ANXIETIES OF INFLUENCE
Collecting Inspiration: Edward C. Moore at Tiffany & Co. at The Met showcases objects the nineteenth-century designer acquired on travels to the east alongside pieces he designed for the company. Walking through one wonders, what is the difference between inspiration and appropriation? And one concludes, right away, the quality of the work.
The objects themselves, of both kind, are stunning. There's a silver vase by Tiffany, depicting a dragonfly caught in a spider's web, that's a flat-out copy of the Japanese ink brush stand set right beside it. But, as is typical, the works whose design Moore supervised speak for themselves. They have their own magnificence and hold their own, matching the originals in fineness, complexity and charisma.
Moore was an orientalist, a Victorian-American who took inspiration from India, China, Japan, Persia and the Arab without troubling himself t understand the cultures deeply. This was part of his milieu. In photographs, his boss Charles Louis Tiffany's New York house and studio is chock full of hanging glass lamps, palm trees, mud brick arches, monumental urns, and carved wood screens. It's a bourgeois mansion dressed in foreign fantasia. Every surface of the interior is embellished with metal, masonry and wood frou frou, much of it referencing exotic -- that is, non-European -- sources.
In later years Moore's work crossed the line from craft to obsession, luxury to opulence, joyfully eccentric to oppressively bizarre. There is a swan-shaped centerpiece as imposing and muscular as a real-life animal, a coffee pot so enthusiastically decorated with Indian, Arab and Persian motifs that no flat surface remains, and, in the final gallery, a pair of candelabra as massive and menacing as bouncers outside a club. One thing that Moore didn't accept from his foreign sources, especially the Japanese objects on display here, was restraint in scale. This exhibit shows well how foreign works can energize artists, and also how native forces -- in this case capitalism -- remain inescapable. Moore's designs borrowed technically and formally for eastern sources, in ultimate service of bourgeois display.
Teapot, Tiffany and Company, 1872–1873, Silver, 5 1/4 x 8 1/4 x 3 3/8 in. Photography courtesy The Met.
