Arts

Tiffany Takes Paris

A new exhibit of the U.S. designer’s decorative work is on display in Paris, featuring 14 works from the VMFA’s collection.

11/18/09 3:42 PM

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Jay Paul

Parisians may be surprised to see their city celebrating the works of a famous American designer in an exhibit titled “Tiffany: Color and Light” at the Musée du Luxembourg. After all, Louis Comfort Tiffany, who lived from 1848 to 1933, was an American, based in New York, who spent virtually all of his career in this country. What’s more, most of his work remained in this country; in fact, there are more than 50 Tiffany windows in Virginia alone.

Jay Paul

But there is a connection: Paris served as both a catalyst and capstone for Tiffany’s dazzling career. And, according to Barry Shifman, the curator of decorative arts at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Tiffany’s travels in Europe early in his life sparked his appreciation for glass.

Louis Tiffany was the artistically inclined son of Charles L. Tiffany, who founded the famous Fifth Avenue jewelry store and the brand associated with a very desirable pale blue box. Louis studied painting in Paris—and, after his student stint in Europe, he returned to America and started painting murals for interiors. He then moved toward interior decoration and finally the production of original and often splendid objects for those interiors, many of them made of glass. He did interior design work for author Mark Twain, sugar magnate Henry O. Havemeyer and tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt. He also produced objects for President Chester Arthur’s White House.

By the turn of the century, his company, Tiffany Studios, was making leaded glass windows, hand-blown glass vessels, decorative objects such as mosaics and bronzes, vases and lamps—all individualistic works of art for the Gilded Age carriage trade. He took advantage of electric lighting to reveal the jewel-like hues and sparkle of leaded-glass lampshades. The popularity of his lamps, some with his magnolia and wisteria motifs, made Tiffany a household name. In 1900, Tiffany took his work to the Exposition Universelle in Paris, and he was proclaimed one of the stars of the show.

Now, a little more than a century later, Tiffany’s decorative genius is again on display in the City of Light. The Musée du Luxembourg exhibit, with about 170 Tiffany works, was conceived by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. After the Paris show ends in early January, it will move to Montreal and then come to Richmond. There, on May 29, 2010, it will help launch the expanded Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

The Paris-Richmond link is no accident: VMFA contributed 14 objects from its sizeable Tiffany collection to the Paris show, including the Cobweb lamp (1899-1900), made of leaded glass, glass mosaic tiles and bronze. “Tiffany combined a painter’s eye for color and composition with a devotion to glass as an artistic medium,” says VMFA Director Alex Nyerges, who traveled to Paris for the exhibit opening with a group including Deputy Director for Exhibitions Robin Nicholson.