Creators (26 page)

It is a matter of definition whether Tiffany was primarily an artist and creator himself or a “creator facilitator,” a man who made it possible by his vision and organizing ability for others to create and produce. He was certainly both: but which came first in his order of priorities? One might ask the same question of Verrocchio, a painter and sculptor of genius in his own right, who also ran the largest shop in Florence, training young men like Leonardo da Vinci, who became great masters in their turn. Creators like Pugin, Morris, and Tiffany—designers themselves but also businessmen competing in the open market and employing craftsmen, some
times in large numbers, to undertake big projects—ran the modern equivalents of the Italian Renaissance studio. But though Tiffany had a great deal in common with Pugin and Morris, including an imperious nature which made it impossible for him to continue for long as part of a team, he also had the background of his father’s business, conducted on a large global scale, and emerging at a time when America was transforming itself from a largely farming economy into the world’s biggest industrial power. In 1883, while he was still redecorating the White House, he dissolved his art partnership, and thereafter he operated through a series of personal businesses: the Tiffany Glass Company of Brooklyn (1885) and Tiffany Studios of New York (1889), which was integrated with the original Tiffany and Company in 1902 when his father died and he inherited the firm. In 1892 Tiffany established the Tiffany Glass and Decorating Company in Corona, Long Island, to make art glass on a huge scale. His object, conscious or unconscious, was to unite the forms and methods of Morris and the arts and crafts movement with the new style which sprang from it, especially in Belgium and France. This embodied Tiffany’s own aesthetic ideology, that all art forms should evolve directly from the forms of nature, whether trees, flowers, rocks, birds, and animals or phenomena such as sunsets and moonlight. Although the style was English at birth, it was baptized
l’art nouveau
, after a shop opened by the entrepreneur Samuel Bing in Paris in December 1895. By then, as it happens, the style was already a decade and a half old, and Tiffany was right at the center of it. But Bing put his finger on the distinguishing mark of Tiffany as a “creator facilitator” when he wrote: “Tiffany saw only one means of effecting the perfect bridge between the various branches of industry: the establishment of a large factory, a vast central workshop that would consolidate under one roof an army of craftsmen representing every relevant technique…all working to give shape to the careful planned concepts of a group of directing artists, themselves united by a common current of ideas.”
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Tiffany was thus updating the Renaissance studio in an industrial age, but one that centerd around glass rather than on bronze, marble, and paint. He came to glass, however, through his work as a landscape artist, his first love. He wanted to infuse
his landscapes with light, in a way never before achieved. In Paris he had watched artists try to do this using the techniques (derived from Turner) of what was soon called impressionism. He decided to do it by painting on, or increasingly with, glass. He was much impressed by the stained glass produced by William Morris and Morris’s chief designer, Edward Burne-Jones, which he rightly saw was infinitely superior to anything being produced in America, despite the enormous demand: in the 1870s about 4,000 churches were being built in the United States, each of which required colored glass. Tiffany first worked with John La Farge, who had similar ideas; but gradually they became rivals, then enemies.

Tiffany’s approach to colored window glass was based on two main ideas. First, he grew to dislike painted or stained glass and came to believe that the patterns and pictures must be composed of glass whose color was inherent and acquired in the foundry. By going into the chemistry of glassmaking he realized that virtually any color of glass could be produced; and by producing his own “palette” of glass, he could compose windows exactly as he wished, with all the intensity and purity of color of the best medieval glass. Second, he thought that colored glass should not be confined to churches but also used in the modern home. From the start, and using his new industrial methods of glass production, he made windows for large numbers of churches using the lead line to reproduce his draftsmanship and color choice and with virtually no painted detail (he also tended to ignore the pointed Gothic design of windows or other architectural features; this disregard would have infuriated Pugin).
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Tiffany continued to produce religious window glass. One of his masterworks was
Tree in the Marsh
(1905) for the Russell Sage Memorial Window in the First Presbyterian Church in Far Rockaway. Another was a vast landscape window (1924) in the Pilgrim Congregational Church in Duluth, Minnesota. This use of landscape glasswork in churches was at first regarded as sacrilegious by critics, but is now accepted as a distinctive and marvelous form of the art and features prominently in the Metropolitan Museum’s great Tiffany display.
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But Tiffany’s secular glass windows were naturally more adventurous, though he was not the
only artist making them: there were also Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Scotland, Victor Horta in Belgium, Antonio Gaudi in Barcelona, and Hector Guimard in Paris. But Tiffany was the only one who produced highly adventurous landscape designs from nature that he executed himself. As early as 1883 he produced an immense screen for Chester Arthur’s White House, dividing the dining room from the main corridor axis. In 1890 he exhibited, in Paris and London, his vast
Four Seasons
, four symbolic landscapes, perhaps his greatest work in colored window glass. He used opalescent and iridescent glass as well as transparent colored glass, and some of the effects he achieved were mesmerizing, though with one or two exceptions all his best windows have been destroyed. For designs he favored flowers and birds, especially peacocks (as Whistler also did). Tiffany’s great
Peacock Window
, now in a villa on Long Island, was designed for a New York house (1912), built in the Pompeiian style. When, today, his glass windows are shown in museums, like the Metropolitan, it has to be remembered that he designed them for specific rooms where their motifs and colors were integrated with other elements which Tiffany designed or supplied—carpets, curtains, furniture, and ornaments.
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As a by-product of his window work, Tiffany began to produce lamps, taking another turn in his effort to use intensified light in designs from nature. Here was another case of art and industry advancing together. John D. Rockefeller, by creating Standard Oil and achieving enormous economies of scale, had reduced the price of paraffin by over 90 percent, the greatest single boon ever bestowed on the housewife, making both stove heat and lamplight cheap, and leading to a vast increase in the number of lamps manufactured. This was quickly followed, in the closing decades of the century, by the introduction of electric light in the home, replacing both paraffin and gas lighting with a source of light that was odorless and far less risky. Tiffany’s venture into luxury lamps, distinct from the mass-produced articles, thus highlighted a sensational technological change in the way homes were lit. Originally he designed lamps to use up bits of colored glass left over from his windows. Then, as the idea took off, lamps became a key part of his production and favorites with
the public, who paid as much as $500 for one of the more complex lamps, with 1,000 separate pieces of glass in its shade. Tiffany also realized that glass lamps (and vases), if well designed and superbly crafted, were the best method of fulfilling his aim of bringing beauty into the home.

All his lamps were inspired by nature. The Wisteria lamp introduced the uneven edge of the shade, a Tiffany hallmark. The magnificent Zinnia was a virtuoso piece of clever metalwork. The Dragonfly had a twisted base in the shape of a water lily. The most spectacular lamp was the Pond Lily, which had twelve lights of iridescent glass sprouting from a base of metal. It vied as a favorite with the Apple Blossom, designed to “light up like an Orchard in Spring”; and the Magnolia, which produced the precise off-white shades of this fascinating tree. All the later lamps were designed to use electricity; Tiffany recognized that this new source of power could be used to produce spectacular light effects. He joined forces with Thomas Edison to design New York’s first all-electric theater. Tiffany had been mesmerized in Paris by the Folies Bergères, where the dancer Loie Fuller of Chicago had a spectacular season. She was the first to use a team of skilled electricians, and colored glass, to illuminate her gyrations with long veils mounted on arm sticks, producing effects that drew artists and sculptors from all over Europe to capture her poses. Among these artists was Toulouse-Lautrec. Tiffany, who greatly admired him, used him and other artists, such as Degas and Whistler, to design glass windows and screens for Samuel Bing’s shop in Paris. But as a rule Tiffany preferred his own designs or designs prepared under his immediate supervision. He wrote: “God has given us our talents not to copy the talent of others but rather to use our own brains and imagination.” Individualism, even when the artist was working in a team, was “the road to True Beauty.”
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Although Tiffany understood glass technology thoroughly and was always introducing innovations at his works, he did not blow glass himself, or even cast it. In 1892 he brought from Stourbridge, England, the manager of the White House Glassworks, Arthur J. Nash, to create a new division, called Tiffany Furnaces, to produce a special new kind of multilayered glass,
the chemistry of which Tiffany had already discovered. It was iridescent, with a nacreous surface, very luxurious to the touch, and produced by treating hot glass with a secret combination of oxides, which Tiffany registered in 1894, calling the project favrile (not after a French term but from an Old English word meaning made by hand). As was typical of Tiffany’s love of sensual effects, the touch of this new material was as important as its visual properties and its receptivity to rare colors. It could be used for all kinds of objects, and became a fin de siècle symbol of
décadence
, but it was best suited to the magnificent vases that Tiffany created in the 1890s. These included the Peacock Feather, in which favrile produced, as if by magic, a distinct shimmer; and the Double Gourd, which blended ideas from antiquity with art nouveau. Tiffany was fascinated by an American flower called jack-in-the-pulpit, in which the stamens appeared to be preaching from out of a delicate hole formed by the petals. He designed various vases based on this theme, using new technical devices, including a superb gold-colored-glass, velvety to the touch. The rare colors and textures had to be achieved while the glass was hot, so they required superb craftsmanship. Even more care was required for the Paperweight vases, using an ancient technique Tiffany improved and updated, in which flowers appeared to be trapped between outer and inner layers of glass.
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Tiffany was a true creator in that he was never content, was always experimenting, and delighted in setting himself and his assistants impossible tasks. By the turn of the twentieth century he was employing 100 of the world’s best glassworkers, paying them the highest wages, and encouraging them to produce any of their own ideas that he could research with his chemistry division, make using Nash’s experience, and market—he had an immense personal flair for marketing. He used the resources of his Tiffany jewelry workshops to produce special metal effects at his foundry, and these, combined with rare colored glass, led to “jewel vases,” which extended his range of vases based purely on nature. He was constantly studying ancient pieces of glass that he had picked up on his travels or had examined in museums, to find effects, originally produced by accident, which he could chemically analyze and produce artificially. This is how he and Nash hit on a superb new class
he called Cypriote, opaque and delightfully pitted, found in its original form in diggings at Famagusta. He also developed a ravishingly rich glass with a rough surface that he called Lava, inspired by fragments he found near Vesuvius. His studies of antiquity led him to make delicate encaustic tiles that could be used in modern bathrooms, or in the surround for a new type of fireplace he designed (incorporating shelves for books or objets d’art), the first radical innovation since Count Romford produced a smokeless grate in Jane Austen’s day. Tiffany found that tiles buried for 2,000 years in ashes (as at Pompeii) underwent chemical changes, producing lusters which he could reproduce in his factory, and he was soon selling more tile sets than vases. He experimented with pottery, producing some amazing pieces, especially vases such as the Fern Frond, in yellow, with seven scrolled openwork stems joined at the top, or pots modeled on cabbages, corn stumps, pussy willows, artichokes, and other common plants and vegetables. His clay was thrown on a wheel or sculptured from lumps, molded in plaster for duplicates, hand-finished, and fired in a coal-burning kiln. The colors—ivory, beige, ochre, and rare browns and greens—were sumptuous, and each object was produced only ten times. His metal objects, especially vases, became more adventurous, especially after 1898, when he used special metal furnaces and recruited an enamels department. In 1902 he made a startling enamel-on-copper vase, with repoussé work of orange branches and green foliage. It gave an effect of opacity in reverse: rays of light, passing through translucent layers of enamel on the vase, rebounded off a layer of mirror foil with great iridescence and brilliance, an effect achieved by spangles and small sheets of thin gold or silver embedded in the transparent enamel. It would be hard to decide which was more remarkable: Tiffany’s conception, entirely original, or the skill of the three enamelers who carried it out.

Tiffany’s best times were the 1880s and 1890s, the opening years of the twentieth century, and the height of the art nouveau period. Then came a series of blows. His father died in 1902, leaving him all the responsibility for the vast jewelry business; and his friend and partner Samuel Bing, in Paris, retired the same year. In 1904, Tiffany’s great rival Émile Gallé died, and Tiffany missed him. He had already experienced a brutal attack on his art. In 1901,
Theodore Roosevelt became president, as a result of McKinley’s assassination, and moved into the White House. Roosevelt, like Tiffany, had an estate on Long Island at Oyster Bay, and was a sworn enemy as well as a jealous neighbor. He saw Tiffany as an immoral bohemian, who had brought to New York the adulterous habits of the Parisian Latin Quarter. “That man,” he roared to anyone who would listen, “lays his hands on other men’s wives.” (There was some truth in this.) Chester Arthur had said he found the White House “like a secondhand junk shop”—hence the expensive remake by Tiffany. But Roosevelt declared that the changes “made it look like a whorehouse.” He refused Tiffany’s offer to buy back all the objects, including the great screen that had been installed. Regarding the screen, he commanded his workmen: “Break that thing into small pieces.” Everything Tiffany had put into the White House was destroyed.
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