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I t is unfathomable (and yet, somehow, true) that 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Tiffany Studios’ glass creations were ignored and regarded as decidedly out of style beginning around the time of 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Louis Comfort Tiffany’s death in 1933 and over the next 25 years.
Revered in their time, the studio’s beautiful creations gestated and languished until near the dawn of the age of Aquarius. Then, in 1958, Tiffany’s first major retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York, saw his and his studio’s work reappreciated. Only then were the lamps, vases, windows and other objects of design able to be fully recognized as works of unparalleled art, not just innovaওtive and 🐼expensive tabletop and cabinet curiosities for the wealthy, as they were originally marketed.
I will leave the technical and historical details to those better qualified to relay them, but as a designer who also writes about design, I find it to be an interesting time to step back and think about Tiffany once again – not only the obvious merits of its great artistic contributions of the late 19th and early 20th century, but also why they seem particularly worth investing in and relevant in today’s design resources. “The Tiffany market is reaching new heights, largely fueled by a new wave of domestic and international collectors entering the field,” Jodi Pollack, Sotheby’s Chairman of 20th Century Design, tells me. “We just shattered the former world record – also set by Sotheby’s in 2016 – for a singular work executed by Tiffany Studios last season, selling the magnificent 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Danner Memorial Window for $12.5 milli🐻on. And we are seeing a similar pattern of new records being set each season for the firm’s leaded lamps and other diverse objects.”
“The answer to why Tiffany remains constantly popular throughout the decades and to collectors from nearly ಞevery continent, is its sheer inherent beauty,” continues Pollack. “Regardless of personal taste, one cannot deny this. My mantra is, every room needs a Tiffany lamp.”
There have always been cognoscenti who loved Tiffany. The great “for instance” is Andy Warhol, who kept a Tiffany lamp next to his Federal-style four-poster bed. The association between Tiffany lamps and Pop Art and hippiedom is no surprise; I am repeatedly amazed when I look at some of those early 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Favrile vases and their swirling, dizzying psychedelia. The thread from those 💯to a Fillmore-era Grateful Dead poster or an Exploding Plastic Inevitable happening is easily connected.
I can’t count the number of times people have referenced the New York City sweet shop Serendipity 3 to me as a style beacon. The Upper East Side haunt, outfitted with Tiffany-inspired lamps and antiques, has been a favorite haunt of everyone cool, from Jackie Kennedy to Marilyn Monroe and, of course, Warhol. (All roads seem to lead to or from AW). Steven Meisel once made me call them to see if they would sell a clock he was fond of; they wouldn’t. The store’s cofounder Stephen Bruce fondly recalled to the New York Post: “Jackie started coming in when Mr. Kennedy was a senator and she was pregnant with John John. She would buy antiquꦡes from me. Cher has been in with every boyfriend she’s ever had.”
Serendipity 3’s presentation of 1960s interior design was very influential – a mix ꦫof nostalgic cast-offs of camp and color, basically Pop Art as interior design. Although it is probably safe to assume their clusters of Tiffany lamps were budget knock-offs, their aesthetic is what mattered, and it struck a chord of both nostalgia and hipness, a “sock-it-to-me” popism with a cherry on top.
Tiffany became hip again in the 1960s and, with a few ebbs and flows, has stayed hip ever since. Today there is nothing hipper ♚or desirable than au🌞thentic Tiffany. Even a design novice can spot the quality and appreciate the sensuality, the no-two-are-alike, the deep immersion in color and pattern, the almost transcendental trip into Tiffany’s fantastical world. For many collectors, aesthetes and designers, to own a Tiffany object is a lifelong goal.
“Every room needs a Tiffany lamp.”
To wit: There are few images of Tiffany design more compelling and striking than the sitting cross-legged on a hardwood floor in a room that’s empty save for a commanding floor lamp and some cool hi-fi gear in the background. It’s like he finally fulfilled his dream to own an authentic Tiffany and didn’t care about – didn’t need – anything else. The “Magnolia” floor lamp (among Tiffany’s most ambitious designs) stands alone, majestic in that room with a mystical presence not unlike the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. His needs seem fulfilled for that moment; with a Tiffany la🌳mp and his favorite music, all was right in the world.
And that is the modern way to display Tiffany: not necessarily mixed in with compatible and expected period Arts & Crafts furniture and accessories, but as an original, iconic art object. Isolated like a Henry Moore sculpture or a Picasso vase🦩, deserving distance and space – a singular masterpieces of art proudly isolated and displayed for maximum awe, inspection and respect. The 21st century may seem lacking in original design trophies (time will tell), but I notice and admire many interiors that now use the home as a personal gallery, their curators hand-picking and collecting the best of the 20th century in eclectic harmony.
I also think there is a correlation between the current vogue for certain architectural movements and for Tiffany. The affection an🎶d acquisition of vintage, hard-edged midcentury-modern architecture is surprisingly resilient and justly shows no signs of fading. But I see a welcome and decidedly strong swing, a broader reach now – especially among younger collectors and home-buyers – to widen the net of 20th-century architecture and embrace the subsequent modernism of the late 1960s through the ’80s – i.e., the sophisticated, organic, wood-sheathed, angular or curvaceous home des🧜igns of the likes of Horace Gifford, Norman Jaffe or William Turnbull. Tiffany designs were often featured in those original interiors, and are again exceedingly comfortable, almost perfectly at home and en trend.
Clara Driscoll was reportedly among the highest-paid women in the world, earning over $10,000 a year.
Louis C. Tiffany was always a modern man. He embraced early automobiles and speed (that avatar of modernity). As Tiffany expert Paul Doros drolly states in The Art Glass of Louis Comfort Tiffany: “Tiffany’s love of vehicular speed ca🐈used traffic accidents with some regularity.” Tiffany was also an ear🤪ly practitioner of photography, dragging bulky and cumbersome camera equipment around the world.
Lest we forget, he also hired many women for the firm: the “Tiffany Girls,” as they were known. Clara Driscoll, head of the Woman’s Glass Cutting Department at Tiffany’s, and the designer of the exquisite “Wisteria” and “168开奖官方开奖网站查询:Dragonfly” lamps, among others, was reportedly among the highest-paid women in the world, earning over $10,000 a year. She was at the company until 1909, when she married and departed due to the company’s “no engaged or married women allowed” rule. (Louis, give me a call about this.) One need look no further than Driscoll’s designs for the 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:“Peony” table lamp or the 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:“Poinsettia” floor lamp (both circa 1910)🤡 to recognize her love of nature and supreme understanding of craft, glass, color and geometry, as well as her almost spiritual, physical interpretation of the natural w🌠orld.
Especially appealing is a pulsatingly colorful 168开奖官方开奖网站查询:monumental vase from Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s famed peܫrsonal residence. For Tiffany to ha𒀰ve chosen to display it in his own home is about the best endorsement one could hope for. It’s a knock out.
Louis C. Tiffany could be considered a modern maximalist. “Color was the essence of Tiffany’s art,” notes Martin Eidelberg, professor of art history at Rutgers University. “He insisted that if he had to be classified as an artist, it should be as a colorist.” Tiffany loved overload and embraced drowning in color and nature. His designs were dense and labyrinthian, almost fractal in complexity and repetition. Consider the plantings at his own houses, which were “deliberately encouraged to become overgrown,” Eidelberg continues, “left as though these were old estates where nature had won the upper h🎃and.”
Modern then and modern today. Art born from fire, as primal as the earth’s beginnings. Tiffany’𒈔s lifelong goal was the “pursuit of beauty.” We remain grateful for the results, when the convergence of science, innovation and artistry produced timeless, never-again objects of labor-intensive individuality and vision.
