Louis Comfort Tiffany brought nature’s beauty indoors with his luxe glass creations, which are being highlighted in several current museum show
Surely you’ve heard the phrase, “They don’t make ‘em like they used to.” This isn’t entirely true for the wares of Tiffany Studios, an umbrella moniker for the various businesses that artist and entrepreneur Louis Comfort Tiffany launched in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even at the time, no one else made things to the standard that Tiffany demanded from his teams of artisans. Son of the founder of the American jeweler Tiffany & Co., he grew up enjoying the best and wanted the products that bore his name to reflect the best. He invested enough time and labor in his vases, windows, mosaics, pottery, and lamps to give his staff bean-counters pause. (Tiffany Studios ultimately went bankrupt in 1932, and Tiffany died the following year.)
If the history of art and antiques teaches us anything, it’s that going the extra mile to create something truly extraordinary pays off, though perhaps not in time to cover your monthly rent, nor are you guaranteed to see it happen. Tiffany was acclaimed in his lifetime, and his gorgeous objects were cherished, but if he were alive now, he would be taken aback by how widely and how well his legacy is adored. Two current museum exhibitions celebrate him. “Shade Garden: Floral Lamps from the Tiffany Studios,” on view at the Queens Museum in New York through November 2015, is the latest fruit of the partnership between the museum and the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, a private foundation in the borough of Queens. The Richard M. Driehaus Museum of Chicago offers “Louis Comfort Tiffany: Treasures from the Driehaus Collection,” a selection of more than 60 pieces from Driehaus’ holdings of around 1,500 Tiffany objects, on view through June 29. In addition, a third Tiffany show will begin in July at the Airport Museum of San Francisco. Drawing on objects loaned by California auctioneer Allen Michaan, the show, “A Radiant Light: The Artistry of Louis C. Tiffany,” will end in January 2015 and is expected to be seen by as many as 25 million people. Beginning in late 2012, Michaan’s Auctions, in Alameda, Calif., has held several sales deaccessioning the former holdings of the Garden Museum in Matsue, Japan, once the world’s largest collection of Tiffany objects.
Lindsy Parrot, curator of “Shade Garden,” chose 20 lamps that illustrate how closely and carefully Tiffany depicted nature and how his designers and artisans tackled the task of translating flowers into glass accurately without falling prey to pedantry. “Some of the [lamp] shades, such as the apple blossom, were simple, and some of the designs were much more complex, and they had to come up with more complicated ways to portray the design,” says Parrott. “I wanted to highlight the different ways of how the different glass selectors could communicate a flower in a realistic manner.”
Selectors were the Tiffany employees who held the crucial job of picking precisely the right bits of glass to make up a lampshade. Tiffany reserved this role for women, believing that their gender granted them a superior sensitivity to color. Interestingly, while the phenomenon of color-blindness was known to medicine in Tiffany’s day, it’s not clear that he was aware of its existence. Nor is it clear whether medical researchers had then confirmed that the condition afflicted more men than women—as many as eight percent of all men have some form of it. It should be said as well that not much is known about Tiffany as an individual. He did not write an autobiography, nor are there biographies of him from his era, and his surviving letters generally don’t yield any personal insights. In favoring women as glass selectors, he might have gone on instinct, or he could have carried forward the prevailing stereotypes and convinced himself that the so-called gentler sex would inherently possess more aptitude for honing in on the ideal shade of blue for the background of a dragonfly lamp.
Tiffany’s deep and abiding love of nature and its flora—gardeners the world over can only dream of the flower-strewn life he lived—was matched, almost, by his willingness to embrace the new. Tiffany’s career played out at roughly the same time that Thomas Edison was performing the cutting-edge work that would turn the world electric. “In 1900, only 9 to 10 percent of the U.S. was electrified,” says Ben Macklowe of Macklowe Gallery, a New York-based Tiffany specialist dealer. “Having an electric lamp was a sign of wealth. To use it artistically was very, very forward-thinking on Tiffany’s part.”
