Martin Eidelberg
| Martin Eidelberg | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Martin P. Eidelberg January 30, 1941 New York City, New York, United States |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater |
Columbia University Princeton University |
| Occupation | Art historian Curator |
| Employer | Rutgers University |
| Known for | Scholarship on Tiffany glass, American ceramic art, and French art, particularly Jean-Antoine Watteau |
Martin P. Eidelberg (born January 30, 1941) is an American professor emeritus of art history at Rutgers University and an expert on ceramics and Tiffany glass. He is noted for discovering that many floral Tiffany lamp designs were not personally made by Louis Comfort Tiffany, but by an underpaid and unrecognized woman designer named Clara Driscoll.
A native of New York, Eidelberg attended Columbia University, where he graduated cum laude in 1961. He then attended Princeton University, where he studied art history. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 with a thesis titlde "Watteau’s Drawings, Their Use and Significance".
He taught at Rutgers University from 1964 until his retirement in 2002.
Eidelberg found a series of letters that Clara Driscoll had written to her mother and sisters, which led to new research about the famous Tiffany lamps. Eidelberg was quoted in 2007 in The New York Times as saying "I think Tiffany would have died" if information had leaked out that Driscoll was the real designer of the famous lamps. Eidelberg's discovery led to an exhibition at the New-York Historical Society, which garnered intense media attention. The evidence arrived at the conclusion that Driscoll was the secret creative force behind design of the famous Tiffany lamps. The letters ultimately offered a new inside view of the workings of the studios.
Driscoll had been paid only $35 per week which was "good money" at the turn of the century, but small compared to the value of the lamps today. The Driscoll letters revealed the "inner workings of Tiffany Studios" and exposed more about the practice of gender segregation at the Tiffany firm. Relations between the unionized men and the women were "not always friendly. Women had to leave if they married and company literature refused to acknowledge designers other than Tiffany himself played a role in the artistic glasswork. Eidelberg's detective work led to a well-publicized exhibit called A New Light on Tiffany which revealed "a new understanding of the techniques and procedures used to produce the extraordinary objects that made Tiffany such an exalted name in American design."
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