1950s Fred Press glasses that I didn’t know I had

I kept the glasses in my kitchen cabinet for several years, thinking that I would someday take them out, serve iced tea or lavender lemonade in them, and marvel at their beauty.

They were 1950s glasses with single stalks of gold wheat outlined against a turquoise background. They were a showstopper. When I checked the bottom of the glasses for a maker’s name, I found nothing. I had bought another set of ’50s glasses at auction around the same time, and these had a stylized “L” for Libbey glass. They were the Atomic Fish pattern, and I kept those stashed away, too.

Recently, as I was cleaning out my cabinets for a small kitchen update, I came across the turquoise glasses. I was still curious about the maker, so I looked them over again. Slowly turning one glass as I browsed the lower edge where names sometimes appear, I finally found it. There in gold lettering were two words: Fred Press.

I knew that name. I had seen and written about a sculpture of the head of an African American woman signed by a Fred Press. Googling, I found that this was the same artist, and he was one of the most prolific and talented drinking-glass designers of the mid-20^th century.

Press was first and foremost a sculptor, but he was also a painter, author, illustrator, commercial artist and glassware designer. His counterpart to the female head was that of an African American man. He won first prize for the male sculpture, titled “Slave,” at the Delgado Museum of Art (now the New Orleans Museum of Art) in 1946. I originally thought the head at auction was that of a man, not woman.

Press and his brother formed a company called Contemporary Arts Inc. in Boston in the 1930s that sold plaster reproductions of his sculptures to make them available to everyone.

While a teenager, he won the annual Procter and Gamble Soap Sculpture Contest four times in a row, and the company finally asked him not to enter again to give others a chance to win. He used his cash prize to attend the Vesper George School of Art. He began painting in the 1940s and exhibiting his works.

From the 1950s to 1980s, he was a chief designer and executive vice president of Rubel & Co. in New York, creating both glassware and giftware at a time when design was an art form.

Press is credited with revolutionizing the giftware industry with his colorful designs of glassware and barware. He used 22-karat and 24-carat gold on his works. Some of the sets sold by retailers on the web came with gold carriers.

He won a Good Design award in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1952.

Press received a commission from the Navy in the 1990s to create two of 24 bronze bas-reliefs for the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington. One depicts the Battle of Inchon, South Korea, in 1950, and the other honors Navy hero John Paul Jones. Press died at age 92 in 2012.

As for my Fred Press glassware, I’ll hang on to it a little longer. If you are interested in collecting early glassware, educate yourself first on what is original and what is not.