Windows on A Nouveau World

By J.D. Reed

In 1916 Louis Comfort Tiffany threw a party for himself to celebrate his 68th birthday. "When the savage searches for the gems from the earth or the pearls from the sea to decorate his person," Tiffany told several hundred guests at his lavish studio, "he becomes an artist in embryo." That idea informs $ nearly all Tiffany's prodigious output. As decorator, craftsman and glassmaker, he fretted over his place in history. Was he embryo or master? Artisan or artist?

The answers to those questions glow through every glass panel and glisten from every opalescent surface in "Masterworks of Louis Comfort Tiffany," an exhibition on view through Sept. 9 at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Tiffany expert and curator Alastair Duncan has assembled 72 rarely seen works for this spaciously mounted show: monumental stained-glass windows, richly patterned leaded-glass lamps, delicate hand-blown vases and impressionistic gold jewelry.

At a time when craft is flourishing, and when the Bauhaus' straight lines have been tied in postmodern knots, Tiffany's plummy palate, iridescent surfaces and flowing shapes are attracting record museum throngs and stratospheric auction prices. "Masterworks" was the most popular exhibit ever at the Smithsonian Institution's Renwick Gallery in Washington; some 225,000 people visited it during its five-month stay. At Christie's a pond- lily glass table lamp brought $550,000, a record auction price for a Tiffany work.

A well-known tastemaker in his own day, Louis Tiffany is now often confused with his father Charles. Charles was America's premier jeweler who founded Tiffany & Co., and son Louis (1848-1933) was born with a vermeil spoon in his mouth. Louis remains a shadowy figure, energetic and Victorian stolid. He married twice, had six children and became infatuated with building and decorating his 84-room mansion, Laurelton Hall, on Long Island. A perfectionist, he sometimes smashed work by his artisans that did not meet his standards.

Tiffany trained as a painter; several of his mediocre oils are included in the show, testament more to his sense of composition than his skill with a brush. Influenced by the supple lines and Asian touches of the art nouveau movement, he did better with fabric and furniture. As an interior decorator, he brought exotic warmth to the drafty drawing rooms of Vanderbilts and Mellons. He added Moorish spice to Mark Twain's study, and in the 1880s swathed the public rooms of the Chester A. Arthur White House with such exuberance that one critic compared the ambiance to "steamboats and barrooms." (Theodore Roosevelt later restored colonial austerity.)

Stained-glass windows, at first merely a part of decor, soon became an obsession into which Tiffany poured his talent and technical brilliance. He explored luminescence and color in his windows with an intensity that would credit a modern painter. Instead of using lead cames, or frames, at regular intervals, as glassmakers had done for centuries, he incorporated the metal strips into the design, as outlines for trees and riverbanks. His vision was limited by the few kinds of glass commercially available, so he invented and patented his own brand, called Favrile glass. By 1900 he boasted that he could call on 5,000 colors and effects to reproduce "the vast, teeming bosom of nature."

The twelve windows represented in "Masterworks" pulse with a colorist's verve and ingenuity. Here are familiar nouveau nature themes: profusions of rowdy blooms and bursting vines, roe deer and sailboats bobbing on azure seas. In the 9-ft.-tall Cockatoo and Parakeet, a bird with opalescent feathers pecks at vibrant cherries. In the magnificent Landscape Triptych, Tiffany played with shade and light in a glade to produce landscape poetry worthy of the Hudson River school of painting. Vase of Red Peonies, dominated by a glorious clot of blossoms, prefigures abstraction.

The 17 leaded-glass lamps displayed in "Masterworks" radiate a ragtime glow -- magnolias, maple leaves, dragonflies and cobwebs are set atop finely wrought bronze bases. Viewed together, however, they overwhelm a modern eye, a sort of kaleidoscopic overdose. Tiffany would perhaps have been embarrassed by such a showing of his lamps. He considered them rankly commercial and beneath his talents. They were, however, a convenient way to use up the several tons of glass chips and shards remaining from his monumental windows. At his 68th birthday party, where more than 160 examples of his art were displayed, Tiffany exhibited only one lamp: a unique construction in which a golden glass globe is supported by shimmering enameled copper peacock heads. Still, the leaded-glass lamps became best sellers and were turned out by the hundreds, peaking in popularity between 1904 and 1912.

Despite such success, however, red was the color of Tiffany's balance sheet. He simply spent more on materials and manpower than he earned in sales and commissions. Every year, thanks to the largesse of his wealthy family, he wrote a check to cover the shortfall, and went on making magnificent windows and exquisite vases. It sounds like something an artist might do.