A New Museum for an Ancient Art

By A. T. Baker

For openers: Louis Comfort Tiffany, glassmaker extraordinary

Glassmaking is one of the oldest of crafts: it was an estimated 3,500 years ago that some unknown artisan in Mesopotamia pulled a chunk of quartz from a primitive furnace and found that it had become the fascinating molten glob that is glass. There has never been a single museum detailing and displaying this long history. The Corning Glass Works has remedied the situation by opening a stunning new museum in Corning, N.Y., devoted to just this purpose. The building is worthy of its mission. It is an innovative and handsome structure designed by Architect Gunnar Birkerts, sheathed in paneled plate glass and laid out in the shape of a crazed clover leaf, a library in its center, a series of bays assigned to each of twelve major glassmaking styles.

The biggest bay is intended for special exhibits and, fittingly enough for the opening, it will be devoted to the work of the greatest of all U.S. glassmakers, Louis Comfort Tiffany. Specifically, it will celebrate 16 stained-glass windows that Tiffany treasured and installed in his lavish house in Oyster Bay, N.Y. The house burned to the ground in 1957, but somehow these windows survived and were bought by Hugh McKean, then president of Rollins College, and his wife Jeanette, a longtime Tiffany collector. With the windows, the McKeans set up a gallery near their home in Winter Park, Fla. Only after special pleas from Museum Director Thomas Buechner did they agree to lend the windows for Corning's opening.

In return, Corning has provided a richly tasteful installation of dark interiors, where each window glows, offering opulent testimony to the improvements in Tiffany's taste and technique as he grew in age and experience. The windows begin with panels that look like little more than paintings (not very good ones, mostly of the Burne-Jones persuasion) and go on to the increasingly abstract and incandescent color of Tiffany's later works, such as Pumpkin and Beets, 1900-05, as abstractly designed as any action painter might wish. Also on display is a solid representation of Tiffany's famed lamps and lampshades (one recently brought $360,000 at auction).

The designs range from the most familiar, delicate lacery to a remarkable lamp studded with bizarre, irregular pieces of brown-green glass. The result looks like nothing so much as a bejeweled turtle.

Not even Tiffany, who was a vain man, could have anticipated the surge in the value of his work. But then he did not intend to be a glassmaker in the first place. He did not need to be. When he was born in 1848, his father was already on his way to becoming the most famous jeweler in the land. But young Louis had no wish to take over the family business. He set out to be a painter, studying for a year with George Inness, rather than going to college. In the end he discovered that the arts and crafts movement founded by Britain's William Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites was more to his taste; their creed was that everyday utensils and decoration should be formed and shaped by the same principles of beauty as any painting or sculpture. By the time he was 31, Tiffany had abandoned "pure" painting almost entirely to turn his talents to interior decoration and design, with a strong predilection for the Oriental simplicities and tastes preached by Whistler.

His first interest in glass came from attempts to make stained-glass windows of his (and other painters') works. He found himself dissatisfied with the state of the art, which then chiefly consisted of fusing the drawings into the glass, and began looking for improvements. In his experiments, he records: "I perceived that the glass used for claret bottles and preserve jars was richer, finer and had a more beauttiful quality in color than any glass I could buy." The secret, he concluded, was that this cheaper glass "contained the oxides of iron and other impurities which are left in the sand when melted." It took him almost 30 years of experimentation before he found methods that produced what he wanted, including an iridescent glass that he called Favrile (from the old English word fabrile, of a craftsman) and for which he applied for a patent. Others, including John La Farge in the U.S. and Thomas Webb in England, were working along the same lines, but apparently Tiffany got there first.

By 1900 Tiffany seemed content to rest on his considerable laurels as a decorator, having to his credit the nearly total redecoration of the White House for President Chester Arthur, and was concentrating on his glassmaking. He saw new opportunities in the invention of the incandescent bulb. Working with Thomas Alva Edison, he realized that something was needed both to soften the brightness of the new light and to conceal the bulb's unlovely shape. He came up with the lampshade that is perhaps his most famous design.

During his lifetime, Tiffany guarded his reputation ferociously. He was not primarily a designer; rather, he was a director and producer -- bearing the same relation to his glass that Diaghilev did to Paris' Ballet Russe. Though he personally puttered with glass all his life, and in the early years often did a quick gouache or watercolor sketch for a proposed design, in later years he simply hired the best designers, the most skilled craftsmen, then turned them loose to fashion their individual pieces. He was a strong and controlling taskmaster. If a section of a glass window displeased him, he would knock it out with his fist. Every product had to pass his severe scrutiny and demanding standards of taste. One foreman told the story of a large window produced to the order of a rich client; it was intended to represent the view from the client's front porch. The customer declared himself delighted, but added, "I want a duck, right there in the middle of the picture." Tiffany indignantly said that a duck would not fit the composition. Said the client: "I paid for that window, and I want a duck." Tiffany glared at him, turned and smashed the window into fragments. --By A. T. Baker

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