Light in full bloom at the Chrysler Museum of Art

Last Wednesday, daffodils bloomed both outside and in the Chrysler Museum of Art.

The outdoor blossoms festooned the entrance. The indoor ones glowed on century-old, leaded-glass lampshades designed by Tiffany Studios that are on display in a new exhibition.

Composing a three-dimensional flower in flat glass isn't easy. But the "Tiffany girls" assigned to floral-pattern lampshades found ways to bring their interpretations to life - and light.

Glass selection was critical, since the right piece of studio-made glass could suggest the characteristics of flowers, from color to texture.

Kelly Conway, the museum's curator of glass, examined the golden daffodils on one of the lamps. "See how they used a darker glass inside the trumpet? It adds depth," she said.

Conway toured the show that day just as "Tiffany Lamps: Articles of Utility, Objects of Art" opened to the public. The 40 or so leaded-glass shades with bases come from the New York City-based Neustadt Collection of Tiffany Glass, which organized the show.

She might have been strolling through a spring garden, passing peachy peonies and floppy red poppies, with blue-eyed dragon-flies zipping through.

"If I had to take one home, it would be that one," Conway said, staring up at a large dragon-fly hanging shade.

Unlike the famous dragon-fly table lamps that look as though the insects have just landed and will soon flutter away, this one features a dense, interlocking pattern. The creatures might be engaged in a kind of air ballet, their wings resembling flower petals.

"I imagine myself lying in a field with all these dragonflies swirling overhead," Conway said. "It's very kinetic."



The exhibition is "really one of the first in-depth studies of the lamps from a more scholarly perspective," Conway said.

That was made possible by the discovery in 2005 of richly detailed letters written by Clara Driscoll, who designed nearly all the floral shades. She is now credited with first having the idea to make lamp designs based on nature.

She joined Tiffany Studios in the late 1880s and became the head of the women's glass-cutting department. Starting in 1898, Tiffany manufactured lamps she designed featuring flowers and insects. (Men designed the geometric shades.)





The show opens with a display illustrating the process of making a Tiffany lamp: A watercolor sketch was translated into a plaster mold, and that design got transferred onto a wooden mold. Workers then created templates to use as guides in cutting the glass.

Each glass piece had to be selected, cut, wrapped in copper foil and, finally, soldered together with lead. The last step was applying a patina, often bronze or gold, to the silvery solder lines.

"We start with that in the exhibition, because it's important to know how labor-intensive these shades were," Conway said.

Louis Comfort Tiffany, a former painter who shifted into decorative arts, loved nature and embraced Driscoll's designs.

"Here's something fun about the installation," Conway said. She walked over to a display of two peony library lamps dating from 1900-1913.

Both used the same pattern, but the one on the left cleanly defined its leaves and flower petals.

A glass selector chose a lot more red for the other lamp, which made the petals bleed into the leaves. "It's very hard to distinguish what's flower, what's leaf, what's background."

Conway said the crisper one was "a more successful execution of the lamp." About the other, she had to wonder: "Was this a rush order? Was the designer having a bad day?" Or was it a matter of catering to a customer's taste?

As with many of the pieces, the shade's design repeated a section, three times in this case.



Another section of the show displayed 10 lamps in order of cost, an acknowledgement that Tiffany created a commercial product. "He wanted to sell goods, but he wanted everything to be beautiful and harmonious."

The least expensive lamp in the bunch was a small wave-design reading lamp. The shade with gold-patina base sold for $32 in 1906.

The costliest item in the lineup was a magnolia floor lamp with a 28-inch-diameter shade. With base, it cost $456 in 1913, when the average yearly income was $620, according to the show's label text.

In 2005, a similar lamp auctioned by Christie's brought just over $2 million, www.christies.com reported.

"It shows the magnolia flower front, back, side, bud, full bloom and on its way out - in all its life cycles," the curator said.



The Neustadt collection is famous for its many Tiffany lamps and its vast, colorful array of flat and pressed glass used in so many Tiffany products.

Egon Neustadt and his wife, Hildegard, began purchasing Tiffany lamps in 1935, when Tiffany's decorative arts were not in style. An Austrian-born orthodontist, Neustadt continued to add to his Tiffany holdings until his death in 1984, The New York Times reported.

The show complements the Chrysler's equally renowned Tiffany collection, which emphasizes blown glass forms but also includes about 17 lamps.

Walter P. Chrysler Jr., the museum's chief benefactor, collected Tiffany items around the same time as Neustadt, Conway said, but she knows of no record of the two having met.

In 1931, Chrysler visited the great artist-designer Tiffany at his exotic, palatial home on Long Island, N.Y., called Laurelton Hall.

That encounter led to a friendship that ended with Tiffany's death in 1933 at age 84. Five years later, his studios closed following bankruptcy.

Chrysler and Tiffany were children of famous and accomplished men.

Chrysler, who died in 1988, was the namesake of the founder of the Chrysler Corp. Tiffany was the son of the founder of the Tiffany & Co. jewelry stores.

For a Tiffany catalog the Norfolk museum published in 1978, Chrysler wrote that the designer was "one of the most creative and imaginative taste-makers the United States has produced."

"The resurgence of interest in Tiffany is due in large measure to the serious review of the decorative arts" of the circa 1900 period, he wrote. That review took place after World War II and involved museum experts as well as collectors and scholars "who refused to allow the great ideas and objects of the recent past to fall into oblivion."