the king is dead long live the king

it's beginning to come clear that the rebirth of the tiffany obsession (well-deserved, imho) fueled the entire art nouveau renaissance in the middle of the twentieth century.

Early scholar of Louis Comfort Tiffany, Robert Koch was born to Millard and Ella Heidelberg (Koch). He gained his bachelor's degree from Harvard and a master's degree from New York University. During World War II, he served in the United States Army from 1942 to 1945. Koch, received his Ph.D., in art history from Yale in 1957. The following year he curated an exhibition of Louis Comfort Tiffany's work for the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. The exhibition is credited with reviving the interest in Tiffany Art Nouveau objects. He was a professor at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven. He published his Ph.D thesis in a revised form as "Louis Comfort Tiffany, Rebel in Glass," in 1964. In 1972 Koch discovered a very early, and very rare, Tiffany, one that had probably been made by the designer personally. In 2002 Koch donated it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1

or....

“Let those who arrogantly despise their parents’ tastes beware. Let those who ruthlessly sweep out their attics pay heed. Not only is the fickleness of taste inevitable, but so is the phenomenon of conscientious revivals. A case in point is Louis Comfort Tiffany, zigzagging from a position where he was at the peak of chic around 1900 to the gutter of deri- sion around 1920–1930 and then gradu- ally, deliberately being rediscovered.”

When Aline Saarinen wrote this in 1955, she was witnessing the changing tide in the taste for Tiffany’s glassware and decorative objects. Now, almost a half-century later, Tiffany and the work of Tiffany Studios has secured the recognition of museum curators and private collectors, achieving widespread public appreciation.

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848–1933) was an artist and entrepreneur of remarkable talent, breadth, and innovation. His accomplishments as a painter, interior designer, and artist in stained glass, blown glass, metalwork, ceramics, and jewelry were enhanced by his role as a businessman and his appreciation of modern technology. The popularity of the different media in which Tiffany worked varied among patrons, and Tiffany himself had disparate opinions of his craft. In particular, Tiffany did not feel that his distinctive and colorful lamps were preeminent among his creations. Contrary to Tiffany’s personal opinion, however, Tiffany lamps witnessed immense popularity when introduced, demonstrated by the quantity made by Tiffany Studios from the turn of the century until the company went bankrupt in 1932.

In 1970, Dr. Egon Neustadt published his collection in The Lamps of Tiffany. Dr. Neustadt, an orthodontist who was born in Vienna, began collecting Tiffany lamps with his wife, Hildegard, in 1935. Neustadt noted that when he brought his first lamp home and placed it on his desk, “Our friends didn’t like it.” Undaunted, Neustadt’s interest in the leaded glass shades and bases became all-consuming, making him the earliest serious enthusiast of Tiffany lamps, assembling an encyclopedic collection. Beginning approximately twenty years ahead of other major Tiffany lamp collectors, including Walter Chrysler, Jr., Lillian Nasseau, and Hank Helfand, he brought credibility to the field. 2

or....

Jeannette Genius McKean (1909- 1989) founded the Morse Museum of American Art as the Morse Gallery of Art on the Rollins College campus, naming it in honor her industrialist grand- father who retired from Chicago to make Winter Park his final home.

As a child, she visited Winter Park and had fond memories of her grandfather and Osceola Lodge on Lake Osceola, the craftsman-style home he remodeled. It stands today a few blocks from the Morse Museum exactly as it was when she visited in the early 1900s.

Jeannette McKean grew up in the gracious Kenwood section of Chicago in the Richardson Romanesque-style mansion her grandfather had built and later gave to her parents as a wedding gift. The home was richly detailed with stained-glass windows and carved mahogany cabinetry, and her artistic mother, Elizabeth Morse Genius, bought American Impressionist paintings, many of which are in the Morse collection today, to hang on the walls. As with many wealthy families of the period, the Geniuses also collected Tiffany glass.

In 1942 she founded the Morse Gallery on campus and named Hugh F. Mc- Kean, then a Rollins art professor, as its director. In 1945, Hugh and Jeann- ette were married.

Thirteen years after she founded the Morse Gallery, Jeannette McKean staged an exhibition, "Works of Art by Louis Comfort Tiffany," that was the first serious showing of Tiffany work since the turn of the century. For decades Tiffany's work had fallen from favor, but Jeannette McKean, remembering the satiny, iridescent glass in her family home, still thought his work exceptionally elegant.

In 1957 when the McKeans received word from one of Tiffany's twin daughters that his estate, Laurelton Hall, had burned, it was Jeannette McKean who made the decision to rescue the Tiffany 'treasures' then considered not worth saving. Her husband remembered her exact words at the scene of the devastation: "Let's buy everything that is left and try to save it." With that decision she created the nucleus of a collection that would grow into the most comprehensive collection of the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany in the world. 3

whether it was the flood of interest in getting something for nothing that collectors brought to news of tiffany's death, or a passion more in depth or earnest than that that was catalyst for a revival, or whether it was merely generational change, in which the generation that loved it begat the generation that hated it begat... etc. as a culture that enjoys assigning reasons, art historians (like everyone else) will guess and quarrel and surmise, and all that's really left for us to do is to sit back and thoroughly enjoy.

the alternate shaping of reality

while some 60s poster artists looked to french art nouveau, others looked to vienna. particularly when it came to lettering, alfred roller's font was nearly ubiquitous.

"The lettering by Alfred Roller in this poster he designed for a Secessionist exhibition in 1903 was the major source of inspiration for Wes Wilson and the other San Francisco poster artists of the 1960s period." 1

other designers of that moment included kolomon moser, but even on his own posters, he used variations of roller's fonts.

david goines borrowed from wiener werkstatte fonts (along with many others) in his posters as well.

when i was living in the haight-ashbury district of san francisco in the late 60s, my favorite poster artist was mari tepper. her work was so different from the rest, but now i see echos of vienna here as well.

why, you might ask, should there be such a strong influence from secession vienna on bay area artists? patience, grasshopper. all will be shown in the end.

beyond the letter- ing, we saw the alternate shaping of reality which may easily explain the way the fonts look different in the hands of wilson versus their originator. what do you think?

more at funnyordie.com.

the temporary aberration

roxy reminded me in her comment after yesterday's post that many of you probably never thought about that moment in US history when everything changed: the first baby- boomers graduated from high school, everyone started smoking dope, and you could buy posters everywhere. posters were such a big new thing that life magazine devoted a whole cover story to the subject.

i was aware of this, and wondered if there had been some technological advancement had occurred which allowed the manufacture and price of big beautiful four-color posters to be within nearly anyone's reach; i recalled that part of what began the first poster craze was, in part, just this kind of thing.

i asked the brilliant poster designer and printer, david goines, about this and i'll quote you some of his response. One thing that may have had an influence was that while most printing was done by letterpress (newspapers, magazines & books), printing of large images, especially complex ones, such as maps, and cheap ones, such as boxing posters, was done by offset lithography, which was the poor cousin of the much more expensive letterpress process.

The intermediate process of Mimeograph was used for text-only (sometimes with minimal illustration) such as school newspapers, leaflets, class handouts, but wasn't really useful for images. Ditto (spirit duplication) was useful for very small quantities of illustrated class- room handouts (grade-school teachers used it a lot).

In the early 1960s technological innovations began to make offset lithography not only competitive with mimeograph, but actually replaced it by around 1966. (more from david to come....)

Interest in Art Nouveau underwent a revival in the Seventies when reproductions of posters of Sarah Bernhardt by the Czech designer Alphonse Mucha became popular. The Art Nouveau revival is understandable in the context of the magpie approach of Pop graphic designers. Spurred on by museum exhibitions of the work of Alphonse Mucha and Aubrey Beardsley, British designers took up the style to the extent that Queen magazine was describing an ‘Art Nouveau fever’ in 1964. 1

In its brief heyday around the turn of the century, the tendrilous international style of art nouveau swept over Europe, dominating the design of everything from the Paris Metro stations to ordinary knives and forks. The inevitable reaction against it was particularly violent, and the whole movement was dismissed as a rather ludicrous, if temporary, aberration. Artists like Alphonse Mucha, if remembered at all, seemed as dated as gaslight and their work as decadent as Oscar Wilde's sun flower. But lately art nouveau has been getting a new look. Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art had a big show of it three years ago, and in London last week Alphonse Mucha was once again a big name with simultaneous shows at the Grosvenor and Jeffress Galleries and the Victoria and Albert Museum. 2

i'll be examining further these mentioned exhibitions, and the particular effects they had depending on where they were held. and there were many other regional happenstances that bear mentioning. to come. we'll look also at the wider picture of art nouveau, as well as more on posters.

david byrd is a brilliant poster artist who has worked in many media and in many styles. as we've seen, mucha's style was a prototype for many of the artists, and for some even more than that. david's web site says this one was inspired by a muybridge series, but i don't know.

check out another mucha piece, some preliminary drawings 4, and let me know what you think. even if you agree with me and find it irredeemably mucha-ish, the hand that made it is clearly also a master.

you also may be beginning to understand how many questions are involved in this one. not just the return of mucha himself, but of his many shadows too.

temporary aberration? uh... no. i just don't think so.

inna gadda da vida, baby

i've begun to wonder about the resurgence of interest in art nouveau in the 1960s; there aren't easy answers because, as it turns out, the questions aren't easy!

i had read somewhere that a collector with a huge collection of art nouveau treasures which had become all but worthless arranged for a museum exhibition, thus reviving value in what he owned. but even if i could find that reference again, which i have not, i am beginning to think it's apocryphal anyway: it's a story with as many roots as did the original movement itself, and i hope i can untangle some of them.

to give you an idea of what i mean, let's take rock posters, for a start. seeing them juxtaposed like this with those from 60 years earlier, it's almost hard to tell which are more "psychedelic," but the influence is obvious. but! what do we mean when we say influence? style? lettering? direct theft?

over the next number of posts we'll look at all of these, as well as the many others that arise. as usual, i'm learning as i go along, hoping to assimilate. i have books coming from the library, letters i've written to the artists themselves, etc. and of course rock posters is just the beginning. what about that mucha poster you had on your wall in 1969?

i think this is going to be fun.