Tiffany's golden bowl

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 1997 by David Park Curry

Four years before Henry James spun an elaborate literary metaphor in The Golden Bowl (1904), Louis Comfort Tiffany created a real one, afloat on shimmering waves of fumed glass and gilt metal [ILLUSTRATION FOR PL. I OMITTED]. The actual bowls history is as labyrinthine as any Jamesian plot. Hailed as Tiffany's "most important piece" at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900, it was viewed by hordes of fairgoers and featured in numerous publications.(1) The bowl represented the apogee of Tiffany's revolutionary ideas about the art of colored glass, but interest in it was soon sunk by a rising tide of anti-art nouveau sentiment.

Hidden in a private collection for much of the twentieth century, the bowl was dismissed as "monstrous" in the scholarly pages of the Art Bulletin in 1962 before resurfacing at a New York City antiques show in 1966, during a surge of renewed interest in art nouveau led by a small group of dealers and collectors.(2) Since then, the bowl's reputation has been reinstated, with twenty-five years of prominent publication and exhibition added to its resume. Acquired by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 1974, this imposing vessel has become a flagship in the museum's sea of superb European and American decorative arts from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To fully appreciate its power as a fundamentally visual experience, it is helpful not only to evaluate fashions changing wheel but also to consider a few examples of architecture, sculpture, and painting from the bowl's own era.

In 1900, the year the bowl was created, Tiffany changed the name of his firm from Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company to the far more artistic-sounding Tiffany Studios. However, art and commerce constantly intertwined in turn-of-the-century America, and Tiffany's confection, larger than most Favrile pieces, was frankly commercial, intended to catch the eye of a public wearied by miles of aisles at large international exhibitions.

Stamped "April 1900," the bowl was put on display in New York City before being sent to Paris. A local trade paper reported:

When Louis C. Tiffany decided to make an exhibition of his work at the Paris Exposition, he was asked by the promoters of the fair to send some special object, which should be the chef d'oeuvre of his collection and of the United States exhibit. The fulfillment of this request is shown in the beautiful punch bowl which has just been completed, and which by special arrangement with the United States Commissioners was on exhibition for a few days in order that American art lovers could have an opportunity to see it.(3)

At about the same time, the Buffalo [New York] Express predicted that the resplendent piece

is certain to attract much attention at the Paris Exposition, where it will be the chef d'oeuvre of the collection sent by Mr. Louis Tiffany, a collection which can be but an honor to Americans, showing as it will, the most beautiful and artistic works in glass and mosaics.(4)

Certainly, Tiffany would not have wanted to send this fragile object to Paris too early, for international fairgrounds were chaotic economic battlefields where "foreign nations...pitched commercial camps."(5) At the vast site on the banks of the Seine, "dirt, disorder, and delay" remained the "most conspicuous exhibits" until mid-June. The interiors of the twin palaces of Industrial Arts were "choked with unopened packing-cases and alive with working carpenters." For the first six weeks of the exposition, visitors who made "rare incursions into Chaos" usually had to "retire in confusion...with torn clothes and dusty boots and hats white with plaster." Eventually, however, "littered labyrinths were...transformed into a broad-aisled universal bazaar where all the nations of the earth displayed their decorative wares."

As the dust cleared, Tiffany's myriad pieces of Favrile glass sparkled in the American section of the international Industrial Arts building. Several photographs survive, showing the space Tiffany shared with his father, Charles Lewis Tiffany (1812-1902), the founder of Tiffany and Company. One offers a particularly good view of the golden bowl, protected by a special vitrine near the entrance [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED]. Another shows that Louis Comfort Tiffany took numerous honors, including a grand prix and five medailles d'or.(6)

Despite this bevy of medals, it could not have been the firm's clumsy jam-packed display techniques that attracted attention to the punch bowl. More germane to the public perception of such an object was the temporary architecture of the fair itself, dominated by a considerable number of large domes supported by metal frameworks. Carrying the flag for American artistic ingenuity, Tiffany's airy yet monumental bowl - an upside-down dome supported by an elaborate metal structure - had special appeal at a fair where the architecture was "best described as bubble buildings blown for a day."(7)

The lucent surfaces of Favrile glass, "giving the impression of a delicate silky epidermis," as Siegfried Bing put it,(8) also link the bowl to entertainments offered at the fair, specifically to those presented by the American dancer Loie Fuller. Her elaborately lit performances captured the imagination of artists and the general public alike: