February 21st, 2pm EST
Members Only Zoom Lecture
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As a young artist, L.C. Tiffany (1848-1933) was stimulated by the intermingling of the different art movements in his day: the Aesthetic Movement, the Arts and Crafts, and Art Nouveau. Each movement focused on the value of the decorative arts and the wish to integrate decorative art with the fine arts in architectural interiors. This conference would examine how Louis Comfort Tiffany altered his career from his desire to be an artist of easel paintings to developing a world-famous studio of leaded-glass windows, vases and lamps. His success grew from his admiration for the glass medium and from inspiring his artisans to bring out the unforeseen effects of colour, texture, and form in the molten glass.
The talk will be illustrated by works from American Tiffany collections and from the Tiffany Studios largest and most important Canadian commission in the former Erskine & American Church Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ Bourgie Concert Hall).
Recently retired as Senior Curator of Decorative Arts, and former Curator of Canadian Art at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Rosalind Pepall was responsible for a wide range of exhibitions and publications, among them: Ruhlmann: Genius of Art Deco (2003-2004), in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y. and the Muséedes Anneés 30, Paris; the Canadian travelling exhibition, Edwin Holgate, Canadian Painter (2005-2007), and Tiffany Glass: Colour and Light (2009-2010), presented in Paris, Montreal, and Richmond, Virginia.
In 2012 she co-edited a book on Decorative Arts and Design: The Collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In her recent book, Talking to a Portrait: Tales of an Art Curator, (Véhicule Press, Montreal, 2020), Ms. Pepall relates stories about art works – whether an oil portrait, a wilderness explorer’s sketchbook or a Tiffany lamp and how she fell under their spell.
