San Francisco Airport Museums Presents Louis Comfort Tiffany and Art Nouveau Glass

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San Francisco Airport Museums Presents
Louis Comfort Tiffany and Art Nouveau Glass

SAN FRANCISCO -- San Francisco Airport Museums is pleased to present its new exhibition, Louis Comfort Tiffany and Art Nouveau Glass.

On view through February 2004, the exhibition includes approximately 100 objects from the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. The exhibition depicts the transformation in glassmaking during the Art Nouveau period of the 1870s to the 1920s, a movement characterized by fluid, stylized organic forms, in juxtaposition with ancient glass from which Tiffany drew his inspiration.

Central to the exhibition is the work of Louis Comfort Tiffany, the most influential figure in American Art Nouveau glass. He experimented widely with new techniques and produced more than 5,000 types of glass, notably the extraordinary range of iridescent glassware sold under the trade name “Favrile.” Among the examples of his work included in the exhibition are table lamps, vases, compotes and candelabra.

Other glass manufacturers represented in the exhibition include the Bohemian firm Lötz Witwe, which made iridescent glass; and Emile Galle, a glassmaker and designer from Nancy, France, whose work featured naturalistic decoration with engraved floral and plant designs.

Louis Comfort Tiffany and Art Nouveau Glass is located in Gallery G-2, pre-security on the Departures/Ticketing Level of the International Terminal. The exhibition is on view free of charge twenty-four hours a day.

San Francisco Airport Museums

The San Francisco Airport Museums program was established by the Airport Commission in 1980 for the purposes of humanizing the Airport environment, providing visibility for the unique cultural life of San Francisco, and providing educational services for the traveling public. Today, the San Francisco Airport Museums features approximately twenty galleries throughout the Airport terminals displaying a rotating schedule of art, history, science, and cultural exhibitions, as well as the San Francisco Airport Commission Aviation Library and Louis A. Turpen Aviation Museum, a permanent collection dedicated to the history of commercial aviation