Louis Comfort Tiffany, Autumn Landscape, 1923. The Metropolitan Museum, Engelhard Court.

The gated entrance to Charles Foster Kane’s Xanadu. Film still from Citizen Kane, 1941 by Orson Welles.

Remains of the Loggia of Laurelton Hall, ca. 1905, installed in The Metropolitan Museum’s Engelhard Court, NY.

Interior of Laurelton Hall, Living Room, ca. 1925.

The Real Xanadu: Laurelton Hall

In Citizen Kane (1941), Charles Foster Kane has a palatial private mountain estate called Xanadu. Described as containing the “Loot of the World” it had the art collections of 10 museums, a zoo, Venetian canal, and sprawling gardens. But it turns out that there might have existed a real life version in America: Tiffany’s Laurelton Hall.

Laurelton was a complete living artwork, with its own railway station, private beach, greenhouses, farm and chapel. Chock-a-block with the choicest artwork literally dripping from floor to ceiling, Laurelton Hall was Louis Comfort Tiffany’s dream manse that he built in Laurel Hollow, Long Island.  A 65+ room mansion complex on 600+ acres of land, the interiors were decorated with thousands of unique objects from around the world, including the very best works Tiffany himself handpicked from Tiffany Studios, works that had even won him international fame and gold medals.

No doubt, that if it still stood today, Laurelton would be a historic site and a permanent museum: the ultimate legacy of Tiffany’s ouvre. But the vagaries of fashionability would not be so kind, unfortunately. In its day, Laurelton became sort of the ultimate white elephant, a monument to supposedly another time’s kind of artwork, considered demode and passe.

 “Arabian night’s dreams vanish, at Laurelton a phantom has become reality, eternal.”

  – A visitor to Laurelton Hall.

Wisteria Transom Panel, c. 1910–20, From the Dining Room of Laurelton Hall, Long Island, New York. Wisteria. Charles Hosmer Morse Museum, FL.

The Central Hall, Courtyard & Fountain.

Color Autochrome, ca. 1914 of The Bathers by Louis Comfort Tiffany, Metropolitan Museum, NY. (destroyed).

The Bathers

Only one of the many masterpieces installed in Laurelton Hall, firefighters actually smashed through The Bathers to gain access to the living room during the fire that burnt Laurelton Hall down to the ground in 1957. This amazing early color photograph dated in the early teens hints at what must have been one of Tiffany’s most incredible palettes.

Entrance Hall of The White House, 1882.

Peter Waddell, The Grand Illumination, Sunset of the Gaslight Age, 1891. oil on canvas, White House Historical Association.

The White House Screen

One of the most legendary objects in The White House’s history is the colored glass screen by Tiffany that was located in the Entrance Hall. Commissioned by President Chester A. Arthur in 1885, it was removed on the orders of new President Teddy Roosevelt in 1902, who supposedly wanted it “smashed” into little pieces. Rumor has it that the tremendous lost screen was instead removed, auctioned off for $275, and eventually installed into the Belvedere Hotel in Maryland, which burnt to the ground in 1923. Some historians speculate President Roosevelt’s motivations in removing a national treasure might date back to his personal animosity to Tiffany, possibly inspired by the bitter litigation and dispute with the town of Oyster Bay during Tiffany’s acquisition of the property of Laurelton Hall, originally public picnic grounds and an old hotel of the same name.

Computer reconstruction of The Blue Room in The White House, circa 1886, Nest magazine, 2000.

Tiffany also redecorated and designed the Blue Room, the East Room and the Red Room in the White House at the time. The Blue Room, or Robin’s Egg Room — as it was sometimes called for its egg blue color – had ornaments in a hand-pressed paper, touched out in ivory, as well as Tiffany’s trademark lighting fixtures.

Favrile glass mosaic column, ca. 1905, Metropolitan Museum. One of a pair of mosaic columns originally flanking the entrance to Tiffany Studios.

Favrile glass over concrete: Fragment of the mosaic sign from The Tiffany Studios building, 347-355 Madison Avenue, NY.

Tiffany Studios

If Laurelton Hall might be the equivalent to something like Orson Welles’ Xanadu, then Tiffany Studios in today’s light might be almost equivalent to something like Edison’s studio, or perhaps Leonardo’s workshop, filled to the rafters with the inventory of decades of the finest handmade glass objects of all time.

Workmen at Tiffany Studios.

A five story building including workrooms and showrooms, Tiffany Studios held an unparalleled collection of original designs, samples, Favrile glass sheets and more, employing some of the finest workmen, designers, craftsmen and chemists. To this day, Favrile glass and works the likes of Tiffany Studios still cannot be authentically equaled, even with today’s technology.

Tiffany Studios showroom, ca. 1913.

Tiffany Studios was liquidated in 1933. More on this, and collector Vito D’Agostino’s rescue of works from Tiffany Studios that year, to come.

The post Lost Masterworks appeared first on John D'Agostino's The Treachery of Images.

WORDS BY:   John D’Agostino
WORKS:    www.EmpireofGlass.com
One of America’s most acclaimed artists, Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) embraced virtually every artistic medium, from stained glass windows, lamps and mosaics, to pottery, metalwork, interiors and enamels.
 

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Fish Panel, ca. 1906. Provenance: Vito D’Agostino

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Gould Landscape Window, 1910. Provenance: Miss Helen Gould, Vito D’Agostino.

Tiffany asked why so many of us made such little use of our eyes, and why we so obstinately refrained from using color in architecture, clothing and elsewhere, when nature so clearly indicated its mastership. He referred to this as the “sovereign importance of color” – and set out to rectify the situation in a relentless “quest for beauty.”

The elder son of Charles Lewis Tiffany, founder of the famed Tiffany and Company jewelry store, the young Louis began his career as a painter, working under George Inness (1825–1894). Early notable designs of his included the redecoration of The White House for President Chester A. Arthur in 1881. At the World’s Fair in 1893 in Chicago, over a million visitors waited in line to see his ornate Byzantine Chapel, and at the Paris Universal 1900, Tiffany won the grand prize, a gold medal, and the Légion d’honneur. Internationally recognized as one of the greatest forces of Art Nouveau, Tiffany’s work would still fall completely out of fashion by the 1920’s.

Tiffany used the medium of glass to challenge the pre-eminence of painting. In glass, Tiffany found a medium of endless possibilities that expressed his love of light and color. He felt that no painting could capture its brilliance, at one point creating stained glass windows based on well known artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec to prove the point home. He could suggest a myriad of natural surfaces, from hard stone, primal magma and volcanic rock, to the sensuous, iridescent surfaces of winged creatures like butterflies, dragonflies and peacocks. Claiming a palette of some 5000 colors, Tiffany had an incredible array of different kinds of favrile glass to work with, from lava (volcanic) glass, to cypriote glass, to drapery glass and ripple glass, just to name a few.

Tiffany began experimenting with glass about 1875 in Brooklyn. He was inspired by ancient Roman, Greek and Egyptian glass, that, when dug up hundreds of years later, were imbued with an incredible iridescent quality, due to the ores and oxides of the earth seeping in. Frustrated with the limited palette of the glass of the time, he turned to making his own opalescent glass, with the colors fused inside in molten form. This was in stark contrast to the predominant method since the Middle Ages, which was the staining of colorless glass. Using a witch’s brew of secret recipes including metallic oxides, chromium, silver, gold and even uranium, Tiffany called his trademark glass favrile, after the Old English word fabrile (hand-wrought), a signification meant to reflect the hand-made quality of his glass. It cannot be duplicated even today. Quite simply, it is the finest glass ever made.

  “Infinite, endless labor makes the masterpiece. Color is to the eye as music is to the ear.”
-Louis Comfort Tiffany

This text first appeared as part of the paper The Strength to Dream: How Remnants of the Past Illustrate a Legacy of the Representation of Vision by John D’Agostino, published in ArtForum’s Art&Education Papers Archive, 2010.

View the full paper online here.
Purchase Hardcopy here.

An eccentric, autocratic perfectionist, Tiffany was notorious for walking down the production lines of Tiffany Studios with his cane, smashing anything he found to be unacceptable. Stories exist of craftsman actually scurrying to hide works from him in the fear that he would destroy them. “Mother Nature is the best designer” he said, and he set out to summon up the kingdom of nature, in all its glory. Using sophisticated abstract forms derived from nature as the material for his Art Nouveau motifs, historians like Robert Koch would later dub him the grandfather of Abstract Expressionism, a narrative confirmed by my father, artist John E. D’Agostino (born 1941), whose original inspiration for the abstract was not any of the expected originators of the movement, but Tiffany himself.

While Tiffany’s work would suffer from the vagaries of taste and fashion, the uniqueness of his oeuvre today is unquestionable. Perhaps the lowest moment was in 1936, when salvage dealers were smashing Tiffany’s celebrated lamps against the curbs, just so they could melt down the intricate bronze and lead frames holding the glass for scrap metal. For the artists of Art Nouveau, the lotus, a motif Tiffany would use again and again, appropriately, symbolized rebirth. For art lovers like my grandfather Vito D’Agostino, it was just a matter of time. Tiffany’s reputation would plummet from international renown to obscurity and disfavor, but only to rise yet even stronger once again.    •

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