A Visit to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Well dear clients and friends your intrepid Art Nouveau travelers were at it again recently, dropping in last month to see our friends at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. The VMFA is the third and final stop for the exhibition entitled “Tiffany: Color and Light” that began last September in Paris and spent the winter in Montreal.

Macklowe Gallery is proud to have lent a rare “Woodbine” table lamp for the exhibition, as well as arranging for unusual mosaic and turtleback inkwells to be lent by a generous private collector.

And what an exhibition it is, brilliantly curated by Rosalind Pepall of the Montreal Museum, Alice Cooney Freylinghuysen of the Metropolitan Museum, and independent curator and all-around charmer Martin Eidelberg. There is a richly illustrated catalogue, but you really need to see the pieces in person to get the full experience as the curators intended. The exhibition is brilliantly laid out and takes advantage of the McGlothlin wing, part of the VMFA’s new 165,000 square foot expansion.

Hillary and I were lucky enough to attend the opening evening, and let me tell you friends, Virginians know how to throw a party! All the patrons were dressed up in festive black tie, enjoying the exhibition while the champagne was flowing. The dinner was beautifully presented and far more delicious than any I’ve had at catered events in New York, but all this was just the backdrop. My “dinner partner” seated just to my right was none other than Frances Lewis herself! She regaled me with stories of how she and Sydney discovered this or that masterpiece, whether it was at Macklowe Gallery or in the finest galleries in Paris. Seated across from us was John Snow, who may not ring your “Tiffany bell” but was generous enough to have left his position as Chairman of the railroad company CSX to be Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush. He was less interested in talking about himself than about the Leonard Cohen concert he and his wife had recently attended, which got us into a table-wide discussion of what’s good in music today. I never thought I would be recommending Ron Sexsmith and Julian Coryell to the former Secretary of the Treasury, but there we were just having a grand time.

Before dessert there was a performance given in which a dancer, clad in flowing white, the gauzy fabric concealing wooden poles that extended from her hands at least 3 feet, performed a dance “a la Loie Fuller”. Many of you know the original Loie Fuller from the various bronzes of her by Raoul Larche and images of her done by Henri de Toulouse Lautrec and other artists of fin-de-siècle Paris. Hers was a dance of metamorphosis, and this evening the dancer came to life as colored light images of Tiffany lampshades were projected onto her, turning her into a dragonfly one moment and a magnolia blossom in the next. It was such an unexpected and ethereal moment of beauty, and a highlight of the evening.

The Museum was a natural fit for the Tiffany exhibition, as it happens to have the country’s very best permanent collection of 20^th Century Decorative Arts, with an emphasis on French Art Nouveau and Art Deco furniture and objects and Tiffany Studios lamps and glass. There are pieces here you just won’t see anywhere else, collected with great passion by Sydney and Frances Lewis. They were aided by our dear departed friend Frederick Brandt, who was the long-time curator of this department. Barry Shifman is the “new” curator and has ably filled Fred’s shoes, taking the collection forward with a discerning eye.

The loan exhibition “Tiffany: Color and Light” runs only until August 15^th, so run don’t walk and make plans to visit. I would love to lead a group there and I know we would be treated to true Southern hospitality, so let this be an open invitation to all of you for one of the weekends in August. If enough people wish to convene in Richmond to see the show and the Museum’s permanent collection, we can plan a weekend’s activities to accompany it. Please email me at the Gallery if you are interested and we’ll see what we can do.

To learn more about this exhibit, visit the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts website.

Summer Hours

On another note, Macklowe Gallery is going to be closed Saturdays this summer starting June 26. We will be closed for vacation June 28 and reopening July 12. Lloyd, Lary and I will be exhibiting in Aspen during that time, so come on out to God’s country and say hi.