ArtistDanish
Otto Bauer
1 active items
A bottle-shaped floor vase in cobalt blue or olive green, standing tall on a shelf somewhere in Scandinavia - that is the image most collectors associate with Otto Brauer's work. The name in Swedish auction catalogues appears as "Otto Bauer", a common variant spelling, but the designer and his output are unmistakable: clean, generous forms in coloured glass that defined how Danish domestic interiors looked from the 1960s onwards.
Brauer began his career in the Danish glass industry as a teenager, reportedly entering the trade around the age of fifteen. By 1931 he was working at Odense Glasværk, and from 1936 at Kastrup Glasværk, two of the most important glassworks in Denmark before they merged with Holmegaard in the 1960s to form Kastrup og Holmegaards Glasværker. He spent the bulk of his career - roughly four decades - within this consolidating network of Danish glass production.
His most enduring contribution is the Gulvvase, designed in 1962. The form is deceptively simple: a tall bottle with a narrow neck, scaled up to floor height. The earliest versions came in single-colour glass - dark blue, brown, olive green, white - with a calm, modernist restraint. By the end of the 1960s, Holmegaard began producing cased versions with a white inner layer and a vivid outer colour: red, ruby, turquoise, yellow. These later pieces caught the mood of the era and became among the most recognisable objects of Danish pop-influenced design. Brauer retired in 1977, having worked through the full arc of Scandinavian postwar glass design.
His work is represented in museum collections across the Nordic countries, and the Gulvvase remains in production today under the Holmegaard brand. On the Swedish auction market, his pieces appear consistently under both "Otto Bauer" and "Otto Brauer" - vases, decanters, carafes and bottles from the 1960s and 70s. The 23 items recorded on Auctionist have sold primarily through Stockholm-area houses and Auctionet, with prices typically ranging from around 1,100 to 1,400 SEK. The top recorded result is 1,400 SEK for a table lamp in glass, with several bottle and vase lots following closely behind.