Tiffany in Paris

In which Neely Barnwell Dykshorn takes in the Louis Comfort Tiffany "Colors and Light" exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg.

10/29/09 11:48 AM

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Jay Paul

This exhibition marks the return of Louis Comfort Tiffany’s work to the Musée du Luxembourg. The original museum was in the Palais du Luxembourg, today the seat of the French Sénat, which was built for Marie de Médicis in 1615 by the architect Salomon de Brosse. De Brosse’s design included two galleries to hold a cycle of 24 Rubens paintings glorifying the queen. Two hundred years and several regimes later, in 1815, the Louvre was emptied of all seized artworks, and the paintings from the Musée du Luxembourg were brought in to fill it. Luxembourg then became a museum of living artists and was bequeathed works by Caillebotte. Picasso, Bonnard and Degas, among others. The present building was constructed in 1884-1886, and Tiffany’s Paris dealer, Siegfried Bing, whose shop, L’Art Noveau, named an entire decorative arts movement, donated several vases in 1894—the only non-French pieces ever allowed in.

Tiffany in Paris

Today, the Musée du Luxembourg functions as a jewel-like venue for temporary exhibitions and is situated in one of the most charming sections of Paris, on the street that borders the top of the Luxembourg Gardens.

The Tiffany show galleries were designed by Hubert Le Gall, who did “René Lalique, bijoux d’exception” for the Luxembourg Museum in 2007. The spaces provide chic backdrops for Tiffany’s designs and, with the exception of a stained glass-patterned carpet in the largest room, allow the work to speak for itself. And it speaks volumes: From tiny Favrile vases to enormous and elaborate windows, the forms are astonishing and the color almost overwhelming.

The exhibition includes furnishings from Tiffany’s interior design projects (which lean decidedly more towards an Arts and Crafts aesthetic) and the first stained glass window he designed, to cover an ugly view at his New York home in the Bella Apartments.

Photographs document Tiffany’s next move to the mansion that architect Stanford White built for Tiffany père in 1882. Today, that building houses the Ralph Lauren shop at Madison Avenue and 72nd Street. Tiffany’s studio occupied the top level, and he filled his residence there with fantastic lanterns and mosaic tile decoration—the height of fin de siècle souk-chic.

Although glassmaker John La Farge patented opalescent glass, both he and Tiffany worked to master it. Tiffany pushed the medium further with “drapery glass,” executed by pulling glass while it cools. In the exhibition, a window panel displayed flat at tabletop height shows the sculptural quality of this technique.