The family lived in the town of Frauenau in Bavaria, where Valentin Eisch was employed as a master engraver at the glass factory of Isidor Gistl.

According to Erwin Eisch, his family, as well as most of the people in Frauenau, were Communists during the Weimar Republic and unsympathetic to National Socialism.

From 1946 to 1948 Eisch worked at this trade in the family's cutting and engraving shop[2][9] while studying at the school of glassmaking in nearby Zwiesel.

After taking his journeyman's examination in engraving in 1949 [9] Eisch entered the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (Akademie der Bildenden Künste),[4] where he studied glass design, sculpture and interior architecture, returning to Frauenau in 1952 to assist his parents and two brothers, Alfons and Erich, in founding a glassworks there.

Art scholar Susie J. Silbert identified SPUR as a Situationist group intent on revitalizing European culture by emphasizing artistic individualism.

In 1960, with his future wife, Margarete "Gretel" Stadler [de] and the artist Max Strack, Eisch formed the group RADAMA.

[4] The group became notorious for publishing a biography of a fictitious abstract painter, Bolus Krim, and holding a memorial exhibition of the "prematurely deceased" artist's work.

Bolus Krim's work, of course, was actually that of RADAMA members; Eisch showed a number of his glass pieces along with his paintings and sculpture.

At the conference, Littleton and his students set up a small furnace built by Dominick Labino and proceeded to blow glass.

Working in a studio environment, rather than on the factory floor, allowed him to develop and refine his personal vision for glass as a sculptural medium.

For weeks after Eisch's return to Germany, Littleton found himself creating works that were derivative of his friend's complex, intuitively-shaped forms.

[22] The following summer, Littleton traveled to Frauenau to work in Eisch's studio, where he created about thirty sculptures for exhibition in Europe.

As important as his reliance on fantasy was to shaping his art, his unwillingness to compromise personal vision to appeal to the marketplace was just as vital.

[20] Beginning in the mid-1970s Eisch began to create more and more in the traditional art forms of painting on canvas and paper, drawing and printmaking.

Above all, his guiding idea is the physical relationship of male and female, of human contact through touch with an emphasis on the hand.

[28] Littleton wrote of Eisch's paintings and drawings that "Erwin...has said that the real landscape no longer exists in art, no more than the classic figure; and so he creates his own vision of the world of the spirit and new relationships of body forms.

[30] Over the following 26 years Littleton Studios published 64 prints by Eisch, including a ten-print portfolio titled "Kristallnacht: Night of Crystal Death."

According to Eisch, he created the portfolio as a means "to relieve some of the clinging shame that weighs down upon us Germans, and to bring courage to all those who oppose hate and violence and the destruction of the environment, today and forever.

"[31][32] Using a palette of primarily red and black ink, Eisch aimed to show in the artworks "the brutality and stupidity" of the November 1938 pogrom in Nazi Germany that foreshadowed the Holocaust.

[4][35] In 2008 Bild-Werk Frauenau offered four summer sessions and 36 courses in subjects ranging from painting and drawing, to cutting and engraving glass, to singing.

It is thanks to him that in 1982 art historian Wolfgang Kermer's important studio glass collection, parts of which had already been shown in cooperation with Erwin Eisch in 1975[38] and 1976/77,[39] was donated to the museum, where it still forms the basis of the modern department today.