stroemple clearly sees himself as an archivist when it comes to Chihuly. He says he normally has only 15 or 20 pieces of his Chihuly collection on display at his home. Many of the pieces now on exhibit haven't been unpacked since he bought them. But, despite appearances, amassing works simply for the sake of collecting isn't his style. He's a smart, informed collector who researches before he buys. He seems to know every piece in the collection and can explain exactly why he bought it.

An Ohio native who moved to Oregon with his family when he was 9, Stroemple says he collected bugs and creepy-crawly things as a kid. As a Marine in Viet Nam during the war, he saved his money and brought back antique Japanese porcelains. Later, while studying international business at Oregon State University, he played rugby, hung out with the jocks and bought artworks - by then he was into 19th-century American genre painting - whenever he could scrape together the money. He still occasionally buys paintings by contemporary artists, including Alexis Rockman, and has a sizable collection of glass sculpture by Bill Morris.

But in the late '80s he turned his attention toward glass. The go-go art market had made prices for contemporary art too high, in his opinion, and with his businessman's logic, he decided to look for an art medium that was, in business terms, undervalued. He spent three years studying the history of glass art before he decided that glass sculpture was worth collecting and that Chihuly was an innovator.

So fascinated is Stroemple by Chihuly and the team-work process that for a while in the early '90s he made it his habit to get up at 3:30 a.m. and drive from Portland to Seattle to be in Chihuly's Lake Union hot shop when the morning's first blow started at 6:30 a.m.

That doesn't mean Stroemple likes everything Chihuly makes. He's not interested in having a wall of Chihuly glass in his home, as some Northwest collectors do. And he hasn't bought any of the "macchia" created since the mid-'80s. Stroemple believes Chihuly's macchia - the basket-shaped, densely colored sculptures that resemble Native American baskets - lost brilliance and singularity once artist Bill Morris was no longer working as Chihuly's head gaffer.

The 51 macchia included in the PAM show all date from the early '80s, and many are lovely. Also included in the show are about 200 small (8-15 inch tall) and large (up to 3-foot) art-deco-inspired Venetians. And there are 30 works on paper from Stroemple's collections.

On display for the first time are the three so-called "stoppers", which are three-foot-tall, amber confections of putti and dragons perched on laundry-tub-sized glass bulbs. The humor here is that that they are the "stoppers" for gargantuan perfume bottles.

Some 19th-century glass innovators, including Rene Lalique, were known for making extravagant perfume bottles.

Stroemple doesn't plan to buy one of the big chandeliers that were hung in Venice, though he does own what the most spectacular group of chandelier-like works Chihuly has made, a quintet of five amber and golden chandeliers started last year in Murano, Italy, and completed in Seattle.

The five pieces, which are a bravura finale for the PAM exhibition, look like gorgeous clumps of gold kelp, each mass sprouting a milky "pod" decorated with perfect eels, blowfish, octopus, sharks, crabs, mermaids and Poseidon blowing his conch horn. Singoretto, a master at making the Noah's ark of sea life, made the creatures, and Tagiapietra blew the opaque pods. Chihuly's Boathouse team fashioned the sinewy tendrils later.

The piece, called "Laguna Murano Chandelier," is spectacular by any definition. It evokes all the over-the-top technical expertise of the historic Venetian glass industry, and, also, the lavish, pleasure-loving aesthetic of Venice in the centuries when it known as the Serene Republic, the queen of the seas.

Stroemple claims he can't draw, can hardly write his name legibly, and has no artistic talent himself. But, he says, "I've always been very visual. What I like, in any art, is the attention to detail. I respect the time and energy and talent that comes into making something beautiful, whether it's a painting or a bronze. From the paintings, to the bronzes, to the glass, what they have in common is that they're all beautiful objects."