New Tiffany galleries - Current and Coming

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2002 by Allison Eckardt Ledes

It is always a happy occasion when a museum combines resources, scholarship, and sound aesthetic judgment to create a new way of looking at objects in its permanent collections. A prime example is the thoughtful and evocative installation of more than eighty objects affiliated with Louis Comfort Tiffany in part of the Deedee Wigmore Galleries of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts, was responsible for the installation. Wisely situated between a stair hall by the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White and a living room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the galleries are harmoniously painted a deep cerulean blue that beautifully sets off the seemingly infinite palette that Tiffany used to such great advantage.

Today the museum owns hundreds of works representing all the varied mediums in which Tiffany worked: stained-glass windows, mosaics, glass, metal, jewelry, woodwork, ceramics, enamels, textiles, paintings, watercolors, and drawings. The objects span the decades between the early 1890s and the early 1920s. A selection of design drawings, chosen from some four hundred in the collection, will be rotated in the new display because of their fragile nature.

The museum has always been in the vanguard as a collector of Tiffany's work. It acquired examples of his Favrile glass as early as 1896--just three years after he invented the method for making these shimmering iridescent pieces. These examples are important because they can be dated to a three-year period, and many of their have their original labels and price tags. They were donated by Henry Osborne Havemeyer who, with his wife Louisine, were early and avid patrons of Tiffany. They commissioned him to decorate their fabled (and sadly now destroyed) mansion on Fifth Avenue, which was one of the richest aesthetic interiors in the country. A visit to the Wigmore Galleries, where a few of the mosaic panels that once adorned the entrance hail are on view, serves to convey the extraordinary opulence of the Havemeyer mansion.

Two other early and enlightened patrons of Tiffany were Robert and Emily de Forest, who, about 1894, hired him to decorate a new library they had built on to their house on Washington Square in New York City, and in the late 1890s they engaged him to decorate the parlor in their Long Island house, Wawapek. In their Manhattan house Emily de Forest displayed her collection of Tiffany flower-form vases in the bay window of the library calling it her "flower garden." As part of the new museum installation similar vases dating between about 1894 and 1910 are placed in a windowlike vitrine evocative of that bay window Robert de Forest was president of the Metropolitan Museum's board of trustees, and when he unveiled his donation of Tiffany's Autumn Landscape window he remarked: "Mr. Tiffany stands quite by himself among the great artists of our time."

With the installation of this permanent exhibit the Metropolitan Museum has restored Tiffany's legacy to a place of honor on a par with that which he enjoyed in his own time. At the same time the installation fosters an understanding of why Tiffany's interiors are always referred to as total works of art.

A book about the museum's collection of works by Tiffany, written by Ms. Frelinghuysen, was published in 1998. It is available by telephoning 800-468-7386.