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Let the Light In
GEORGIA MUSEUM OF ART EXHIBITS (VIRTUAL) TIFFANY GLASS
By Noah Rawlings arts@flagpole.com
L ike other non-essential institutions,
most art galleries and museums are
presently closed. This is no excuse, however,
not to brighten your life with art.
The Georgia Museum of Art has gen
erously converted its current exhibition,
“Louis Comfort Tiffany:
Treasures from the Driehaus
Collection,” into a free virtual
show, accessible from the safety
of your home. Even if you
already saw the exhibit when it
first opened on Feb. 1, before
the pandemic really took off,
you might consider “return
ing.” As one virtual visitor
commented, “Although I got to
see it at the museum, I learned
even more watching [the digital
version]
The American artist and
designer Louis Comfort Tiffany
(1848-1933) is best known as
the developer of the incompa
rably beautiful stained glass
known as “Tiffany glass.” In
a sense, he worked as much
with light as glass. He and his
employees designed lamps
to emit light and windows to
let light in. In general, light is
merely the agent that allows one
to see a work of art, such as an
oil painting or marble sculpture. But light
is the very essence of an artwork made of
stained glass: Light passes through the glass,
both illuminating the work itself and casting
the surrounding space in its hues. Such an
artwork moves beyond its physical boundar
ies, generating an ambiance or atmosphere
that may influence an entire room.
Consequently, it is extremely difficult to
replicate the physical presence of a Tiffany
lamp or window. Virtually, you can’t see
or feel the reflections; you can’t notice the
iridescent shimmering, the tones shifting
with each step you take. Nonetheless, The
Georgia Museum of Art, curator David
A. Hanks and collection owner Richard
H. Driehaus do a laudable job of present
“Garden Landscape Window” by Tiffany Studios
ing Tiffany’s work, given these trying
circumstances.
The virtual exhibition (which can be
seen at tinyurl.com/rkcuze5) is basically
a high quality PowerPoint presentation.
One by one, photographs of artworks are
shown with commentary from Hanks and
Driehaus. There are certain advantages
to this format. In those photographs that
capture multiple pieces at once, one can
more easily notice formal and tonal corre
spondences among several different art
works—something that is often difficult to
do during an immersive museum visit.
Moreover, the video’s commentary is not
just informative in its presentation of facts
about Tiffany’s life and methods; it also
reveals an illusion underlying the Tiffany
aesthetic, as well as the problematic nature
of his business model. “Tiffany himself,” we
are told, “did not design most of the lamps;
he hired a group of female artists, who he
believed had a superior color sense to men.”
We should proceed, then, by remembering
that “Tiffany” lamps and “Tiffany” windows
are not the creations of a singular man of
genius named “Tiffany.” They are the prod
ucts of a team of underpaid, often invisible
women. Needless to say, this insidious
discrepancy between those who labor and
those who reap the fruits of labor has a long
history—and the phenomenon continues
today.
Equally thought provoking are Hanks’
and Driehaus’s interpretations of Tiffany’s
work. Interestingly, both Hanks and
Driehaus opine that Tiffany’s work is
“realistic,” a “simulation of nature,” “very
organic” or “very natural.” Indeed, Tiffany
did state, “Nature is always right. Nature
is always beautiful.” But there is a differ
ence between finding inspiration in nature
and emulating nature. In her well-known
essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” American writer
Susan Sontag suggests that Tiffany lamps
are “the most typical and fully developed
Camp style.” For Sontag, Tiffany lamps thus
embody “the love of the exaggerated, the
‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not.”
Tiffany’s works do borrow from the nat
ural world, but they also distort it through
abstraction, or through their integration
of natural forms with novel industrial
methods. As Roman sculptors abstracted
away “imperfections” like wrin
kles, veins and blemishes from
the bodies of their subjects,
Tiffany’s pieces abstract away
certain natural details—the
texture of dirt, the nooks of
a mountain—and incorpo
rate manufactured materials
(industrial bronze, copper wire,
wrought iron).
Tiffany’s works do not aim
to mimic nature. Rather, they
are legible through another
dictum, reportedly uttered by
the painter Auguste Renoir to
Pierre Bonnard: “Make every
thing more beautiful.” In short,
Tiffany glass depicts exagger
ated or idealized natures; it may
also conjure nature where there
is none. This latter point is
exemplified by his stained glass
windows, which often depict
vibrant, pastoral landscapes
(such as the one on this paper’s
cover). Many of these windows
are placed in buildings where
verdant forests and mountain streams are
nowhere nearby. Thus, Tiffany windows
have a strange trompe I’oeil quality: They
display an outside world that, although not
truly there, is truly beautiful. At this histor
ical juncture, in which our quarantined days
are spent looking into the windows of our
laptops and phones, we can discover a deep,
relieving pleasure en trompant nosyeux, in
fooling our eyes, by gazing at these aston
ishing landscapes of light. ©
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Quarantine Tales
For many Athens residents, this is an unprecedented
moment: A virus spreads across the globe; schools and
workplaces are closed; most days are spent indoors. In short,
"normal life" either is nonexistent or has become something
else entirely.
flagpole wants to share your stories of living, working,
playing and hoping in these tumultuous times.
How has your life been altered? What do you miss about
life before sheltering in place? What has sheltering in place,
oddly, brought back into your life? (A skill? A hobby?)
Stories can be fact or fiction, prose or poetry, lighthearted
anecdotes or heavy accounts. Limit them to 500 words.
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Email all submissions to Noah Rawlings at
noah@flagpole.com
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APRIL 15, 2020 | FLAGPOLE.COM 13