New Tiffany galleries. (Current and Coming).

It is always a happy occasion when a museum combines resources, scholarship, and sound aesthetic judgment to create a new way of looking at objects in its permanent collections. A prime example is the thoughtful and evocative installation of more than eighty objects affiliated with Louis Comfort Tiffany in part of the Deedee Wigmore Galleries of the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen, the Anthony W. and Lulu C. Wang Curator of American Decorative Arts, was responsible for the installation. Wisely situated between a stair hall by the architectural firm McKim, Mead and White and a living room designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the galleries are harmoniously painted a deep cerulean blue that beautifully sets off the seemingly infinite palette that Tiffany used to such great advantage.

Today the museum owns hundreds of works representing all the varied mediums in which Tiffany worked: stained-glass windows, mosaics, glass, metal, jewelry, woodwork, ceramics, enamels, textiles, paintings, watercolors, and drawings. The objects span the decades between the early 1890s and the early 1920s. A selection of design drawings, chosen from some four hundred in the collection, will be rotated in the new display because of their fragile nature.

The museum has always been in the vanguard as a collector of Tiffany's work. It acquired examples of his Favrile glass as early as 1896--just three years after he invented the method for making these shimmering iridescent pieces. These examples are important because they can be dated to a three-year period, and many of their have their original labels and price tags. They were donated by Henry Osborne Havemeyer who, with his wife ...