Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings October 2017 - 489

there was a creative genius nourished by reading the classics of
all nations, it was Elliott, the best educated and self-educated of
English poets. He belonged to good clubs, associating superﬁcially with the rich and well-born, but in essence he led a life of
study, meditation, and sheer hard work on texts and languages.
Though Elliott was a conservative by intellectual conviction and
instinct, he had a passion for cultural innovation. He strongly
approved of Cubism, for instance. He wished to bring about
the same kind of revolution in poetry as had been achieved in
painting, music, and the novel. The original of Elliott's masterpiece The Waste Land was given to Ezra Pound, who cut away
the pretentious parodying and witty superstructure which Elliott
had decorated the poems' hard despair. Pound dug out from the
version Elliott gave him the fundamental bones of the poem
of despair so that its music and rhythms can be heard and felt.
The changes transformed the work into a masterpiece and one
that was perceived as such the moment it was made public.
The poem's success more or less instantly placed Elliott at the
head of the profession of poetry, a position he occupied until
his death >40 years later. Elliott was in his mid-30s when The
Waste Land brought him fame. With Four Quartets, Elliott's
active life as poet was essentially complete. He had created one
of the most penetrating and memorable moves in the history
of the art, and that was his contribution to Western culture.
He wrote ﬁve plays. In 1948, Elliott received the Nobel Prize
and shortly afterwards England's highest award, The Order of
Merit. He also received 18 honorary degrees from universities
throughout the world and was an honorary fellow of colleges
in both Oxford and Cambridge.
Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933): He was the greatest creator of glassware of modern times, perhaps of all times.
Glassmaking is the least understood of the crafts. Making ﬁne
glass is an extraordinary mixture of creative skill, science, and
accidents. Humans, according to Johnson, have been making
glass for >500 years, but only quite recently did they discover
the chemistry of what they were doing, and there is still a large
element of unpredictability in some of the processes. Glass is
made from sand. Unfortunately, it is likely that only about 10%
of Tiﬀany's works have been preserved. His work was mainly
art nouveau, the prevailing mode for most of Tiﬀany's career.
Vast quantities of his work were destroyed deliberately. Both
of his palatial homes containing the best of his art were sold
oﬀ and demolished.
It is a matter of deﬁnition whether Tiﬀany was primarily an
artist and creator himself or a "creator facilitator," a man who
made it possible by his vision and organizing ability for others to
create and produce. He was certainly both, but which came ﬁrst
in his order of priorities is unclear. Although Tiﬀany understood
glass technology thoroughly and was always introducing innovations in his work, he did not blow glass himself or cast it. Tiﬀany
was a true innovator in that he was never content, was always
experimenting, and delighted in setting himself and his assistants impossible tasks. By the turn of the 20th century he was
employing 100 of the world's best glassworkers, paying them the
highest wages, and encouraging them to produce any of their
own ideas that he could research with his chemistry division. He
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also had an immense personal ﬂair for marketing. After splendid
but meretricious fame in his youth and neglect and contempt
in his old age, followed by near oblivion, Tiﬀany stands in the
top-rank of transatlantic craftsmen, a major creative artist.
Cristobal Balenciaga (1895-1972) and Christian Dior
(1905-1957): Johnson indicated that of all the creative people
he had come across, Balenciaga was easily the most dedicated
to the business of making beautiful things. His work absorbed
him totally, and there was no room in his life for anything or
anyone else. When it became impossible (as he saw it) to produce work of the highest quality, he retired and quickly died.
Making elegant clothes is one of the most ephemeral but oldest
forms of art. Until the 16th century, complete outﬁts were the
rarest of all artifacts to survive, and until quite modern times
museums were lacking in even rudimentary collections of historic clothes. Until the 20th century, only the rich dressed well
and fashionably. From earliest times there was an international
trade in wool and other textiles, but made-up clothes rarely
crossed frontiers until the 18th century.
These two creators were designers and manufacturers of elegant female clothing. They produced women's clothes of the
highest quality in material, design, cutting, sewing, ﬁtting, and
ﬁnish. Both worked in the 1950s and 1960s in Paris. Balenciaga,
according to Johnson, was probably the most original and creative
couturier in history. According to Johnson, Balenciaga had the
superior skills of the two. Balenciaga dressed the very rich and
Dior dressed the rich. Balenciaga's desire was to make women
happy and to provide clothes that were comfortable despite their
grandeur, their complexity, and the magniﬁcence of their materials. He never used pins or extraneous stiﬀening of any kind.
Balenciaga argued that if a woman was comfortable in her clothes
she was conﬁdent, and if she was conﬁdent she was at her best
and wore the clothes with style. Another of his principles was
permanence. While Dior made changes twice a year (spring and
fall), Balenciaga fundamentally produced permanent dresses. He
believed that a woman could buy one of his dresses (his specialty
was evening gowns) as an investment, and if properly looked after
they would last forever. Not so, Dior. Another of Balenciaga's
principles was the central importance of material in his designs.
Textile and lace manufacturers, embroiderers, and specialists in
gauze and dyes catered to him. The dresses from both of these creators were produced by human hands, bringing into existence the
images created on paper from their powerful and inventive brains.
In contrast to Balenciaga, Dior could not actually make a
dress. He was a designer. He also insisted on brilliant craftsmanship, and superlative materials were used in all of his dresses.
The sewing was perfect, the cutting impeccable, and the ﬁttings
patient and exact. At the time of Dior's death his house employed 1000 of the ﬁnest experts ever gathered together under
one roof. During the decade before his death (1957), Dior sold
over 100,000 dresses made from 16,000 designed sketches using
1000 miles of fabric. He was an artist, stunningly quick with
pen and brush. Except for Dior's superiority in draftsmanship,
Balenciaga was in every other way immeasurably superior.
Pablo Picasso (1881-1973): According to Johnson, Picasso
was perhaps the most restless, experimental, and productive

Facts and ideas from anywhere

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings October 2017