Window with Garden Landscape, by Louis Comfor Tiffany, c. 1902-1920, is from the Richard H. Driehaus Collection, Illinois.

By Marylynne Pitz
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Slideshow: Reporter Marylynne Pitz narrates a preview of the artwork on display in "Louis Comfort Tiffany: Artist for the Ages." Click photo for larger image. Related Story The Tiffany Tour: Where to find his work locally The Exhibit "Louis Comfort Tiffany: Artist for the Ages" debuts with a members-only preview Saturday and opens to the public Sunday noon at the Carnegie Museum of Art, 4400 Forbes Avenue in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. This is the final stop for the Tiffany exhibit. It opened at the Seattle Art Museum (October 13, 2005-January 4, 2006), then traveled to the Toledo Museum of Art (February 2-April 30, 2006) and the Dallas Museum of Art (May 30-September 3, 2006), before reaching Pittsburgh.

As the golden boy of America's Gilded Age, Louis Comfort Tiffany orchestrated glass, color and light into memorable visual symphonies.

Like any composer bewitched by a captivating melody, Tiffany trumpeted his variations on a theme in different ways.

"If he was fascinated with dragonflies, he did them not only in lamps but in mosaics and textiles," said Marilynn A. Johnson, curator of "Louis Comfort Tiffany: Artist for the Ages," a traveling exhibition that opens Sunday at Carnegie Museum of Art in Oakland.

Accompanied by a lavishly illustrated, informative catalog, the show demonstrates how nature, the Mideast and Asia influenced the artist.

Many people know Tiffany's stained-glass windows and lamps but are unaware that he created mosaics, vases, jewelry, metalwork and desk sets.

His talents blossomed at an auspicious moment. As America's industrial revolution revved into overdrive, an age of affluence dawned and wealthy tycoons sought the best in home furnishings.

As a result, Tiffany's New York glass furnaces burned white hot to keep up with demand from wealthy churches, and clients such as Mark Twain and railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt.

As the son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the famed jewelry and luxury goods store, he began sketching nature at a young age. From 1885 through about 1920, he created new kinds of art glass that were handmade, opalescent or iridescent.

"He considered himself a colorist," said Johnson, a former curator from the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

"It's that element that the public responds to so strongly. When you see his glass, it's unforgettable. It does evoke an emotional response because of the color and light," she added. One of his patented glass formulas, called Favrile, simply means handmade.

Lamp with dragon fly motif, c. 1900-1910, made of leaded glass and bronze from The New York Historical Society. Click photo for larger image.

Unlike European artists who achieved a two-dimensional effect by using black paint to define figures in stained glass, Tiffany strove to create a more natural look by layering different colors of glass. Among his innovations were confetti and streamer glass, which have chunks of color in them.

In key parts of windows, Tiffany and his team of artisans folded and layered glass to create texture, depth and realism. Drapery glass, for example, was used to create the folds of saints' robes.

"I've seen windows with as many as eight layers of glass," said Kirk Weaver, vice president of Stained Glass Resources, whose Pittsburgh-based company restores Tiffany windows.

Those intricate layers, Weaver added, "make you feel like you can reach into the background of the window."

Osanna Urbay, an art show coordinator with Exhibitions International in New York, worked with 40 institutions, including the Smithsonian, to arrange loans of the artist's work. Tiffany, she said, enjoyed pushing the limits of glass.

"Art glass enthralled him because it provided endless avenues on which to explore light and color. Tiffany wanted to see art in the average American home," Urbay added.

	Vase with millefiori decoration, c. 1905, is from the Evergreen House at Johns Hopkins University. Click photo for larger image.

Many of the 150 artworks in the show, she said, "have not been seen or studied for decades," including three objects that had not been appraised since Tiffany donated them to the Smithsonian in 1890s.

"This show tried to offer an example of all of his work in all of the media in which he worked," Urbay said.

At the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, Tiffany exhibited a chapel featuring opalescent glass. No paint or enamel was used, which made him extremely proud.

A rich handsome entrepreneur, Tiffany hired European artisans as well as women from New York's art schools. His employees labored feverishly in chaotic conditions to create handmade objects, experiment with molten glass and execute the visions of their exacting boss. By 1896, in the mosaic department alone, Tiffany employed 40 to 50 women.

"He wanted the painstaking work that hand labor gives because to him that would create perfection, and he was a perfectionist," Johnson said.

Lydia Field Emmett designed the autumn window Tiffany exhibited at the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Agnes Northrop created floral and landscape windows. Clara Driscoll created such signature pieces as the dragonfly lamp and earned $10,000 a year, an astonishing salary for a woman in that era.

With his characteristic perfectionism, Tiffany insisted that a leaded glass lamp shield, shaped like a dragonfly and suspended on a brass chain, be draped across the lamp's light to protect people from the bulb's glare.

"How over the top is that? You have a bejeweled lamp, but then you add a little more bling to it," Urbay said.

Early Influences

	Louis Comfort Tiffany was known for layering different colors of glass. Click photo for larger image.

Reared in an affluent home and educated at a military school, Tiffany rejected a role in his family's business. He began his career as a decorator, creating richly textured, light-filled interiors. Photographs of those rooms reveal the seeds of his genius.

Training in painting taught him how to layer pigments in watercolors, a technique that proved useful in window design, Weaver said. By 1885, he had embarked on an enduring romance with glass.

Nature never ceased to inspire Tiffany, who spent much of his boyhood on a New York country estate. He once dispatched Arthur Saunders, a glass blower, on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas so the artisan could spend hours looking at sea creatures from a glass-bottomed boat. The result of that research was Tiffany's rare aquamarine glass, created in 1912, which embedded sea creatures or water lilies in solid clear glass tinted to look like water. Two examples of it are in the show.

By 1900, his reputation in Europe reached its height. In 1915, his studios finished the Dream Garden, a 49-foot-wide scene done by 30 artists and inspired by a Maxfield Parrish painting. Edward Bok commissioned the scene for the Curtis Publishing Co. in Philadelphia.

It would prove to be one of his last major commissions. Although Tiffany enjoyed enormous international success, by 1915, modernism nudged him to the art world's reject pile.

"He had the most extraordinary changes in appreciation of his work. By the time of his death, his work was considered completely passe," Johnson said.

Rejection hurt, but what followed was horrific. After a 1936 auction of the contents of Tiffany Studios in Manhattan, salvage dealers slammed the artist's lamp shades against curb stones to remove the glass from intricate bronze and lead frames before melting the metals for scrap.

Lillian Nassau, a Brooklyn woman, watched the scene in shock. Nassau, who fed her family during the Great Depression by buying and selling old gold and bric-a-brac, became the foremost dealer of Tiffany's work and played a role in reviving his reputation.

The rebirth of Tiffany's reputation was due to the efforts of Nassau; Edgar Kaufmann Jr., son of the Pittsburgh department store executive Edgar Kaufmann Sr.; art historian Robert Koch; and Hugh and Jeannette McKean.

Jeannette McKean founded the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. The museum holds the largest collection of Tiffany objects in the United States.

Her husband, Hugh, studied at Tiffany's New York estate, Laurelton Hall, in 1930. After the estate burned, he salvaged what he could from the ruins. Johnson dedicates her catalog to these people who collected Tiffany and worked to restore his place in the history of art.

During a 1946 auction of Tiffany's works, Kaufmann bought a Favrile glass vase and donated it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, where he was a design curator. He also put a Tiffany lotus lamp in the guesthouse at Fallingwater.

Luckily, Johnson said, "There were always a dedicated few who went on collecting and praising his work."