I saw 4 shows at the Metropolitan today - Louis Comfort Tiffany and Laurelton Hall—An Artist’s Country Estate was one of them.

    

Stained Glass Window and Imported Door Entrance to Tiffany’s uptown apartment, designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany

I Never was really into Tiffany Stained Glass Windows, Tiffany Stained Glass Lamps, etc; it’s all around me and I see it in antique stores, in museum stores and it’s beautiful, but I’ve never really embraced Tiffany - and maybe I should, because Louis Comfort Tiffany was something else…. not just rich, but incredibly talented in a lot of different ways - and he did artwork in several media, and was proficient in several media and even his houses ….were designed as works of Art.

Not only were his houses “Art” but they were designed to produce “Art” and that includes pottery - meaning his house had a Kiln …..on Madison Avenue and 72nd Street…that’s right ….. his house was the equivalent of a modern Theme Restaurant …except it was just for him and his family.

A lot of times wealth is wasted on people that act like they don’t deserve it …. I got the impression from this exhibition that Louis Comfort Tiffany was wealthy and knew just what to do with it …. make his life into Art - and everything he touched - into Artwork.  According to the Times Article:

“Tiffany was born in 1848, the industrious son of a wealthy founder of the luxury-goods business soon known as Tiffany & Company. He set out to be a painter, touring Europe and the Mediterranean and becoming especially smitten with Orientalism. But he had more facility than originality, as the paintings and watercolors here attest. “  (Correct - as a painter he’d be but a footnote in Art History had he not done his decorative work - the work he’s really known for).

There’s probably more Artwork in the New York Times review of the Tiffany show than what I can produce.

“…..Reassembled here for the first time since Laurelton Hall burned to the ground in 1957, the Daffodil Terrace adds a fitting Temple of Dendur splendor to a strange and lovely exhibition. It has been organized by Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Met’s curator of American decorative arts, and presents a series of beautiful objects in search of a ghost.

The Daffodil Terrace once connected the dining room and the gardens at Laurelton Hall, the grand estate that Tiffany built for himself from 1902 to 1905 on 580 extensively landscaped acres overlooking Long Island Sound. It is displayed here in an enormous gallery, along with the stained-glass windows whose trailing wisteria vines brought the garden into the dining room, and the imposing white marble mantel whose three glass mosaic clocks let diners keep track of the time, the day and the month. “

Laurelton Hall would have been a place I’d love to visit - it’s so comfortable - and the living interiors - well …… Louis Comfort Tiffany was ahead of this time.

OK……. his paintings, while technically good, don’t interest me … it’s the pottery and stained glass that is uniquely his.  

The Louis Comfort Tiffany show at the Met runs till May 20th, 2007 - a good 6 months - plenty of time to see it.

It’s not a show that I, personally, would have gone out of my way to see - since I was at the Met today … I spent maybe 20 minutes with Tiffany.