Fixed Beauty and the Struggle to Create

There’s always something a little forlorn about a household object displayed as art, no matter how beautiful it is. An item that’s been designed for a domestic space seems lonely in the lifeless environment of a museum gallery. Such is the case with the 40 Tiffany lamps that make up the bulk of the Frist’s Tiffany by Design show. Their rich glow suggests a comfortable opulence that is at odds with the stark surroundings, and they seem to plead to the viewer, “Wouldn’t you like to take me home?” At least, that appeared to be the effect on a recent Saturday morning when many Frist visitors could be overheard fantasizing about doing just that.

That reaction surely would have delighted Tiffany Studios’ founder Louis Comfort Tiffany, who put his inherited fortune and his design talent to work creating handcrafted glass and metalware, much of it in the form of upscale home decor. A brilliant businessman as well as a gifted artist, Tiffany designed his lamps and accessories to inspire the acquisitive passion of upwardly mobile consumers, and much of the pleasure of a visit to Tiffany by Design is wallowing in that same sublimated lust—even though the objects of desire are now only within reach of homeowners with very fat wallets.

Tiffany, born in 1848, was trained as a painter, but became interested in glass and interior design early in his career. The works in Tiffany by Design date from the peak years of his products’ popularity, 1900-1918. The show’s entrance is marked by the spectacular “Lemon Trellis Window,” which embodies Tiffany’s ideal of “fixed beauty.” The window’s lush forms and colors offer up a seductive simulation of nature, without any of the natural world’s inevitable, unpredictable change. Its static prettiness is an ideal introduction to the array of lamps, which present dozens of variations on the same theme of captive perfection. The “Pond Lily Library Lamp,” with its intricate brass base that echoes the forms of the shade, and the “Poppy Shade,” which features a subtle effect of veined leaves complementing the vivid flowers, are two notable examples of the Tiffany gift for rendering the tender complexity of living things in cold, hard materials.

In addition to the ever-popular nature motifs, Tiffany’s geometric designs are well represented in the show, while a display of bases and desk accessories offers a nod to the importance of Tiffany metalwork. One room of the show is devoted to the reproductions and forgeries that have been the inevitable result of the fetish for Tiffany goods.

The exhibit also includes some fascinating information about the largely anonymous artisans who actually did the labor of the Tiffany Studios. One revelation is that some of the most popular designs were created by women, who worked in their own studio separate from the men. The curator’s statement notes that Tiffany believed women had a particular eye for color, although it’s worth noting that women were initially brought into the studio as replacement workers during a glass cutters’ strike. In any case, the importance of women designers to the Tiffany style, especially the role of artist Clara Driscoll, has only come to light thanks to recent research by art historians. One of them, Martin Eidelberg, has been quoted as saying that Tiffany “would have died” if the influence of his women designers had become public knowledge. The only face he wanted identified with the brand was his own.

While the objects in Tiffany by Design were never publicly attributed to the individuals who made them, The Artist’s Voice is premised on the notion that art is inseparable from its creators. All the pieces in the show were produced by artists with some form of disability, ranging from bipolar disorder to ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). The show examines what making art means to people with disabilities, and how the limitations of their bodies and minds affect their creative work.

The show includes a broad range of skill levels and techniques. Some of the art is the product of therapeutic environments, such as sculptures made by the residents of Clover Bottom Developmental Center, a facility for the mentally retarded. These are captioned with the artists’ own statements about their work, which are joyful and poignant at the same time. Case in point: “ ‘Gregory Vaughn makes happy engines and motors and gears.’ (Gregory always speaks in the third person.)” At the other end of the spectrum are artists like Connie Livingston-Dunn, an art therapist who began to work in digital media after an injury forced her to give up painting. Her digital collage “Floating Gaia,” with its sheer colors, delicate seascape and abstract figures, seems to be a surreal meditation on the fragility of the natural world.

The theme of the show makes it difficult to approach any of the pieces on their own terms, without first checking the captions to see the exact nature of the artist’s challenge. That seems somewhat unfair to the artists like Livingston-Dunn, who are pursuing their work at a high level. Nevertheless, it’s fascinating to contemplate the creative process of someone such as Sandy Booher, a blind sculptor; or Thaddaeus Tekell, a painter suffering from mental illness who destroys most of his work. While the show’s agenda may limit the viewer’s response in some ways, it compensates with a compelling glimpse of the struggle and pleasure that went into creating the objects on display.