 Good evening everyone. It's wonderful to see so many of you here this evening. I think Tiffany is our equivalent of Impressionism and there's never any dearth of an audience and there's always still so much to learn and it always gives us, at least me and I think many many other people so much happiness and cheerfulness which is a good thing right now. I hope you all had an opportunity to go up to the second floor to see the Cooper Hewitt's Teak Room before this program tonight because it is really looking the most splendid I think it has ever looked and I think it's so befitting that the Tiffany pieces are the same time period contemporary with the mansion and Lockwood de Forest so it all just sings so beautifully. I'm Cara McCarty I'm the curatorial director of Cooper Hewitt's Smithsonian Design Museum and I'd love to welcome you to this fifth season of the Enid and Lester Morse Historic Design lecture series which was a brainchild of Denny Morse several years ago when the museum embarked on its major renovation and Denny being the stalwart champion of keeping our collections alive came up with the idea of having this lecture series that really focused the spotlight on the museum's collections specifically its historic collections and to bring in actually this wonderful idea to bring in experts from various parts of the world to talk about our collection in ways that we might not normally look at it and we've had the most wonderful roster of speakers I recognize some faces out there so I know some of you have been to some of them but it's been such a joy to share the collection with our visitors this way as well as for the curators to get to know some new colleagues so on behalf of Cooper Hewitt and our audience, Denny and Lester I heartfelt thanks to your continuing generosity and support of the museum not only the collections but many many things that Cooper Hewitt continues to do The title of tonight's talk is Lewis Comfort Tiffany, Artist and Innovator Our speaker, Benjamin MacLo joined MacLo Gallery in 1994 and became the third generation president in 2012 Under his leadership, MacLo Gallery became the world's most respected dealer of antique and estate jewelry French Art Nouveau Decorative Arts and the entire oeuvre of Lewis Comfort Tiffany A sought after expert, Mr. MacLo has appeared on television to discuss Tiffany Lamps and Martha Stewart with Martha Stewart lectured on Lewis Comfort Tiffany and presented the art glass of Emile Gallet He has helped expand the decorative collections arts collections of major museums in the United States and abroad and he has been a very generous and instrumental lender to exhibitions On the Cooper Hewitt front Mr. MacLo has kindly lent us for an extended period of time a sumptuous Tiffany Turtleback chandelier which is currently on view in a Tiffany exhibition in our second floor locked with DeForest Design teak room which was originally the Andrew Carnegie Family Library The glow of the lamps dense golden and modulated glass panels harmonizes with the golden and red stenciling that DeForest designed for the walls completing the glowing effect were intended by DeForest Carnegie too had a similar chandelier in the room so to see the lamp now on view in the type of context for which it was originally tended is a very special opportunity and it would be a dream if it could end up there End of year The exhibition Passion for the Exotic Lewis Comfort Tiffany and Lock with DeForest is made possible in part by the Richard H. Dreehouse Foundation Restoration of the Magnificent Teak Room was supported in part by the American Express Historic Preservation Fund Please welcome me Welcome Benjamin MacLo Hi everybody Thank you for that very kind introduction Thank you very much Mr. and Mrs. Morse for making this possible Can everybody just be absolutely certain that their phones are off? Not just silence but off I tend to get very distracted and relive streaming tonight and I could end up spouting some sort of awful thing if that happens and then he'll never invite me back So as the title indicates my goal tonight is for you to get a sense sort of a 10,000 foot view of Louis Comfort Tiffany's life and why he was considered such an important person during his life what he sought to achieve and what his lasting effects are It's not nearly possible in 45 minutes to cover everything So by virtue of it there are going to be things that are omitted I'm just going to say I'm sorry now If you would invite me back we could talk about other things But let's try to go through it in a way that gives you a lot to learn from and a lot of enjoyment So of course the first question is who was this guy? Who was Louis Comfort Tiffany? Well the best way to think of him was the merchant prince of New York His father Charles Louis Tiffany in 1837 founded Tiffany Day & Young which eventually became Tiffany & Company The foremost purveyor of silver stationary exotic goods and of course fine jewelry in New York City This is a picture from 1870 of their second store which was on Union Square So if you actually look in the window of the store from then you're going to see Exotica Now you would think of when you think of Tiffany & Company today but we have German bronzes we have Japanese fans we have crystal from England and then of course we have jewelry mainly from the continent most of which was imported from Italy and England in this period So it gives you a sense of what it would have been like if you had been in this this world that he grew up in and the company Tiffany & Company really started to assert its power in the world after the Civil War and in this period and this is when he was growing up because of course he was born in 1848 So when he was 22 this is what the window would have looked like in his daddy's store and when he was a little bit older this is what the display in his daddy's store would have looked like at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris Now we think now World's Fair is something sort of a bygone era but you have to understand that in this period starting with the Crystal Palace Exhibition in 1853 the World's Fair is where everybody went to see what was new and everybody went to see what was coming and who was going to be the power going forward and so Tiffany & Company took this enormous stand and if you look carefully by then they already had stores in New York London and Paris gives you an idea that they were already an international firm searching for global supremacy Now Tiffany himself had nothing to do with his father's business at this time this is what Mr. Tiffany was doing This is a painting in 1872 so we're going back in time a little of a view of Cairo and this is not something he reproduced from a photo this is something that he did from visiting Egypt and all parts of the Middle East mostly with George Innes and watercolors that he studied with at the National Academy of Design just down the street and it really shows his understanding of nuance and the color and his love for the exotic and his sort of heterogeneous point of view I always think of Tiffany as an aesthetic omnivore he just took whatever he thought was special and turned it into a hole and when you see his studio in the 1880s it gives you a sense of that here we have an etching by Thomas Moran what Tiffany lived with and he had Persian carpets and he had European busts and a Chinese vase and an American clock and so all of this was not just things he thought were pretty but they were things that actually inspired him but his real love as a collector which greatly informed who he became as an artist was really more in the Far East and this is a picture from Laurelton Hall which was his great private home on the island which shows his collection of Japanese art and artifacts samurai armor across the wall suba and sword guards across the top and furniture as well there and so it sort of shows a lot of what he did and you're going to get a sense of Laurelton Hall as this Gesamtkunstwerk which is a fancy German word for an entire sort of complete work of art we have Richard Wagner to thank for that and Laurelton Hall if it existed today with its 570 acres of landscaped gardens and it's 8 stories entirely designed by Mr. Tiffany himself would probably be the most important non-presidential historic home in America unfortunately all that exists of it now are what we have in the various museums but let's talk about that in the Metropolitan Museum we actually have the lozia from Laurelton Hall so if you go to the Met you've probably seen this but what I think is just so fantastic when you build on this concept of the aesthetic omnivore is we have this sort of Greco-Roman Egyptian inspired design because if we go through it here we have Roman mosaic they're not Roman they're Tiffany glass but Roman inspired mosaic stylized Corinthian capitals with a Near Eastern floral motif and then as we go farther down it you'll see that the actual column structure is entirely Egyptian so what do we really have here we have Tiffany windows and lamps that reflect the Japanese aesthetic and the idea of geometry all of this somehow works together in harmony and what I love about this period in time in Mr. Tiffany's interpretation and love of it was that there was not one idea of beauty there was not one idea of what was correct and he was not afraid of putting things together that nobody else had put together before because he was really not afraid of being mocked and we don't think of it now but actually the most severe documented human fear after the fear of being murdered is the fear of being humiliated in public and he just wasn't afraid of that which I think is just fantastic and it's really inspirational to me and that's why I'm able to stand up here and speak to this crowd of strangers so anyway let's continue on and so as we sort of think about Tiffany I think it's important to understand that he was born into this extraordinarily wealthy family he grew up in the milieu of Lady Astros 400 and he understood that in order for his artistic ideas to gain credence they had to start at the top so his first major artistic experience his first major commission was actually the veterans room at the Seventh Regiment Army which is now called the Park Avenue Army and I've got some nodding heads so a lot of you have probably seen this now I have to apologize this is an old photo it has since been restored and it looks much better but if you look at this and you see this extraordinary blue glass fireplace with on the top here sort of a scene of the preservation of the Union because you have the eagle of the Union destroying the snake of the Confederacy this was a place where the silk stocking regiment came to trade stories after the Civil War and I know we think of the silk stockings of the Havemeyers and the other wealthy New York families as sort of a very very privileged but they were actually the first people to volunteer for the Union Army the Confederacy fire on Fort Sumter and this Armory which is the only privately funded Armory in the United States held a lot of great patriots and after the war was over they built this extraordinary room and Tiffany did it for them in 1882 and that's where the veterans came to smoke cigars and drink brandy and trade stories so it was an extraordinarily important place and when Tiffany was trying to think about how to make it beautiful his entire life experience and so we have as I said this sort of Roman inspired glass mosaic in the background but then as you continue through you actually have oops sorry backwards here in a second you have stenciled Indian wood ceilings silver stenciled that he would have actually purchased in India with Lockwood de Forest so it brings us full circle here to the museum because there's no question that there was an involvement there the sort of materials of invention continued with the stenciled leather walls and then of course the very first example of Tiffany's windows now if you look at this for a second there's nothing floral here there's nothing ecclesiastical here this is really a window that's job is to let the light in and it's 20 years before frankly right it's pretty incredible right so having sort of if you will, conquered America's sort of gathering place of New York's elite he got the commission to do the private home of Louisian and Henry Habemeyer and so he thought if he could do this really well then it would really set him up so let's take a look at this now here again we have the entire work of art created by Tiffany so we have the first of Tiffany's lamps for which he is so famous but then we also have Asian wall coverings we have Persian carpets and then we have furniture that was carved designed by Tiffany and DeForest and carved in Ahmedabad I think that's how it's pronounced India and imported so again we have this sort of extraordinary globalism at a time when most Americans had never traveled more than a few miles from their home and the Habemeyers who made their fortune in the sugar and oil industries were only too happy to have this and they had great faith in Tiffany unfortunately this house was knocked down to build one east 66th street and so the Metropolitan Museum got many things from the Habemeyer family and other things that sort of filtered out throughout the marketplace but unfortunately this home no longer exists speaking of places that no longer exist this no longer exists either can I get a show of hands of how many people who know what this is this is the White House so it's sort of extraordinary because just a few years after doing the armory just a few years after doing the Habemeyer home Lily Comfort Tiffany set his sights on the White House and President Chester Arthur had to redo three rooms in the White House they were extraordinarily respected in the period they were written about in the period unfortunately we only have black and white photos of it from the period so fortunately an artist in 2007 having read the descriptions of the colors in the room did a rendition of it so this really gives you a sense this is Peter Waddell doing the grand illumination from 2007 it gives you a sense of how Tiffany was able to be so fearless with color so really just get a look at this and imagine what this was saying about American democracy, American ingenuity and our way of projecting our power to the world our power was not just military but it was also creative perhaps a lesson that could be an electric sorry I had to say something so we had Tiffany sort of in a small world focusing on the elite of the elite of New York City and now on the elite of the American political world and then he set out to conquer the American home and he didn't do it necessarily through his interior design he really did it through his art class and here's a perfect example of one of my favorite pieces from the Metropolitan Museum's collection and I think that one of the things you brought me here for is to sort of show the process of innovation and so the following slides are most of them from the Metropolitan's collection and I'm going to run through them to give you a sense of how groundbreaking this glass was in the period so this is iridescent glass and Tiffany is widely credited with the invention of iridescent glass there were other people Johannes Loetz in Austria at the same time posh in Germany but Tiffany no doubt was the one who codified it and I think made the greatest success with it when they figured out how to do what's known as a peacock luster which is what you see here it was really off to the races but that wasn't the only type of glass they were doing at the beginning they were also doing things like this now this was part of the donation of H.O. Halfmeyer to the med in 1896 of 52 vases and roundels that Tiffany had created as a sort of complete collection for Halfmeyer and Halfmeyer figured since he was Tiffany's best client he was getting the best of his earliest production and since he was a great patron of the museum he was going to give it to the museum and this was another way that Tiffany would disseminate his gospel beauty to the American masses because the Metropolitan Museum was then as it is now one of the great museums of the world but take a look at this this is kind of weird right it's sort of this psychedelic gourd now the gourd form is something you see in glass all the way back to antiquity but Tiffany was updating it with his treatment of color with his abstraction and also with his iridescence he took his influence as well from Italy now he called this his agate glass and agate is a gemstone but it's really Vecchia Cassidone which is a morano technique where you layer glass while it's being blown hot and then you carve it back to reveal those that are underneath so there's a precedent to everything in the world one of the great precedents to Tiffany glass of course is Roman glass and here we have a piece from the first half of the first century AD also from the Metz Collection and then here we have a piece of Tiffany glass in the Metropolitan Museum from 1895 so it's sort of a fantastic object lesson here we have the original and then here we have the copy I love the use of swirled color and again the form might be kind of simple but the decoration is not now Tiffany had innovations in glass that people had never done before in history and one of them is what we think of as his drip or lava technique and this is a fantastic example of that and I really believe that Tiffany even though he did not consider himself a modernist was at the forefront of the movement of abstraction in America this vase was made before George Brock started experimenting with Cubism this was made before Jackson Pollock but look at the two of them you just cannot say that there was not an influence here Jackson Pollock went to the Metz he's never been reported as having examined the Tiffany Collection but I'll be a monkey's uncle if it didn't influence him now Tiffany get back to the Metropolitan Collection you'll also see things like this where they're using treatments of blocks of color very hard to do in glass now back to the lava technique this is probably the most famous piece in the Metropolitan Museum's collection because it has this real sense of the scorched earth that is left by lava when it flows over basaltic rock and that's what you see here but what were the influences of this it's actually quite interesting because allegedly Tiffany took a trip to Mount Etna saw lava flowing over basaltic rock was inspired to make glass and did it that may be true but I think that it's actually a little different now we need to take a little step back in time if you have been to the Metz you've seen the Chesnola Collection that's their collection of things from Cyprus what they call the Cypriot Collection and Admiral de Chesnola for those of you who are anti-immigration this should maybe change your mind Chesnola was an Italian immigrant a high-end Italian immigrant but one of the great heroes of the Civil War he was a cacti I believe in the Union Army and Lincoln was so taken with him and so proud of him that after the war he actually got our first a bastard ship to Cyprus and he went there and embarked on a maniacal quest to do archeological deeds and he brought back 20,000 objects that he donated to the Metropolitan Museum which was then a nascent museum and literally created at a whole clock the whole Antiquities Collection now there were lots of disputes over the way that he did it and whether or not he should have taken everything and that's something I'm not at liberty to discuss since really not my qualifications but what he did was set up an ability for American eyes to see the world from a different perspective so I think that that has a lot to do with it because Tiffany actually called this type of glass in the center here his Cypriot glass and how it was made is perhaps beyond this discussion but the basic idea was it's the same as Raccoon Pottery in Japan so we have something that's calling its influence lava is probably influenced by Antiquities from Cyprus but the actual technique uses a oxygen reducing formula where just like Japanese ceramics so I think that's just fantastic how globalism plays into Tiffany's world and when we're talking about Japan for those of you who are experts in Japanese pottery there's something called Mended Imari Porcelain where they would actually flow gold over areas of imperfection and that I believe very strongly is part of what influenced Tiffany because if you remember our first picture from Laurelton Hall he was a great collector of things Japanese so I think it's really fascinating now I just showed you all this really weird and cool glass but I think you have to have a historical context to understand what a member of America's elite would have considered art glass in a period so this is a perfectly beautiful piece of American brilliant period of Victorian brilliant cut glass lead crystal is an innovation that goes back all the way to the Phoenicians it's not something that was new in this period but the ability to cut lead crystal in this way was something that was greatly influenced by the industrial revolution and you know electricity so something like this this type of a punch bowl which is quite large was quite well made would it be considered duly good if you were a wealthy New Yorker to have something like this in your home Tiffany hated this and his father sold this and he hated it he just thought this had absolutely no artistic quality because for him art was all about an interpretation of nature and nature doesn't exist in a monochromatic vacuum and that's what this was he did not believe as Marcel Duchamp did in 1912 that science could conquer art and that math and ratios could conquer beauty he felt quite the opposite that the whole goal of humanity was to see the imperfections of the beauty in art and so it's just a completely different way of looking at things and when we look at his Japanese influence we see things like this also from the men now in 1925 Tiffany loaned them at 27 pieces of glass from his collection which became part of the permanent collection in 1933 now Halfmeyer thought that he gave the very best pieces of course but Tiffany having an extra 30 years to put things together probably thought that his 27 pieces rounded out the collection so it's kind of exciting when you go to the vet and you see everything they have but I think it's interesting again to return to the Japanese and say what is this vase and why did he make this because this is a vase that I think is really called a paperweight but it's not what you think of as a Baccarat cliche paperweight first of all this is blown glass this is not just done with lamp work and molding and it's quite extraordinary because it shows Tiffany's love of color and his love of what I think of as a diffuse view of nature and I really think that this is influenced by the Upoa of Japan so here we have one of the very famous images of Hokusai Umagawa in Sagami province from 1830 now we're stepping back in time almost 100 years but I think this idea of a landscape of the mind rather than a landscape that you could actually see in nature like we did in the first painting from Cairo was something that Tiffany loved he loved this idea if I can return to this for a second of something that gives you a feeling of nature rather than the reality of nature and I think that is shown very clearly here in this fantastical landscape by Hokusai and I guess that is now Fuji but it's a completely flattened landscape and so there's not really any representation of reality I mean these cranes would have to be 50 feet tall in order to look that large so it's quite interesting so I think if you'll permit me for a moment I want to give you a sense in the world of Tiffany what could be considered sort of good, better, best and since we talked about Cypriot and Laugh I'm going to just sort of run through a few photos to give you a sense of the point of view of what I think that means so here's a vase that we had recently at Maglo Gallery as Cara mentioned we've helped create lots of museum collections and I'm hoping that this will eventually find its way from the private collections into a museum but what I love about this is this piece was sort of enormous it was about 15 inches tall which for a blown vase is really quite imposing and remember when I mentioned the idea that Tiffany was at the forefront of abstraction could this be any further from a piece of Victorian cut crystal so what I like about this is the size I love the mouth that is sort of asymmetrical I like the abstraction of the decoration this sort of scorched earth that you see in the Cypriot panels and so I would call this a very very good piece and I was very proud to sell this but one step above it is this so let's look at this again the Cypriot vase but here we have a whole rainbow of spectral colors here we see a bubbling surface and if you remember I mentioned the oxygen reduction technique in order to do this what actually would happen is they would use oh I'm forgetting high substance in order that they would treat the surface with and when it was done when it was put into the annealing oven it would actually come to the surface with a bubbling quality to it I'm sorry I forgot which bicarbonate of soda it is or whatever but it's that basic idea so what we have here is a more unusual form very unusual color and that makes to me something that's beyond very good and maybe even to very very very good but better still is this so here your gas to say it all technologically extraordinary shape is great, decoration is great, color is great and so here you have something that's even a step higher than the private collection in Philadelphia that we recently sold it to but just to return to the map to me this is better than all of them so here we have color, we have form we have crazy decoration and so certain as a recap since we've been talking a lot about Tiffany glass to me this is the best because it just shows all the risks that Tiffany was willing to take and it's important to understand that by nineteen hundred forty three museums in the world had an example of Tiffany glass now what I failed to mention at the beginning is Tiffany's first piece of artistic glass was made in eighteen ninety two so in eight short years thanks to pioneer collectors as well as gallery owners Tiffany had this extraordinary reputation now in Paris there was Samuel Bing who opened the gallery Art Nouveau which is where the Art Nouveau movement gets its name from he organized exhibitions and the museum is out there in Paris bought Tiffany glass the, sorry I have to read this the Kunstgewehrmuseum in Berlin bought Tiffany glass the Imperial Museum of Tokyo bought Tiffany glass and so there was this extraordinary embrace of this contemporary artwork but in nineteen hundred does anyone know how many museums had a Tiffany lamp zero and so this was not yet something that was considered interesting to the museum although now in Tiffany's defense the first eight years was mostly glass production most of the lamps they made were for commissions like the Habmeyers but in nineteen hundred only eight percent of New York City even had electricity ninety two percent of you didn't have electricity so to have a lamp that was purely decorative because let's be honest these are not lamps to read by was an extraordinary extravagance for ourselves is where all the good lamps go so fortunately lots of them are in math flow galleries so I can give you some pictures of work with so this is a Tiffany peacock lamp and I think it continues with the theme of what we're talking about which is Tiffany is trying to create these total works of art because here we have the idea of a peacock there's no peacock head there's no peacock face there's no peacock neck but nobody would look at this and think that it's anything but a lamp representing peacocks because we have peacock feathers we have the eyes of the peacock feathers and then the body is suggested by the swollen chest of the base and then at the very bottom you see the array of feathers around it in a symmetry of six that's done with mosaic glass so it's really quite fantastic because it's not representation and it's not abstraction but it's somewhere in the middle what art critics would call conventionalization it's taking the idea of it sort of pulling it out of reality and I think that's just fantastic so we started in my family's business to have a great attraction for the Tiffany lamps when my parents started in the 1960s but they really couldn't afford them at the time so as their business evolved and they started to buy Tiffany lamps they became a more and more important part of what we do and we had lots of wonderful famous clients like Steven Spielberg and Robert Stewart and Barbara Streisand and there was this extraordinary growth of excitement about Tiffany lamps in the 1970s and interestingly enough that's when the museum started to buy so it sort of gets back to the comment so I want to give you sort of an object lesson on how to look at a Tiffany lamp that if you went to a lecture given by a Renaissance art scholar he or she would show you how to read a Renaissance painting to know what the portrait was trying to actually tell you without words and I'm not that smart but I'll try to give you the idea at least of how to look at a Tiffany lamp and understand what it is you're physically seeing so let's stick with a peacock lamp let's go to a more conventional model here so with a Tiffany lamp since we're at the National Design Museum I think it's important to talk about how they're made every 16 inch diameter Tiffany peacock shape is exactly the same they're all composed of the same pattern the same number of pieces of glass and if you were completely color blind none of them would look very different here but that's what's beautiful about Tiffany is that none of them are the same based upon the color based upon the treatment of glass and what's interesting and again a topic for another lecture is that most of the greatest Tiffany lamps that were designed by women and the glass was selected by women they were, as we've learned next to the Eropastoral Society about 25 women working with Clara Driscoll in the women's lamp in the jewelry department who were responsible for some of the most famous designs and Tiffany himself there's two reasons that he hired lots of women well many reasons but there's two that we know of for sure one is that he got to pay them less because they weren't unionized but the main reason is that he knew that women had a better color sense than men now now everybody's nodding their heads like well of course we do but back to 1900 how many women artists were there or galleries or museums that was a radical and weird idea but Tiffany saw it and he was right and actually science has proved him right only in the last five years that women actually across the board have a finer sense of color differentiation than men and if you want to be proof of that just think for a second about anybody who knows color blind it's almost always a guy so sorry little tangent let's continue so anyway every single one will be identical Tiffany lamp bases and shades are often associated when you have a lamp like this it's only this way this shade and this base were meant to go together this shade and this base were associated by Tiffany you had a choice of bases so you don't always say Tiffany lamp can't be right if it doesn't have this combination you have to know a little bit more but let's look at it from the top down so this is just the cap now one of these caps is real and one of these is fake and I always love to do this with people so I'd like a show of hands if everybody thinks that this one here on stage left is the original Tiffany cap show of hands, how many people think it's real you're going to have to raise your hand for one of them otherwise I'm going to charge you a small minority, very good and how many people think this one is the original one majority, see that is why if you play who wants to be a millionaire you always want to ask the audience you're absolutely right so let's see why he's a perfectionist when it comes to his industrial design every single Tiffany cap was etched out of acid rather than stamped in a die press which was crazy and cost them way too much money but Tiffany hated the idea as you see here that you'd sort of have these empty cells if you look here every single cell has an edge and so that's it everything else is meaningless because nobody making fake Tiffany caps is going to go into trouble now you're as much of an expert designer but let's look at the shape every single peacock knife as I said is composed of the design based on what they call the cartoon now if you look here you have a peacock eye here and then it repeats here and here so this lamp repeated all the way around the shape this one in a symmetry of eight sometimes there's no repeat at all in certain lamps, sometimes there's a repeat in a pattern of three when you look at the shades you'll see generally speaking that the letting is very thin and very very expertly done much harder to do thin letting when you have a curve because obviously if you look at anything that's curved it's larger on one side than the other so when you're flowing lead over something you need more on this side where the hole is so a geometric lamp has all square tiles everything should be just like a perfect little soldier so continuing on don't ever review all this, don't worry because there's going to be a test at the end I hope you all realize if you look at every single piece of glass here a good Tiffany lamp almost every Tiffany lamp there is nothing monochromatic now think back to that piece of cut crystal I showed you, Tiffany loathed the idea of single colors and so he drove his glass makers and his chemists absolutely mad figuring out how to make glass that represented what his eyes saw in major he was doing in his watercolor and oil paintings at the same time and so they figured out how to make glass that had multiple hues and when you see a good Tiffany lamp every single cell should have a feeling of multiple colors so that overall there's a composition that makes the eye move around it and let's continue by looking at the base generally speaking every Tiffany base which is cast of bronze is perfect you know with some bronze makers they have a late cast or a bad cast or a lifetime cast or how to know but Tiffany basically every piece of metalwork is perfect which is extraordinary Tiffany was creating metalwork for nearly 50 years the Tiffany studios was a business from 1898 until 1934 and you almost never see what you would call a poorly made piece of metalwork that's something to be proud of there was an extraordinary pride who worked there and Tiffany himself lived in New York City and a Laurelton Hall on Long Island and his factory was in Corona Queens it was literally halfway between these two homes so he was there all the time driving everybody crazy but that was part of the reason why the quality was so good now looking a little bit more carefully at this base let's look at the quality of the metalwork now this is a little bit hard for you to see here but if you look carefully again there's multiple colors in this and again the influence of Japan in cups here I can actually show you a super close up so this is a super close up of that base and you can see there's no one color this patina was made in the factory this is not as a result of 100 years of life and so what Tiffany wanted to do was actually figure out how to reverse engineer what the Japanese were doing this is a mazy bronze from the 19th century that has this multi-hued patina that Tiffany loved so much nobody in Europe had figured out how to do this and Tiffany figured out how to reverse engineer it because the Japanese bronze makers weren't about to divulge their secrets Tiffany couldn't pay anybody enough to divulge the secret but they figured out how to do it with copper plating the bronze and introducing all sorts of pigments and acids and such to make it happen is everybody with me? we have any good time? I don't want to bore anybody no sleeping alone so let's run through this authenticity and quality checklist together let's start here with the cap so every single cap will have an angled edge in each cell there will be symmetrical cuts in the metal and each of those cells will be finely finished with smooth walls if you see something that looks very jagged or if you see a straight up and down wall you can be pretty certain that's not something that was made at the Tiffany studios now let's look at the shade it will repeat symmetrically and consistently and the glass cuts must be consistent with metal templates now I haven't mentioned this keep that in your hopper we're going to come back to that a little bit later generally speaking the lighting is uniform and the glasses generally multi-cued now there are exceptions to every rule but this is a 95 to 98% way of looking at a Tiffany lamp and with the bases the casting must be crisp and consistent the detail work is often welded on after the casting which I failed to mention to you but what you see here this onion ball was done in the casting but the wire that ran all the way up the base which you can barely see here was actually done afterwards it was welded on because it was a better way of getting the specificity they wanted to and as I said the Tina should have multiple tones like in Meiji promises now look sometimes it's just hard to tell why are we really really got stumped by this one thank you it's important to understand obviously there are Tiffany lamps and there are Tiffany lamps now sometimes it is actually hard to tell because this is also a fake Tiffany lamp and this fooled the people in Sotheby's too back in 1995 there was this landmark sale of a man named John Weekum in Texas who was a great collector but he bought this Libertum flower chandelier about 10-15 years earlier and when he put it in the catalog we might have looked at it and told the people that it really didn't think it was right and there were six reasons why we didn't think so they said it doesn't matter it's right or wrong and then the man who made it came along and said to them I made that you have to go down the sale so you sort of have to think about provenance in the world of collecting as a double-edged sword and manufacturing is the most important thing and we've seen it with the authentication of paintings we've seen it with the authentication of jewelry and certainly we see it with Tiffany as well this is an entirely beautiful work of art but it just does not happen to be original Tiffany so not the end of the world but something worth mentioning for those of you who are you know blusting after the idea of becoming collectors it's important to know with who you're dealing with so this is a very pretty shade and I think that it would be sort of an interesting way to maybe not conclude certainly come close to concluding by showing you what I think are really great Tiffany lamps the same way I showed you what I thought were really great Tiffany vases so this is a Tiffany vase in the peony pattern but it's actually called the elaborate peony and now Tiffany himself as I mentioned had 570 acres of landscape gardens in his home at Laurelton Hall he was a maniacal landscape architect and gardener but one thing he was not a fan of was hybridization he thought that you should get the flower that God made and make the best of it with the exception of the elaborate peony the elaborate peony had literally doubled the number of petals of a conventional peony and he liked it so much that he made a lamp out of it and remember I mentioned that this whole idea of how the lamps are supposed to be made let's just take a little side step here a little bit out of order I'm saying metal templates Tiffany lamps were made as I said on a cartoon and every single piece of glass in the pattern was numbered you see here this is number 98 this is number 12 etc and these are the metal templates that would have been used to make something like this which is a tool of the pattern of shade this is the wooden form on which it would have been made so when they were making this they were actually working dark they didn't have a light source coming through to make sure that the piece of glass that was up here was harmonious with the piece of glass that was down here so it gives you a sense of just how expert the women and men who selected the glass really were the way that they would make this is they would start with a cast ring at the top and then they would take a group of pieces of flat glass because all the glass and the lamps are flat and every single piece of glass in this curvy beautiful lamp is flat and they would cut each piece of glass and imagine this is on a flat piece they would wrap it in copper foil on the edge and then they would actually set it into this wooden form with a straight pin and then when they had done a section of them they would flow that solid over it and they'd sort of make their way down the lamp that way to a finished room and that's the 101 of how Tiffany Shade is made now imagine how hard it must have been to do this one this is probably perhaps the most famous lamp that Tiffany ever created by Clara Driscoll with an uneven top that shows the branch work of Tiffany and a beautiful tree patterned base this is the lamp that only came this way the shade in the base were a married unit and I love the artistic idea of this in the marketplace a lamp like this is probably worth over a million dollars there are Tiffany lamps that cost exactly the same as this when they were made that are worth $200,000 they would have less intense colors and so that's where the collecting market sort of separated from the originality of Tiffany in the sense that when Tiffany was in business every single wisteria cost the same price unless it was a custom order where you said well I want purple and green because that's what I have and if Tiffany liked it you would make it for you so we see here the extraordinary detail of how to give you the idea of a wisteria tree of the blossoms that are all pendant the uneven bottom order and I'm going to show you exactly how a wisteria would be I love the idea of that and I love it even more with this shade so we recently had to be a fortune to own this and Clara Drisclachi writes about the inspiration of making this she was from Talmadge, Ohio and there was a farm that she brought and then the farmer next door had a primrose garden and so what you see down here is mosaic glass just like Laurelton Hall's columns just like the Park Avenue Armory's fireplace that I showed you at the beginning taking the same idea of Roman rose eggs and updating it to a naturalistic motif and that's exactly what she wanted to do here she took the idea of the primrose and then she just exploded it because she said that every spring the butterflies would be all over the primrose garden and so she took this idea and she created her own gazanquins for her own complete work of art this is not a functional lens I mean there are light bulbs in there but I have to explain to you the shade continues all the way down to here and so to change a light bulb you have to have the smallest hand on God's dirt I assure you and it's very very difficult but what do we actually have here what we really have is a sort of diffuse, impressionistic idea of the idea of beauty and the idea of this moment in time when the butterflies would be fluttering across the landscape in this primrose garden and to me this is like the top of the top of what Tiffany was trying to create it's less than 1% of what you're going to see in the marketplace it's less than 10% of what you'll see in any museum collection but this was very much what he had his greatest passion for he loved combining different things and he did it again in this so this is in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts which has a fantastic collection and here again we have the idea of the peacock but it combines all of Tiffany's great loves it's a lamp so it is ostensibly functional but it is a blown glass peacock eye vase on an enameled bronze base with Tiffany glass scarabs across here and here and then enameled peacock heads and necks to a blown glass shade at the top so it's this sort of idea where Tiffany just was unafraid of doing everything together and making it all work so to me this is sort of as high as it gets in terms of creation now when you're thinking about how Tiffany is used in today's world there's a very wide variety and I think what's interesting we're always talking in the world that it takes about this sort of encounter antiques with the contemporary world so I'd like to take a moment and show you what that looks like so this is a client's home and he bought this beautiful Tiffany's spider lamp which unfortunately it's not a great photo but it's very very pretty where the base which looks like the underside of a portobello mushroom was born with the shading that was only done that way but he has it juxtaposed with a Kenneth Nolan painting and a George Nakashima sideboard so a way of showing what sort of heterogeneous collectors like about Tiffany is that there are a lot of ways to use it you could also imagine using something like this in a Tiffany interior the influence here is medieval armor it's a chain mail chandelier but every single one of these is a single piece of glass set like a piece of jewelry in a little metal cage and it's completely flexible and so it's literally would blow in the air it's just amazing and so people use things like this in modern interiors here we have the home of Reed Krakow formerly a native coach and he used Tiffany chandeliers he bought from us and you could see how he did and what was otherwise a home completely not having 1900 furnishings or even 1900 architecture but somehow it all works very well together this is a John Dickinson table made in California in 1968 it's just as different as could be but it all has a way of working together and I always believe that great goes with great so here's something great also Tiffany but instead of the Japanese influence here we have the Chinese influence whereas the Japanese gave you the idea of something and gave you asymmetry the Chinese gave you just this extraordinary precision and symmetry and here you see it this is one of the only lamps by Tiffany that is not on a continuous plane you can see it goes up and down and up and down and up and down and does it all the way down the shape which was a bitch to me I love the attenuated quality of the base the flattened quality of the shape and this lamp is called the pagoda or Mandarin for that reason but you can imagine this going like in a Frank Lloyd Wright interior couldn't you? Well it did so this is Falling Water his famous home in rural Pennsylvania done of course with Kaufman family and they were Tiffany collectors and isn't it just great that with this sort of rustic modern idea of architecture with Japanese with screen inspired windows with medieval Madonna and Child with an early Native American basket with a colonial Europe chair everything goes together with the Tiffany lamp in the dead center to sort of harness it all and to me that's just great I love the idea of that and I think it's really important as we sort of go through this sort of modernization of the world that we live in not to lose track of the idea at every period plot that they were modern so here we have a home of music impresario Jimmy Iovine who's not a collector per se but he wanted to also bring some Tiffany ideas into his home so he did a little Tiffany lotus bell lamp here from the period and some Tiffany candlesticks and such that sort of widens up and otherwise very straightforward interior now we also have something like this this is a Tiffany turtle back chandelier that is very similar in fact to the one that you can see upstairs in the teak room now how would you use this in a 1900 interior you can see upstairs how would you use this in a 2016 interior like this so isn't this fascinating white room with a really contemporary piece of art on the wall with only a hint of crown molding and yet here you have something where the Tiffany chandelier just justifies the whole room and I think when you think of Tiffany as this aesthetic omnivore and as this fearless innovator I hope that over the course of these last 51 minutes you've gotten a sense that we have just scraped the surface of his creativity and there's so much more to explore so I hope that you can do it at the Met at my gallery or any place else that you'd like to visit that you explore this world because Tiffany is an incredibly rich source of beauty in the American world and around the world and I think that if you take the time to learn about it you'll see that it can relate to your own personal aesthetics in some way or another and could be a great source of joy for you so that's my talk and I thank you if you need to leave feel free, for any of you who have any questions we've got a few minutes hold on one second speaking to the microphone thank you Ben that was amazing I'm not going to stand up but you and other people use Tiffany the studio, the store as well as Louis Comfort Tiffany almost interchangeable and it'd be interesting to know exactly how you would characterize the man's contribution is he the artistic director the creative director did he know these crafts intimately could he make a lamp himself great question, what is he sure, well he's all of that he was a good painter he was not a craftsman he did not know how to blow glass he did not cut glass, he didn't know how to cast bronze he knew how it was done he was not a craftsman, he did not do those trades his trade was beauty and so a truly great artist can see something that's right in front of everybody else's eyes that they're going to and that was really Tiffany's great skill he was a great aggregator of talent he had very good people who worked for him but there's no question that he did not sit there at the shop cutting glass and doing all those things because of who he was and because he was the sole proprietor of the Tiffany Studios and he was for a while president of Tiffany & Company and he was always on the excuse me, the board of directors his name is always in the marquee he never allowed his artists and artisans to get the kind of credit that somebody probably would today and that people would insist of in this age of communication that we live now so that was sort of the course of the time does that answer your question? yes, very much when and where is speaking again? you can check on my website I'll give you a card thank you very much what happened to the rooms at the White House they designed? that is a fantastic question and I forgot to mention that what happened to the rooms at the White House? well this you have to know a little bit about New York political and social history I haven't heard of Teddy Roosevelt you know he was governor of New York for many years his family as you probably know since they have a historic home on Long Island were near neighbors of the Tiffany's and Mr. Roosevelt when he was governor of New York had a huge dispute with Louis Comfort Tiffany about public access to the beach at Oyster Bay because he owned 590 acres with an enormous frontage on Oyster Bay and the White Polo looking at his home and bothering him so Teddy Roosevelt he fought it out in the courts eventually the state won as the state always does but Roosevelt never forgot the indignity that Tiffany visited upon him by making him take him to court the first executive order that president Teddy Roosevelt did when he came into office was to destroy the three rooms that Tiffany had created created for President Chester Arthur in 1883 destroyed by Teddy Roosevelt 20 short years later we don't know where any of them are isn't that sad that's the truth that somebody in the back has a question first of all thank you very much you're welcome could you please tell us why they stopped and if reproductions have ever been made since 1930s why did they stop taste changed first of all we had a little thing called the Great Depression starting in 1929 which stopped almost all luxury goods companies in their tracks but Tiffany was an old man by then he retired in 1919 and died in 1933 and the company sort of listed along from 1919 to 1934 without him sort of redoing their old designs but taste had really changed remember the armory show in 1912 made a very definitive stand about what art was supposed to be going forward and it wasn't representational beauty of nature or even abstract interpretation of nature it was something very very different and so Tiffany fell greatly out of favor and remember there were people who just didn't like Tiffany at all when it was made it wasn't for everybody just like it's not for everybody today in 1934 and in 1933 they went into liquidation in 1934 they had so much backed up stock produced it took three years for Percy Joseph who was the liquidator who had bought the entire stock to sell it off and every now and then we've had the good fortune to actually buy something from the Percy liquidation and we'll have the original invoice and even back then in liquidation it was really really expensive a boss like that Cypriot boss that I showed you at first the big tall one that I said was a very good one something like that would have been $85 in 1929 when a good job was paying you two dollars a week so it gives you a sense of just how extraordinarily expensive Tiffany was so from 1934 until the late 60s nothing happened there was a revival of interest in Tiffany largely due to a group of women mostly Jewish women actually in the work area who fell in love with Tiffany and started dealing it at women like Millie and Nassau and Minda Roselblad, Alice Osowski and Barbara Mack who are my mother who saw a beauty in Tiffany that other people didn't see with the revival the prices started to come up and that's when reproduction started to get made so it's again provenance if you're trying to determine authenticity has to go back a lot more than 50 years because my parents did make the mistake of buying a reproduction Tiffany dragonfly lamb in 1968 they realized their mistake when the man who had made told them and that's a long story for another day but just goes back to showing that you have to be very careful of what you buy I think we have time for one more question short how many of these lamps were made with the runs of a hundred or a thousand or two thousand? Great question, how many were made the butterfly lamp that I showed you which we're going to just go back to for one second so that you know which one I'm talking about because it's so beautiful there are four most people think there are only three but I know where the fourth one is I'm trying to buy it right now that's about as rare as it gets there are a couple that are only two or three there's maybe one that there's only one then there are others like the Tiffany dragonfly there might be 150 but we don't know the exact number for two reasons one, they didn't number them that way in a series the lamps very often will have an inventory number for the style like the 20 inch dragonfly style 1495 but they won't tell you how many of them there are and unfortunately in 1929 there was a devastating fire at the Tiffany studios which destroyed 95% of the archives so museum curators around the country have spent the last 75-80 years trying to resurrect the records that were lost at that time yeah because very few of the styles had a married base to refresh your shade okay so the question is would it be hard to track how many were made well not if we had the original records it would be very easy but it does bring up the point that there are shades any 20 inch diameter shade could go with a number of bases any 16 inch diameter shade could go with a number of smaller bases etc so your point is well made we can only tell somebody who's interested in knowing this relative rarity I know that the most common lamp Tiffany ever made was the 16 inch diameter acorn lamp and I know this because there are what are known as dash number lamps where they do an inventory number then a dash and then a number after that and we always used to think that it was the ones that denoted high quality were ones that were special orders and then Tiffany scholar Martin Eilberg took me aside one day and said I think I figured it out and he said I looked through every auction catalog I owned for 30 years to look for the highest number dash number lamp and I got to number 88 so the inventory number dash 88 if you know what it was for Ben it was for a green and white 16 inch acorn which is the most common uninteresting Tiffany lamp that was ever made so you know we don't really know how many were made but I can tell you for the certainty that that's the one that was made more than any other any other questions or are we good one more question one more question the New York Historical Collection when does that fall sure if I had more time I could have talked about more public collections but she asked about the New York Historical Society Collection which is a collection that basically was created by one person there was a couple by the name of Egon and Hildegard Neustadt who were pioneer collectors in the 50s and 60s he was also a dealer in Tiffany and he did something fantastic for the world of collectors he gifted 50% of his collection with the New York Historical Society he gifted about 20% of his collection to the Queens Museum of Art since he was from Queens Tiffany was made in Queens and he thought they deserved something and if you ever have the opportunity I highly recommend visiting there and then with the rest of it he created the Hildegard and Egon Neustadt Museum of Tiffany Art which travels and so most recently I lectured in Winterthur in Delaware National Historic Museums and I lectured on Tiffany there because that's where the Neustadt Collection was but back to the Historical Society because it was Dr. Neustadt's collection and they accepted it whole cloth there was everything from just okay to extraordinary and actually I think that's kind of cool because it really gives you a sense of this industrial manufacturing company which is what they were what was the range of what they did for a low-priced line the lamps that were less elaborate cost less so a 16 in jacorn might have been 45 dollars whereas the butterfly lamp might have been 450 dollars but they were made by the same people they were cast of the same quality bronze they were done with the same patina so the Historical Society has worked very hard to sort of get a really good sense of the quality of their collection and they're doing something extraordinary which is that they are repurposing the fourth floor women in industry in New York, circa 1900 exhibition and the Tiffany room will be central to that and that's going to be done in the next couple of years and if you have any spare coin I highly recommend you donate to them that's after you've given all the money that Cooper doing needs obviously but I highly recommend that and then when it's open it'll be really something worth visiting thank you