More Than Glass

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The New York Sun

To understand the scale and grandeur of Laurelton Hall, Louis Comfort Tiffany’s extraordinary country estate in Oyster Bay, Long Island, which burned to the ground in 1957, it’s best to start with a visit to the Metropolitan Museum’s installation of Tiffany’s art in the American Wing’s Charles Engelhard Court.

There, art and nature commune as Tiffany intended; and the experience will help to serve as a touchstone throughout the show. In the Charles Engelhard Court, amid bubbling fountains and natural light, with views of Central Park and of Tiffany’s stained-glass windows and mosaics, you can see Laurelton Hall’s four-column loggia, which was permanently installed at the Met in 1980. Based on the façade of the Jahangiri Mahal in the Red Fort at Agra, India, the surviving elements of the loggia include four limestone columns with ceramicand-Favrile-glass-flower capitals. Each capital’s bouquet, an explosion of color, represents the life cycle — from bud to full-bloom to seedpod — of a different flower: the East Indian lotus, the Greek peony, the opium poppy, and the saucer magnolia.

Tiffany (1848–1933), who loved opulence and who did nothing in small measure, is like no other American artist before or since. An extremely wealthy, Art Nouveau industrial designer and the son of the founder of Tiffany & Co., he worked in practically every form of the fine and decorative arts. He is most famous as a designer of mosaics, lamps, and leaded-glass windows. He also established renown through his innovations in opaque and opalescent stained glass, as well as blown Favrile glass, which he developed around 1892 by spraying the surface of hot glass with metallic salts. Favrile glass, like stained glass, comes alive with natural light, which gives it soul and movement. It has a lustrous, iridescent depth resembling ancient Roman glass. Favrile glass’s constantly changing, pearlescent surfaces — sparkling, watery, nacreous, and metallic — achieve a blend of natural and manmade, psychedelic effects that defy description.

Many of these beautiful, multifariously shifting qualities are somewhat lost or frozen in the Met’s exhibit, where objects — separated from natural light and spot-lighted in dark galleries — retain only aspects of their full glory. They can still be captivating, but, like relics, they have an aura of forced mysticism or necromancy about them — qualities that can go against their inherent mystery. In the Charles Engelhard Court, Tiffany’s surfaces and shapes — which suggest petal, stream, cloud, and star; flame, leaf, and breast — come alive.

Tiffany built Laurelton Hall — an eclectic mixture of period styles, both Eastern and Western, with its gardens, terraces, fountains, and pools — as a complete living artwork and as a shrine to himself and to the past. It was filled with his collection of art from other cultures, including Native American, Japanese, East Indian, and Chinese (some of which are included in the Met’s show). Mainly, it was filled with the artist’s furniture, lamps, glassware, pottery, paintings, windows, and mosaics — which served as an ongoing Tiffany retrospective.

Laurelton Hall, an 84-room, eight-level, summer house on nearly 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound, was built between 1902 and 1905. With its own railway station, greenhouses, and farm, it was almost self-sufficient. It was also the site of elaborate fetes, including one at which guests dined on peacock and gazed at flower gardens, rock crystal fountains, and maidens who were dressed in Grecian gowns and Egyptian-styled headdresses made of peacock feathers. In 1918, the estate was transformed into a residency program for artists. In 1946, its contents were auctioned off.

Just as an exhibition of King Tut’s tomb cannot fully convey the glories of Egypt, the Metropolitan’s exhibit, curated by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, cannot replicate the harmony and splendor of Tiffany’s American palace. It does give us a taste for what all the fuss was about, and it can certainly whet your appetite for more Tiffany.

At the Met, there are approximately 250 objects either owned, handmade, or designed by Tiffany, all of which occupied space in Laurelton Hall. The show is a bit like peaking into Ali Baba’s cave. It is only a tiny portion of the estate’s spectacular treasure trove; but, with its architectural elements, including numerous stained-glass windows, a large marble fireplace, and the 32-by-18 foot, 11-marblecolumned Daffodil Terrace, as well as numerous photographs of the objects in situ, it is just enough to make us long for a visit to the estate.

Originally flanking the loggia’s columns was a pair of turquoise-and-yellow-glazed Kangxiera Chinese ceramic lions. The large, wide-eyed beasts, one baring its teeth, are decorated with swirling, aquatic forms and patterns, which give them the appearance not only of the sea but of sea creatures. At the Met, the lions greet visitors at the show’s entrance, and they set the stage for Tiffany’s strange amalgamations, in which the qualities of one thing are subsumed in another.

At their best, Tiffany’s ceramic and glass fuse elements of nature in forms that resemble flora, fauna, and mineral. His turtleback lamps feel molten, and seem to wiggle in place. Other forms of his stained glass, which he would layer and step like bas-relief sculpture, make the most of his glass’s various qualities. In “Rose” window (1906), its mellow-golden glass border resembles stone, earth, and parchment. The internal, linear movements — vine, worm, sky, cruciform, flower — suggest a window within nature’s window.

Tiffany can be extremely sentimental, especially in his illustrative paintings and stainedglass windows. In paint, for which he had no genuine facility, Tiffany drowns in his own nostalgia. In ceramics, furniture, architecture, and, as this show demonstrates, especially glass, his overthe-top sensibility is more than a life vest. It is the angel that keeps him on high.

Until May 20 (1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).


The New York Sun

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