Sunday, March 06, 2011

Clara and Mr Tiffany by Susan Vreeland (2011)

Best book of the year, so far. Love those art history fiction books, and this is about one of my favorite art forms - stained glass. I have admired stained glass since I was a kid bored during church services, and have liked Tiffany style lamps, seen Tiffany windows (at least in a small chapel off the coast of Georgia), bought Tiffany note cards. Then, while living in Ohio, I bought my first piece of stained glass with a rainbow and mirror from a street artist in San Francisco (so he could get his car out of the parking garage). My next piece was a round night scene with a tree that I bought an an Ohio art fair, where I felt I had walked into a fantasy land, when I walked in the booth of these glorious stained glass windows. The $80 round piece was the cheapest thing there, and though outside my budget, I have never regretted purchasing it. Then I met Luna Mountainsea, a stained glass artist, from whom I have purchased numerous pieces over the years. As I was reading this book and yearning for a Tiffany lamp, I realized i have my own - not shaped like a typical Tiffany lamp, but a three sided lamp made of glorious glass and shells, and amber, and it is one of my prized possessions.

This book is obviously based on historical information - mostly letters from Clara Driscoll, that have recently come to light, and that describe her time with Tiffany from 1893 to 1908 (I'm not going to go back to check the accuracy of these years, but they are about right.) Louis Comfort Tiffany had women working for him, as long as they were not married. They mostly had some artistic background, as they were the ones to design some of his windows, choose the glass, and cut the glass. Only the soldering was not done by them. Clara had worked for Tiffany earlier, but left when she got married, then when her husband died, she returned to run the women's workshop. It is thought that it was her idea to create lamps our of the stained glass pieces instead of just blown glass, and she received an award in Paris for her dragonfly lamp.

I loved reading about how these glass pieces were made, how Tiffany struggled to get the glassblowers to create iridescent glass - mostly for vases, but also for the windows. Since I have had glassblower friends and Luna showing me excitedly her various glass samples, and seen how much work goes into creating a stained glass piece, I could visualize much of the descriptions.

As with previous art history novels, I need to see what is being described, so I took out a few books on Tiffany from the library and found one that had all the windows and lamps mentioned. If I give this book as a gift to anyone, I will have to give the book of images too.

Vreeland goes far beyond just describing Clara's work with Tiffany, she describes her life and the times at the turn of the century, which I found as fascinating as the story of her work with glass. Clara lived in a boarding house filled with interesting characters. One of her best friends is George, a gay artist. I was fascinated by the description of gay life in those days. Of course it was kept out of the public eye, but it flourished, and Clara helped out by being the female date to operas and other events. George tried to make her a part of his family by setting her up with his brother, but that relationship ran into problems. We do see him working in a social worker type capacity with the poor immigrants. Clara herself does an amazing job overseeing her "girls" in the workshop, dealing with their various life problems, and when the men's union gets mad because the women finished a job the men refused to do, she fights for the right of the women to continue working. You get a good sense of her own relationships from this book, undoubtedly quite accurate, since they were based on her letters.

Plus, we get ring side seats to history - the World's Fairs in Chicago and Paris, the opening of the New York subway system, and much more. Just love it!

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