Entertainment

01:58 PM CDT on Monday, May 29, 2006

By CHARLES DEE MITCHELL / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Patrick Young

Persian rosewater sprinkler, circa 1895-1900, favrile glass, University of Michigan Museum of Art

The Tiffany family name is likely to provoke two images in the minds of most Americans. There is the upscale jewelry and luxury goods store with its signature location on Fifth Avenue in New York City and a local outpost at NorthPark Center. And there is the leaded stained-glass Tiffany Lamp.

The absolute top-of-the-line, one-of-a-kind example from the Tiffany Co. in the 1920s would have cost you as much as a car, but by the 1970s knockoffs of the lamps were ubiquitous in family game rooms and as a key design element for the TGI Friday's chain.

Given such associations, the title of the current exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art, "Louis Comfort Tiffany, Artist for the Ages," could come as a surprise. But the exhibition aims to place Mr. Tiffany both in the turn-of-the-century milieu in which he flourished and to demonstrate that the best of his work merits inclusion in the modernist tradition.

Tiffany was born in 1848 into a family that settled in America during the mid-17th century. His grandfather was the first to forsake agriculture for manufacturing, and his father started the luxury goods store that continues to this day. Louis' privileged upbringing gave him a solid background in the arts, and a grand tour of European capitals cemented his commitment to be an artist. A trip to North Africa and Egypt in 1870 provided subject matter for the first of his paintings to attract attention. But judging from the few examples at the DMA, young Mr. Tiffany was right to acknowledge his limitations as a painter.

The Orientalism embodied by Mr. Tiffany's paintings was in fashion during the late 19th century, and when he turned his attention to interior design he brought Eastern influences into the extravagant apartments and homes he designed for such prestigious clients as H.O. Havemeyer, Samuel Clemens and his own family.

Jason McCoy Inc.

The Four Seasons from the Walter Jennings House, 1897, private collection

His approach did not entail academic precision in duplicating Arabic motifs. The gilt bronze filigree of a balustrade is inset with milky white glass the shape of very young tadpoles. Opalescent glass balls stud a fire screen. There is a chair with elaborate carvings in a tradition that moves farther east to India. The exoticism of these interiors must have been overwhelming, but documentary photographs do not show rooms with the overstuffed quality of so much 19th-century decoration. A new spirit was clearly moving through this work.

Many of his interiors involved stained-glass windows, and this is the medium in which Mr. Tiffany truly began to excel. In the 1880s he patented several processes for producing colored glass, and the work he presented his clients was revolutionary in its techniques. The leading followed the flowing contours of his images, and he achieved stunning translucent effects by layering opaque and transparent segments. He could reproduce portraits by old masters, create his own allegorical and still-life compositions and imitate the effects of Japanese prints. Leaded glass also served as the medium for his lamps, where the overturned bowl shape of the shades lent themselves to such flowing motifs as laburnum and wisteria blossoms.

By the 1890s, Tiffany had a thriving business in glass production. His company appeared regularly at international exhibitions that showcased advanced design in everything from decorative objects to engineering. Today it is hard to imagine how radical his organically shaped vases must have looked alongside the elaborate cut-glass objects that were the mainstream of their day. A vase in the shape of an iridescent jack-in-the-pulpit or a sprouting onion could only have attracted those connoisseurs with the most advanced tastes.

"Everything in nature is beautiful" was a motto Tiffany brought into the studio. With that in mind, the craftsmen and designers working for him produced work that stretched the sensibilities of their affluent audience. Cattails, thistles and fern fronds provided motifs. One of the most exquisite objects here is an enameled copper inkwell formed like a cluster of mushrooms. Even a critic who wrote an approving review of a Tiffany presentation suggested that a series of pieces identified as "lava works" should be tossed out as studio mistakes. There are two examples at the DMA. They are admittedly strange, with their references to ancient glass and Japanese raku pottery, but they are among the most remarkable objects on display.

"We are going after the money there is in art," Mr. Tiffany said of his several enterprises, "but art is there all the same."

Neil Lane Collection

Orientalist necklace with an inverted heart-shaped pendant set with a teardrop-shaped opal, circa 1909, platinum, opal, sapphire and enamel

That sounds like a startlingly modern sentiment, but the Tiffany studios, with their emphasis on unique pieces and labor-intensive process, seem today to be pre-modern in sensibility. After the turn of the century, Mr. Tiffany felt alienated from developments in modern art. He was among the many to rail against what he saw as the excesses of the Armory Show in 1913. During his last years he devoted himself to teaching others the techniques and theories that had informed his best work of 40 and 50 years before.

In what sense then is Tiffany an "artist for the ages"? In his own lifetime his work fell from fashion. The year after his death in 1933, some of his lamps were included in one of those international exhibitions in which he at one time triumphed. A critic referred to them as "silly and fussy and always in the way." The reassessment of the work began in the 1950s, but the popular appeal of the work was linked to the growing taste for art nouveau, a movement with which Tiffany himself did not identify.

What we see in this exhibition is an artist with an adventuresome aesthetic and the entrepreneurial spirit to promote it. The carefully selected objects on display are very much of their day, but they escape categories such as antique and precious, to be judged as the remarkable, beautiful and sometime weird things they are.

"Louis Comfort Tiffany: Artist for the Ages" opens today and continues through Sept. 3 at the Dallas Museum of Art, 1717 N. Harwood at Ross. Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays through Sundays and 11 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursdays. $16, including audio tour; discounts for seniors, students and children. 214-922-1200, www.dallas museumofart.org.