With contemporary advertising and sales catalogues as its sources, this book represents the first exhaustive survey of the Ikora and Myra lines in glass produced between the 1920s and 1950s by the Wurttembergische Metallwarenfabrik AG (WMF) at Geislingen/ Steige. At the instigation of the then WMF director general, Hugo Debach, WMF had been making high-quality art glass (called "Unika pieces", indicating that they were one-of-a-kind) as well as lines in mass-produced art glas (Ikora and Myra). First presented to the public to great acclaim at the Wurttembergisches Landesmuseum in Stuttgart by museum director G. E. Pazaurek, these pieces are now much sought after as valuable collector's items. Ikora and Myra Glass by WMF not only deals exhaustively with the history of this glass but also provides aficionados and collectors of Ikora and Myra glass for the first time with a complete catalogue of WMF products. The availability of this information makes it possible, first, to distinguish from the original later glass made as imitation of WMF glass by rival competitors and, second, to identify accurately each piece of Unika, Ikora or Myra glass.

This publication draws on sales catalogues and advertising brochures documenting the entire range of Ikora metalwork produced by WMF (W rttembergische Metallwarenfabrik AG, Geislingen) from the early 1920s until the 1960s. Even during the first world war, Hugo Debach, who would later become director-general of WMF, took the initiative in having experiments conducted in chemical and thermal tinting of metals. Shortly before 1927 he founded the Neue Kunstgewerbliche Abteilung (NKA: New Division for the Applied Arts) at WMF for upgrading metals. The brilliant colours and the boundless possibilities for design arising from this new technique met with resounding success at the time. Now pieces of Ikora metalwork by WMF are coveted as valuable collectors' items. The name Ikora, borrowed from a plant with brilliantly-hued flowers endemic to South-east Asia and sacred to the goddess Ixora, was designed to express the costly and exclusive quality of this line in metal products. Text in English and German