Robert KehlmannBorn 1942 Brooklyn, New YorkNationality AmericanField Artist, Art CriticEducation 1963 B.A., Antioch College, Ohio (English Literature) 1966 M.A., University of California Berkeley (English Literature)Awards 1977 Craftsmen's Fellowship Grant, National Endowment for the Arts 1978 Art Critic's Fellowship Grant, National Endowment for the Arts 1994 Honorary Lifetime Membership, Glass Art Society 2026 Best New Fiction, American Legacy Book Awards 2026 Historical Fiction, Next Generation Indie Book AwardsBooks Twentieth Century Stained Glass: A New Definition, dual language text, Kyoto Shoin Ltd., Kyoto, Japan, 1992 The Inner Light: Sculpture by Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová, University of Washington Press, Seattle, 2002
The Rabbi's Suitcase, Koëhlerbooks, Virginia Beach, VA, 2025Website official website
Robert Kehlmann is an artist and writer. He was an early spokesperson for evaluating glass art in the context of contemporary painting and sculpture. His glasswork has been exhibited worldwide and is the focus of numerous commentaries. Kehlmann's work can be found in museums and private collections in the United States, Europe and Asia. He has written books, articles, and exhibition reviews for publications in the U.S. and abroad. In 2014 the Rakow Research Library of The Corning Museum of Glass acquired Kehlmann's studio and research archives. In 2025 he published a debut novel, “The Rabbi’s Suitcase.”
Biography
Part of a group of California artists making leaded glass panels in the early 1970s, Kehlmann emerged as a key figure in the development of contemporary American stained glass.Susanne K. Frantz, New Glass Review 18, The Corning Museum of Glass, 1997, pp.34-35. Formally trained in literary criticism he was self-taught as an artist. His leaded works, called “Compositions,” together with later mixed media pieces and mosaics, have been described as symbolic, subjective narratives, rendered in a “painterly tradition.”David Revere McFadden, World Glass Now ’91, Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan, p. 51. As an art critic he was a theorist and spokesperson for the contemporary glass movement in the later part of the 20th century.Grace Glueck, “Art People,” The New York Times, February 10, 1978.
Kehlmann received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for his work as both an artist and critic. He has written two books about glass, and articles and exhibition reviews by him have appeared in periodicals in the U.S. and abroad. Kehlmann has taught at the Pilchuck Glass School, the California College of the Arts, and the Miasa Bunka Center in Nagano City, Japan. He has lectured and given workshops at many institutions including the Renwick Gallery, the Corning Museum of Glass, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Rhode Island School of Design. Kehlmann has juried and curated numerous exhibitions including a retrospective of work by Czech sculptors Stanislav Libenský and Jaroslava Brychtová. He has served on the board of directors of the Glass Art Society (1980–84, 1989–92) and edited the Glass Art Society Journal (1981–1984).
A former Chairman of Berkeley's Landmark’s Preservation Commission (1997–1999), he founded the Berkeley Historical Plaque Project in 1997. His debut novel, The Rabbi’s Suitcase, was published in 2025. A 1,000 page early draft together with his notes and research materials for the novel, are housed in the archives of the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in New York. Kehlmann has lived and worked in Berkeley California since 1963. His wife, Diana Tosto Kehlmann, is a Jin Shin Jitsu practitioner and a homeopath. Their son, Ephraim, is a digital media producer living in New York City.
Leaded Glass Drawings
After receiving his master's degree in English literature, Kehlmann traveled in Europe (1969–70) where he developed an interest in art. He used the tools of literary criticism to help his understanding: “From the start I felt there was little difference in the experience of reading a poem and that of looking at a painting.”Susanne K. Frantz, “Robert Kehlmann: Painting with Glass,” in Robert Kehlmann: Painting with Glass, A Retrospective, (1996) Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga.
Kehlmann's early “Compositions” are made with traditional lead came and colored glass. Glass forms protrude from the background surface, whimsically frolicking with and redefining underlying blocks of color and lead scribbles.Cate Gable, “In Pursuit of Light: The Zen Graffiti of Robert Kehlmann,” American Craft, April/May 1993. Explaining the absence of transparent glass in these works, he wrote: “I don’t want people looking through my windows. What lies behind the compositions, aside from a source of light, has no relevance to my design.” Kehlmann rejected the medium's seductive colors and Tiffany-like approach “plagued” by “small multi-colored pieces of glass,” insisting that the artist has “greater control” with fewer colors and fewer pieces of glass.Notes on Stained Glass Compositions, 26 February-28 March 1976, Richmond Art Center, Richmond, California.
His leaded “Compositions” are more akin to paintings or drawings than to traditional stained glass. They have been described as narratives at once “spontaneous, lyric, grotesque and humorous.”Johannes Schreiter, “Glasbilder von Robert Kehlmann,” Neues Glas, 3/81, pp. 103-5). Biomorphic forms, quirky lines and childlike scribbles, at times derived from his son's crayon drawings, add to the surreal atmosphere.Lindsay Stamm Shapiro, “American Stained Glass Now,” Craft Horizons, February, 1978. A crossed-out triangle in one of the works “appears a casual enough gesture, but the assumption of nearly a thousand years of stained glass, that the nature of line is to delineate shape, is challenged by that childlike scrawl.” Casey Lewis, “Robert Kehlmann: Richmond Art Center,” Glass Art, Vol.4, Number 1, 1976. These Compositions “quietly demolished more than a few of the restrictive preconceptions surrounding his media.”
Sandblasted works
In the late ‘70s Kehlmann began using sandblast on sheets of hand-blown glass to make “nuanced monochromes”Janet Koplos, “Moraga, Calif.: Robert Kehlmann at the Hearst Art Gallery,” Art in America, Sept. 1996, p.117. which glow with inner-light trapped in their surfaces.William Warmus, “The Stations of the Cross” in Robert Kehlmann: Painting with Glass, A Retrospective, (1996) Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga, p.23. Perhaps in response to his brother's untimely death in 1982, the exuberance of the early leaded compositions gives way to introspection in two major series: Tablets (1981) and The Stations of the Cross (1982–1995).
In the mid-1980s Kehlmann began using brass and copper etching on the surface of the glass, and charcoal drawings on board behind the glass, to express “free-associative states of mind.”Matthew Kangas, “Robert Kehlmann: Aspects of Meaning,” Glass, No.64, Fall, 1966. During a 1984 interview, the late art critic Clement Greenberg singled out Kehlmann's work as taking the “first steps” toward “major art” in “two-dimensional, pictorial” glass.“An Interview with Clement Greenberg, Glass Art Society Journal, 1984-5, p.31.
Kehlmann's mid-career sandblasted works encourage the viewer to enter the depth of the works together with the light.Marvin A. Schenck, “Curator’s Statement,” in Robert Kehlmann: Painting with Glass, A Retrospective, (1996) Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary’s College of California, Moraga, p.7. Within layered pieces of glass, or spaces between the glass and underlying drawing, lines and shadows mix with light. The inner-spaces create changing kinetic pattern and movement as the viewer moves or the light changes.
After traveling in Japan and teaching at the Miasa Bunka center in Nagano City Japan in 1985, the influence of Japanese esthetics and calligraphy emerges prominently in Kehlmann's work.“Interview: Robert Kehlmann,” Stained Glass Art, Osaka, Japan (Vol. 1, No.7, Fall). His pieces of the 1990s and beyond have been called “quiet abstract meditations” making references to the Bible, Buddhism, the natural landscape and Japanese calligraphy.
Kehlmann's “Zen graffiti or Americanized calligraphy,” a mix of bold charcoal gestures and anxious strokes, at times combines with broad areas of gold leaf in the style of the Japanese byōbu. Other works of the ‘90s were inspired by the northern California coast with light from ripples and bubbles in the hand-blown glass evoking the surface of water, tide pools, and underwater shadows. They are “characterized by the sensual, measured quality of tender, vulnerable drawn lines in an uncertain planar space.”
Mosaic and Collage
In his mosaics, as in the sandblasted works, Kehlmann superimposes glass over an underlying drawing. Irregular spaces between individually hand-cut tesserae and larger abstract glass forms assume a graphic role. They cast shadows that lead the eye of the viewer back and forth between the glass surface and the drawing behind it. The expressive mixed-media collages, containing autobiographical snippets (museum and opera ticket stubs, entries from his father's address cards, fragments of notated travel maps, etc.) are his most personal works.
Select Public Collections
Bank of America World Headquarters, San Francisco, California Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, New York Four Seasons Hotel, San Francisco, CA Glass Museum, Centro de Arte Vitro, Monterrey, Mexico Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt, Germany Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan Huntington Museum of Art, Huntington, West Virginia International Alcorcon Museo dei Vidreo, Madrid, Spain International Glass Museum, Ebeltoft, Denmark Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin Lincoln Square Residential Lobby (111 W. 67th St.), New York City Musée des Arts Décoratifs de la Ville de Lausanne, Switzerland Museum für Zeitgenössische Glasmalerei, Langen, Germany Museum of Arts and Design, New York Oakland Museum, Oakland CA Pilchuck School, Stanwood, Washington Saint Mary's College, Moraga, CA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Süssmuth-Mitarbeiter-Stiftung Glas-Museum, Immenhausen, Germany Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio
Notable exhibitions
1976: “Robert Kehlmann: Stained Glass Compositions,” Richmond Art Center, Richmond CA. 1978: “New Stained Glass,” Museum of Contemporary Crafts, New York (catalog). 1978: “Robert Kehlmann: Lead and Glass Drawings,” William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA. 1979: “New Glass,” Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY (catalog). 1982: “Robert Kehlmann: Works on Glass,” William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA. 1982: “World Glass Now ’82,” Hokkaido Museum of Modern Art, Sapporo, Japan (catalog) 1983: “Sculptural Glass,” Tucson Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona. “Stations of the Cross” a series of fourteen sandblasted glass panels exhibited (catalog). 1985: “Robert Kehlmann, Neue Glasmalerei,” Galerie M, Kassel and Galerie L, Hamburg, Germany. 1986: “Robert Kehlmann: New Works with Glass,” William Sawyer Gallery, San Francisco, CA. 1988, 1990: “Robert Kehlmann,” Anne O’Brien Gallery, Washington, DC. 1993: “Robert Kehlmann: Drawings with Glass,” Dorothy Weiss Gallery, San Francisco, CA. 1996: “Robert Kehlmann, Painting with Glass: A Retrospective,” Hearst Art Gallery, Saint Mary's College of California, Moraga, CA. (catalog).
Art Criticism