DEL.ICIO.USTravel Arts Syndicate
Published on: 12/31/06
 JOSEPH COSCIA JR./Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| A detail of the Daffodil Terrace from Louis Comfort TiffanyÕs home, Laurelton Hall. The terrace has been re-created in the Metropolitan Museum of ArtÕs exhibit. |
 Hispanic Society of America |
| A portrait of Tiffany by Joaqu'n Sorolla y Bastida is on display at the Met. Tiffany usually wore white suits, which he changed several times a day. The portrait dates from 1911. |
 Metropolitan Museum of Art |
| All the objects in the Laurelton Hall exhibit, including this Favrile glass vase, not only were designed by Tiffany but belonged to him. |
 The Museum of the City of New York |
| Tiffany created this peacock headdress around 1913 for his elaborate, theatrical parties. It was probably first worn by one of his daughters and then by a family friend at the famous Peacock Feast. |
 Millennium Broadway Hotel |
| The Hudson Theater on W. 44th Street in Manhattan was decorated with Tiffany mosaics. Once a legitimate theater, it is now part of the Millennium Broadway hotel. |
 TERESE LOEB KREUZER/Travel Arts Syndicate |
| This peony lamp at the Lillian Nassau Gallery in Manhattan was originally purchased at the Marshall Field store in Chicago. During World War II, Tiffany lamps were smashed to recycle the lead. |
New York — The genie in Aladdin's magic lamp could not have summoned up a more sumptuous dwelling than the house Louis Comfort Tiffany designed and built for himself on nearly 600 acres overlooking Long Island Sound.
Laurelton Hall had 84 rooms filled with exquisite objects of Tiffany's devising: richly colored stained-glass windows, lamps and vases; pottery; enamels; and furnishings set amid magnificent gardens and fountains. The impresario of Laurelton Hall also collected decorative objects from around the world: Japanese armor, swords and screens; Native American baskets and beaded clothing; Islamic tiles; and Chinese headdresses constructed of bejeweled kingfisher feathers.
Many of these objects are on view at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where an exhibit called "Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall" runs through May 20.
"Laurelton Hall was Louis Comfort Tiffany's most important work of art," curator Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen says. It was also his most personal.
Even in the pre-income tax Gilded Age, few people would have seen such a house.
Tiffany (1848-1933) came from a moneyed family. His father, Charles, co-founded a store on Lower Broadway that eventually became the jewelers, Tiffany & Co.
Louis, the third child and second son, preferred painting and the decorative arts. He studied in Europe, came home, married and started his own family.
The Met exhibit includes a stained-glass window never before publicly displayed, from his first apartment on East 26th Street. "It's unlike anything that had happened before in the medium of stained glass," Frelinghuysen says. "It looks like a great big paintbrush being drawn over a canvas."
The bold, nonrepresentational composition is inset with large, heavy, rough-cut jewels of glass and with glass sheets embedded with tiny flakes of glass of varying colors.
Concurrently, Tiffany and the artist John La Farge experimented with stained- glass-making techniques, but Tiffany, with his money and social connections, soon was pre-eminent. He opened a string of businesses, hired skilled artisans, and set them to work in a succession of factories, the most notable in Corona, Queens.
Before long, Tiffany designs in various media ornamented homes, churches, theaters, hotels and other public buildings.
When Charles Tiffany died in 1902, he left Louis a substantial inheritance that enabled him to build Laurelton Hall. The mansion was finished in 1905.
A showman and a good businessman, Tiffany enjoyed giving theatrical parties for which Laurelton Hall provided an unparalleled setting. In May 1914, he invited "150 men of genius" to a Peacock Feast. They arrived to find the gardens at their peak, abetted by a bevy of gardeners who worked for weeks before the festivities to achieve perfection.
As dusk settled on the gardens, Juno arrived — a young woman dressed in a Grecian gown with a peacock headdress, which is on display at the Met. She led a parade of young women bearing stuffed peacocks on salvers. The meal (its menu is in the exhibit) was catered by Delmonico's of New York. The evening ended with a light show and organ music, as reported in newspapers all over the world.
Less than six weeks later, Archduke Francis (also Franz) Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in Sarajevo, setting off the chain of events that led to World War I.
Within a few years, the world into which Tiffany had been born was unalterably changed. People had less money to buy his luxurious products and tastes changed as well. His opulent interiors began to seem fussy and old-fashioned.
In April 1932, Tiffany Studios filed for bankruptcy. Nine months later, Tiffany died and was buried in a grave with a simple marker at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn. In July 1946, the grounds of Laurelton Hall were divided into small parcels and the mansion's contents sold at auction. Three years later, the main building was also sold for $10,000 to a man who used it for a while as a summer home.
Then, on March 6, 1957, a fire of unknown origin started in the cavernous house. It burned for almost 24 hours. When the flames were finally extinguished, the house was rubble and ash.
Here the story of Laurelton Hall might have ended but for a Florida couple named Hugh F. and Jeannette Genius McKean. Hugh had studied painting at Laurelton Hall in the early 1920s, when Tiffany opened his estate to summer fellows as an art school. McKean loved the place, as did his wife. Shortly after the fire, a distraught letter from one of Tiffany's daughters brought the McKeans to Long Island, where they bought everything that could be salvaged. They transported it to Winter Park, Fla., for installation in the Charles Hosmer Morse Museum of American Art, which Jeannette had founded in 1942 with Hugh as its director.
About half of the items in the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit come from the Morse Museum.
The most extraordinary is the Daffodil Terrace, which has been reconstructed for the exhibit. Parts of it had previously been on display at the Morse, but most of the pieces were in storage.
"It was a pergola-like garden room that extended off the dining room," curator Frelinghuysen says. "This is the first time that this has been installed and seen since the 1957 fire."
The installation, which took weeks, is "the most ambitious that the Met has undertaken for a special exhibition in recent memory."
The terrace illustrates Tiffany's interest in integrating indoor and outdoor spaces and his love of nature, which inspired so much of his work. The columns supporting the roof have daffodil-shaped capitals made of glass. The stems are tiny bits of sheet glass. A central opening in the roof is faced with a lattice behind which are iridescent glass panes ornamented with stems and leaves.
"It's as though you were looking through a trellis to the sky and the trees beyond," Frelinghuysen said. "It's a tour de force."
Tiffany lovers who are inspired by the Met's exhibit to see more of his work will find an abundance in New York City. St. Michael's Church on Amsterdam Avenue at 99th Street has Tiffany windows, mosaics and other Tiffany-designed ornamentation, but there are many other churches with wonderful Tiffany windows, including St. Francis Xavier (55 W. 15th St.) and St. James Episcopal Church at the corner of Jerome Avenue and 190th Street in the Bronx. The 7th Regiment Armory on Park Avenue at 67th Street has two magnificent rooms that Tiffany designed early in his career.
Visitors with enough pocket change can even go home with a Tiffany original. The Lillian Nassau Gallery at 220 E. 57th St. may have the largest collection of Tiffany and Tiffany-period items for sale in the United States.
Prices start at $200 for a piece of glass and go up to $100,000. Tiffany lamps range in price from $10,000 to $1 million. The $1 million lamp has a 22-inch peony shade on a rare bronze, mosaic and turtleback base and once belonged to Barbra Streisand. It was built to be electrified (even though electricity was relatively new at the time) and accommodates six low-wattage bulbs.
"People who buy Tiffany really love it," gallery owner Arlie Sulka says. "They're planning to live with it and many of them are planning to pass it on to their relatives or friends. Most don't intend to sell it."
Sulka herself often finds it difficult to part with her inventory.
"I love Tiffany's fascination with color and light," she says. "Every medium in which he worked explored that. When you look at the things he made, they make you happy!"
Terese Loeb Kreuzer is the author of "How to Move to Canada" (St. Martin's Griffin, $14.95) and the editor of Travel Arts Syndicate.
IF YOU GO
Getting there
Expect to pay about $200 round-trip airfare from Atlanta to New York City.
About the exhibit
"Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall," Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fifth Avenue at 82nd Street, New York. 212-535-7710; www.metmuseum.org. Open 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m.Tuesdays-Sundays and to 9 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays. Suggested admission fees of $20 (adults), $10 (senior citizens and students), but visitors can pay what they wish.
Other places to see Tiffany's work in New York
• Queens Museum of Art, Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Queens, NY 11368. www.queensmuseum.org. Exhibits include the Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Art.
• New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West (at 77th Street), New York, NY 10024. www.nyhistory.org/web. The best museum collection of Tiffany lamps in New York City.
• St. Michael's Church, 225 W. 99th St. On Manhattan's Upper West Side, this 200-year-old congregation's landmark church was finished in 1891 and has eight Tiffany windows and a mosaic chapel that he designed. The church is open 11 a.m.-2 p.m. Mondays-Saturdays and at other times for services. www.saintmichaelschurch.org.
• St. James Episcopal Church, 2500 Jerome Ave. at 190th Street, has a mini-museum of Tiffany windows dating from 1889 to 1929. One of Louis Comfort Tiffany's cousins, Charles Comfort Tiffany, served as rector of the church from 1867 to 1871. The neighborhood was once woods and farmland. Now it's bodegas and high-rise apartments. However, the church is easy to reach by subway (the No. 4 train to Fordham Road) and the windows are magnificent. See them on the Internet at stjamesf.dioceseny.org/building/bldgframes.htm; arrange to visit by calling 718-367-0655.
• 7th Regiment Armory, 634 Park Ave. A massive brick building completed in 1879 houses two rooms designed and decorated by Tiffany. It might be possible to see them during one of the arts and antiques shows that take place at the armory. A photo of the Veterans' Room at www.armory.addr.com/index2.htm (click on Photo Gallery, then Interior and Exterior Photographs) shows how opulent and stunning it is, anchored visually by the turquoise blue tiles of the fireplace. The 53rd annual Winter Antiques Show takes place at the armory Jan. 19-28 (www.winterantiquesshow.com/show/armory.shtml), and the Art Dealers Association of America holds its next annual show at the armory Feb. 22-26 (www.artdealers.org/artshow/dates.html).
• Through Jan. 31: "Tiffany Glass Tiles and Mosaic Treasures: 1890-1905." The first of a series of exhibitions at the Lillian Nassau Gallery, 220 E. 57th St., New York, NY 10022. 1-800-682-6485, lilliannassau.com. For 60 years, this gallery has specialized in selling Tiffany's work.
Where to stay
Millennium Broadway Hotel, 145 W. 44th St., New York, NY 10036-4012. www.millenniumhotels.com. Centrally located, with modern, nicely furnished rooms. The Hudson Theater, which is part of the hotel, provides the Tiffany connection. When the hotel was refurbishing the theater, built in 1903, layers of white paint were removed revealing dazzling azure mosaics and gold leaf ornamentation created by Tiffany. Louis Armstrong made his Broadway debut in this theater and Steve Allen broadcast the "Tonight" show from there in the 1950s. After a $1.2 million restoration, it's mostly used for corporate events. Doubles from $249. Packages available.
Recommended book
"Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall," by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen et al. (Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, $45 paperback; $65 hardcover). Catalog to the Metropolitan Museum of Art show with essays by its curator and other Tiffany experts.
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