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By Root 7376 0

Louis Comfort Tiffany. Tiffany’s atelier was a mix of Renaissance workshop and corporate headquarters. Each partner had his own department—fabrics and wallpapers, carving and wood decoration, textiles and embroideries—the whole presided over by the master. Tiffany also ran the glass department and, like La Farge, patented novel production processes. These craftsmen, following the path of contemporary professionals, formed their own organizations (like the Society of Decorative Art, 1877), their own social groups (like the Tile Club, 1877), and their own schools and periodicals.

In fact, however, Manhattan Medici imported the bulk of their artwork from Europe, turning to professional art consultants to certify their purchases. Among the most prestigious were Joseph and Henry Duveen, English-based importers of antique porcelain. Sensing a lucrative market opening up in New York, the Duveens started a branch operation in Manhattan. Henry brought over high-quality porcelain, silver, tiles, and tables, and business began to click the day Stanford White wandered into the store. White introduced Duveen to his wealthy friends, notably J. P. Morgan, then in the market for tapestries to cover the vast walls of his new mansion and furniture to cover its floors. Happily for all concerned, rich aristocrats were junking tapestries left and right, in favor of William Morris wallpaper, and clearing out their old armor and furniture. Joel stripped and shipped noble interiors to Henry’s Fifth Avenue offices, and Henry cultivated new clients, like department store magnate Benjamin Altman, whom he began assisting in 1888.

In the world of painting and sculpture, would-be collectors had, until the mid-1880s, turned to local dealers like Michael Knoedler, Jean-Baptiste Goupil, and Samuel P. Avery, whose styles tended toward the private and personal. The boom years changed all this, generating a vigorous and highly visible art market pioneered by Thomas Kirby, an art auctioneer of long standing. Kirby’s profession, like advertising, had a somewhat shady reputation, which may account for his invariably impeccable appearance: wing collar, cutaway morning suit, and clipped, pointed imperial beard. In 1883 Kirby joined forces with two men who ran an art gallery on the south side of Madison Square, transforming it into the American Art Association (AAA), a salon “for the Encouragement and Promotion of American art.” When his 1887 sale of the late A. T. Stewart’s collection fetched over half a million dollars, the AAA was firmly established as the city’s foremost marketplace for sales of fine art, antiques, rare books, and jewels.

For all Kirby’s talk about the “Promotion of American art,” however, he and his buyers were fixated on Europe. But within those parameters he was willing to take some chances. In 1886 the AAA arranged to have the famous dealer Paul Durand-Ruel send over 289 works of modern French art. The first massive French impressionist show in the United States included oils by Renoir, Manet, Degas, and Pissaro, among many others. The New York press was underwhelmed—“Is this Art?” asked the Times—but the perceptive Durand-Ruel found New Yorkers were far more open to his painters than Parisians had been at first, and the following year he opened his own gallery at 297 Fifth. Impressionist collectors like Louisine and Henry Osborne Havemeyer—awash in Sugar Trust money—soon proved him right, and New York became established as modern art’s portal to America.

PORK INTO PORCELAIN

In March 1880 President Hayes joined frock-coated trustees, and their wives in silk dresses, in dedicating the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new building. To reach the entrance of Calvert Vaux and Jacob Wrey Mould’s barnlike, red brick structure, guests had to troop along a boardwalk that ran from Fifth Avenue to the main entrance on the building’s west side. Once they were settled, Joseph C. Choate, one of New York’s leading corporate attorneys, addressed the distinguished conclave.

He stressed the civic purposes of the new museum. It would not, as in Europe, be