In February of 2012, we acquired the URL for Loetz.com to ensure that this site would be updated, accurate and remain a free, non-for-profit resource for anyone wanting to obtain information about Loetz art glass. At that time, we envisioned showing many photos and various ground color examples for each Loetz decor along with descriptions, production dates and production numbers where available. We also wanted to arrange all of this information in a format that could be easily viewed and searched. Little did we know that our vision for this website would require that the old site be retired and a completely new and redesigned site created. It was a surprise and quite an undertaking but nine months later in November 2012, we welcomed our new baby, Loetz.com, into the world.
Today, we take this time to celebrate Loetz.com’s Birthday and to reflect on where she’s been these past 7 years! Together with our Loetz Advisory Group, we have to date identified 105 new decors and over 100 new "painted and gold relief" DEKs. We were helped immeasurably in this task by Dr. Jitka Lĕničková's massive book, 'Loetz / Series II: Paper Patterns for Glass from 1900 to 1914', published in 2011. Together with our large photo library of over 32,000 photos of Loetz art glass that have been carefully collected and saved over a 15 year time span and the talented researchers in our Loetz Advisory Group who are willing to spend the time to connect all of these dots, we continue our mission to help preserve the history of this amazing art glass.
Going forward, we will continue to add to the index of known as well as newly discovered Loetz decors, and also include even more information on the website regarding the history of Loetz Witwe, books available about this glass, museums where you can see their creations, designers who collaborated with the company, and much else besides. Whether you are a collector, dealer, museum or auction house, we hope you have enjoyed www.loetz.com and are as excited as we are about the work that we are doing to help preserve the history of this glass which is another reason we hope www.loetz.com will be around to celebrate many more birthdays.
In the spirit of this commitment, please welcome another new Loetz decor - Fortuna! Even though we had found 35 known paper patterns that mentioned “Fortuna” in the production notes (which is actually quite a few listings for a decor that we had no idea what it looked like), this decor remained a mystery and one we would work on for several years. To help us get there, we photographed each paper pattern that mentioned this decor so we could study each one in more detail. Then we selected some of the more unusual shapes to see if we could match these to any photographs of Loetz vases in our library to help narrow down the identity of this decor. It eventually became clear after seeing so many mentions of “Fortuna” along with “Dark-green or leaf-green verlaufend Sprialoptisch” in the production notes, that Fortuna was indeed a production of Spiraloptisch but only in these specific spreading or "verlaufend" colors. We hope you enjoy this new Loetz decor.
As you can see, we and the Loetz Advisory Group are fully motivated to continue to invest our time, effort and expertise in maintaining and expanding the content of Loetz.com so that it will remain a valuable and reliable Loetz resource. However, the third-party costs of hosting and maintaining the site, especially for site security, are continuously increasing. While several collectors, galleries, auction houses and individuals have supported us financially over the years, and we thank them most sincerely for their past and present contributions, the vast majority of the costs to maintain this site are still borne by us personally. Clicking our 'Donate' button here or on the front page of the Loetz.com website, will go a long way to helping us continue to maintain this site. Any and all monies you are kind enough to donate will be used entirely and exclusively for third-party costs required to maintain the site. We thank you in advance for your support and encouragement to continue our work and research on Loetz art glass.
Kindest regards,
