The Cross-Dressing of Art and Couture

‘Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,’ at the Met

 

By ROBERTA SMITH

 

In name, at least, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity,” the thrilling, erudite show opening to the public on Tuesday at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sounds like a double dose of pandering. Impressionism and fashion? The pairing portends blockbuster-bundling and seems so excessive as to be unhealthy — possibly illegal — like 32-ounce sodas. Brace for “Van Gogh and Motorcycles,” “Rembrandt and Fabergé” and “Norman Rockwell and Tim Burton.”

But fear not. In reality, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is neither your father’s Impressionist blockbuster nor a focus group’s. With its mixture of great paintings and lavish garments and accessories — everything 19th-century French or inspired thereby — it is certain to attract multiple demographics in great numbers. But its broad allure derives from its visual fireworks, historical clarity and pitch-perfect contextualizing. It builds webs of new information and viewpoints around some of the best-known, most beloved paintings of all time, quite a few of which don’t often travel to this country.

For starters, both of the surviving panels of Claude Monet’s colossal “Luncheon on the Grass” — cut into pieces when it wasn’t finished in time for the 1866 Salon — are being shown together in this hemisphere for the first time, lent by the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where the show had its debut last fall and was thronged.

In fresh, groundbreaking ways this show details the entwined rise of modern painting, modern fashion and modern (upper middle-class) life over some two dozen years of rapid change in Paris, 1862 to 1887. The period included the rise of department stores, illustrated fashion magazines and ready-to-wear clothing, but also the couturier fashion house, most notably that of Charles Frederick Worth. Black emerged even more emphatically from the weeds of widowhood to become emblematic of urban sophistication. And men and women strolled the widened sidewalks and radiating boulevards, browsing shop windows, seeing and being seen in Baron Haussmann’s new Paris, “the capital of the 19th century,” in Walter Benjamin’s inspiring phrase.

Painters and writers intent on bringing a new reality to their work were among the first to see fashion as a vital expression of modern life. Briefly in 1874, no less than the poet Stéphane Mallarmé published a fashion magazine, La Dernière Mode, and largely wrote it, too, using bylines like Mademoiselle Satin and Marguerite de Ponty.

The show tells its tale through a dazzling surround of visual culture high and low, small and large, flat and round. I recommend not missing a thing: not a pleat, ruche or lace parasol; not a painted background, glove or slipper toe; not a photograph or magazine; not a corset, fan or black choker, whether depicted or actual. Such attention reveals frequent similarities of garments (and poses) in the magazines, photographs, paintings and costumed mannequins. A result is an intense, almost hallucinatory swirl in which art and artifact continually change places, and a basic wisdom is demonstrated: any well-selected thing can illuminate any other.

The ratio of 14 dresses to 79 paintings is just right. A little goes a long way with mid-19th-century day dresses, ball gowns or summer muslins; they are as intricate as Gothic cathedrals.

Organized by the Art Institute of Chicago (where it will be seen in June), in collaboration with the Met and the Orsay, “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” and its excellent catalog have been overseen by Gloria Groom, a curator of European art at the institute. The curator Susan Alyson Stein was in charge of the Met’s version, which has a completely different wardrobe from that of the Orsay show, but mostly the same paintings. These include, as a bonus, Courbet’s stunning forerunner, “Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine,” from 1856-57, with its precise rendering of the dresses and petticoats of its women of the street, flopped, exhausted, on the grass.

Ms. Stein’s crisp installation is aided by labels that excerpt the observations, both astute and nearsighted, of contemporary critics, and by vivid quotations that are sprinkled across the walls. One of the first and among the most giddy: “The Parisienne is not in fashion, she is fashion,” from Arsène Houssaye, writing in the magazine L’Artiste in 1869.

With sections titled “Refashioning Figure Painting,” “En Plein Air,” “The White Dress” and “The Black Dress,” this show limns the milieu in which the Impressionists, led by Manet and Degas, came into their own as painters of modern life, determined to portray their contemporaries and their world in a way that also radicalized their medium. Velázquez and the Spaniards served as models, but so did new means of mechanical reproduction, especially the hand-colored steel engravings, called fashion plates, often set into fashion magazines. No less than Cézanne, hardly known for his attention to haberdashery, is shown to have painted a small, nearly exact copy of one in 1871, just before his thick-handed early style exploded into separate brush marks.

Berthe Morisot uses a photograph of herself in a low-cut black evening dress, with slight changes, as the basis for her 1875 painting “Figure of a Woman (Before the Theater).” The labor required for such finery is barely hinted at, primarily in Degas’s soundless depictions of milliners and their shops.

The Impressionists shared their awareness of modern dress as an increasingly prominent expression of their times with far more conservative painters, non-Impressionists — quite abundant in this show — who wanted to paint modern life, but not in such modern ways. They sought the veracity and high finish of Ingres, but were rarely up to it. Fantin-Latour’s marvelous three-quarter portrait of Manet, the impeccably top-hatted, watch-fobbed gentleman of 1867, comes closest, in the one gallery devoted to male attire. (It leaves you wanting more.) A wide miss is Albert Bartholomé’s cloying 1881 “In the Conservatory (Madame Bartholomé),” the only painting to be shown with the actual garment it portrays.

The tension between the innovative and the staid — the Impressionists using clothes as occasions to explore paint; the loyal opposition focusing on them as things in themselves — is the show’s main engine. The artists from both sides of the aisle knew, borrowed from and competed with one another, formulating together a new combination of genre painting and portraiture, catching their subjects in the moment, yet often in a full-length, slightly larger-than-life scale.

The artists’ differences are announced by the face-off of paintings in the first gallery. The contrasts are especially apparent in Tissot’s zealously detailed 1866 “Portrait of the Marquise de Miramon,” a somewhat daring depiction of a lady of obvious high rank wearing a chic deep-pink dressing gown in the privacy of her well-appointed home, and Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866,” defined by the challenging gaze of an unnamed woman, clearly in the artist’s studio, whose even more chic dressing gown is also a pyramidal plane of robustly worked pale pink paint.

This gallery is presided over by a gray silk faille day dress from 1865-67, accessorized by the essential wool paisley shawl from India (which fell from fashion, once French manufacturers learned to make cheaper ones). The mannequin might have stepped out of Monet’s nearby 1868 portrait, “Madame Louis Joachim Gaudibert,” in which the train of the gown unravels in loose brushwork resembling jagged mountain ranges. It is illuminating to see what Monet was looking at and what he did with it.

Tissot, represented by 10 canvases, more than those of any other artist, appears in nearly every gallery, becoming a cautionary leitmotif about coarsening talent. His best work is his earliest: the ambiguous 1864 “Portrait of Mademoiselle L. L.,” a dark-eyed ingénue perched on a desk in a fashionable red bolero and dark soft skirt, evoking Corot as much as Ingres with a subtle eroticism that Balthus must have envied.

While sometimes a step ahead of his more adventuresome colleagues in subject matter, Tissot is soon in rapid descent, heading for the garishly tight, treacly paintings fit for chocolate-box covers found in the show’s final gallery, where a few too many other paintings tend in this direction.

As compensation there is the alluring Haussmannian vista of Gustave Caillebotte’s immense “Paris Street: Rainy Day” (1877) and two utterly astounding day dresses by Worth, their extreme architecture (bustles) echoed in paintings by Georges Seurat, Jacques-Émile Blanche and Henry Lerolle.

The best of the wall quotations comes from Degas: “Think of a treatise on ornament for women or by women, based on their manner of observing, of combining, of selecting their fashionable outfits and all things. On a daily basis they compare, more than men, a thousand visible things with one another.”

Of course “Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity” is about much more than ornament, as were the women in Degas’s quotation. The show chronicles the circular flow of life and art. But its deep content may be the prominent roles women always play in culture, and it is worth noting that 10 of the 15 contributors to the catalog are women. As Elizabeth Wilson wrote in her pioneering 1985 book, “Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity,” which is curiously absent from the catalog’s extensive bibliography: “Dress is the frontier between the self and the not-self,” and fashionable dress “one of the ways in which women achieve self-expression.”

JUST in time for Paris Fashion Week, the Musée d’Orsay opened “Impressionism and Fashion,” an expansive exhibition examining the depiction of contemporary dress in paintings and portraiture in the second half of the 19th century, when fashion here became both a booming industry and a leisure pursuit.

The show, a collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago, includes paintings and costumes and will travel stateside next year. But it is best seen here and now to spot unexpected parallels between the subject matter of the Impressionists, from roughly the 1860s to the 1880s, and that of the street-style photographers who document the exotically dressed creatures outside the fashion shows across the Seine in the Tuilleries.

It is the same as when Baudelaire described “the daily metamorphosis of exterior things,” only instead of the changing shape of bustle skirts, as the pouf derrière became wider in the 1870s and more decorative in the 1880s, the photographers document the exaggerated round shoulders of a Comme des Garçons coat in the 2010s. The thought occurs, while regarding a painting of a man holding an umbrella, standing just so in the bright daylight, that perhaps Claude Monet was The Sartorialist of 1868.

Visiting the exhibition with the Times photographer Bill Cunningham, we were fascinated by the clever staging of the show, with portraits arranged in galleries that are filled with gilded chairs, as if for a défilé. Place cards tied with tiny ribbons to each seat were inscribed with the names of guests. Charles Frederick Worth was seated between Mademoiselle Marie Duplessis and the Comtesse Clotilde Bonaparte.

The incorporation of fashion was thrilling, with a case of hats placed next to the millinery paintings of Degas, and a display of intimates laid out before “Rolla,” a painting by Henri Gervex that shows a naked woman asleep, observed by a man standing at a window.

As we entered the final gallery, designed to evoke Monet’s park settings with walls painted sky blue and the floor covered with a carpet of fake grass, Bill saw a group of children in schoolboy blazers sitting on the ground, and some tired tourists relaxing on a bench, and said, “Now that’s a picture.”

-By Eric Wilson

 

Every once in a while a major museum mounts what might be called a “Well, duh” exhibition, lavishly demonstrating something everybody pretty much already knows. That Rembrandt was a genius or that the Impressionists were inspired by sunlight fall into this category. So does Andy Warhol being a pervasive influence—probably the pervasive influence—on contemporary art. The most shrewd and sophisticated faux-naïf the world has ever known, Warhol may or may not have had his tongue planted in one of his sallow cheeks with each and every item in his massive oeuvre, but practically every artist who worked in his wake during the past half-century succumbed to at least a mild bout of irony influenza.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, choosing about 100 works by artists influenced by Warhol, along with about half that number made by the doyen of detachment himself, endeavors to illustrate this obvious fact in “Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years.”

The show is a breeze. Walking leisurely through a gentle maze of galleries with your head on a swivel, you can take in the whole thing in about half an hour, with a little extra time allowed for the crowds—it’s a popular show—and possibly pausing in front of a video or two. (The grainy black-and-white head-shot “screen tests” of Lou Reed and Nico are strangely fascinating, while the truly awful 1968 Warhol feature “Lonesome Cowboys” is only slightly less odious on a small screen than it was in theaters.) A quick pan of the final gallery, wallpapered with Warhol’s famously garish cow heads and garnished with those floating silver pillows (which constituted his second solo at Leo Castelli, in 1966), and you’re ready, as the British street artist Banksy would have it, to exit through the gift shop. The exhibition contains little, if anything, you need to see close up or to linger over. The audio guide doesn’t whisper, “Andy would have wanted it this way,” but it should.

“Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” really didn’t need much organization in the galleries. Random copses of parent-and-sibling work would have done the didactic trick: Andy did a portrait of Marilyn Monroe this way, while Luc Tuymans paints Condoleezza Rice that way and Julian Schnabel painted Barbara Walters still another way. But see how they’re all kind of similar because they’re anything but honorific? The Met groups the exhibition into five convenient categories which, with their subtitles (and like Warhol’s collection of flea-market kitsch), embrace just about everything under the sun: “Daily News: From Banality to Disaster”; “Portraiture: Celebrity and Power”; “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities”; “Consuming Images: Appropriation, Abstraction and Seriality”; and “No Boundaries: Collaboration, and Spectacle.” The wall texts aren’t awful, but they’re a far cry from “Eureka!” For example, this from the portraiture section: “Power and fame in their countless manifestations have held a strong appeal for many artists beyond Warhol. The artists in this section, nearly all of whom depend on the photograph in some way, build on the Warholian model and replenish the art of portraiture in their own unique fashion.” It’s hard to image anybody who sees “Sixty Artists, Fifty Years” not knowing this beforehand, or not being able to see the point just from the pictures on the walls.

What’s good about the show? A lot. This is the Met, after all, and it either owns or can borrow excellent and salient works by Ed Ruscha, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vija Celmins, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and the rest of the no-surprises supporting cast. The installation is first rate. (It’s not the designer’s fault that nothing beckons you to stop for a moment of contemplation.) The catalog—an ample but concise bit of one-stop shopping for Everything Andy—boasts a long, cohesive, and nicely written essay by the show’s co-curator Mark Rosenthal. It also includes a superb chronology of “moments” in Warhol’s career, from his initial rejection by Castelli in 1961 to his cameo in the movie “Tootsie” and hilarious Braniff Airlines ad campaign with Sonny Liston, to his near-murder in 1968, to highlights from Warhol’s even more influential posthumous quarter-century (for example, Rob Pruitt’s “The Andy Monument” statue recently on view on a street corner in New York’s Union Square.)

Still, there’s something dishearteningly lightweight about “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists.” It may be that the august Met, straining against type as it does to hold little contemporary art circuses (e.g., Koons, the Starn Twins) on its roof, isn’t really comfortable with an artist as nearly omniscient, yet will-o’-the-wisp, as Warhol. In one of the catalog’s interviews with several artists influenced by Warhol, co-curator Marla Prather blunders. She says to California artist John Baldessari, “As you no doubt know, Warhol’s first solo show was at the Ferus Gallery [in Los Angeles], in 1962.” If she isn’t somehow referring to his first show in California, that isn’t the case. In 1952, Warhol had a one-person exhibition, “Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote” in New York. He also enjoyed at least a couple more solo outings prior to showing his Campbell’s soup can paintings at Irving Blum’s emporium.

It’s not usually a critic’s place to tell a great museum what it should have done, but the disappointing superficiality of “Sixty Years, Fifty Artists” bids me step over the line. We all know the breadth of Warhol’s influence; a peek into the first 10 Chelsea galleries you happen across will tell you that. What the Met should have plumbed is the depth of Warhol’s influence, by taking, say, 10 artists (I’ll nominate Ms. Sherman, Elizabeth Peyton, Messrs. Koons and Baldessari, and Robert Gober to get the squeegee moving), first noting the affinity between an early work and a relevant Warhol, and then documenting how, and to where, those artists ran with it. The Met could have escorted the viewer beyond Pop’s chic ennui and into Warhol’s profundity as an artist, as evidenced in the “Disaster” paintings, the Jackies and early films like “Empire.”

That, however, would have required the influencees to admit the extent of their debt to Warhol, and big-time contemporary artists are often too career-savvy for such modesty. Pushing them out of their necessary professional conceit is the task, nevertheless, of a premier museum if it wants to get beyond an E-ZPass version of Warhol’s legacy.

By PETER PLAGENS

By LEE LAWRENCE

New York

The most exciting shows are often those that break new ground or introduce the unfamiliar. “Chinese Gardens: Pavilions, Studios, Retreats” does neither. We expect to see water swirling amid craggy rocks, mountains dissolving into mist, robed figures lingering under gnarled pine trees, birds perched on a flowering branch—and we do. And if we take the time, we really do. By limiting the selection to a single theme, the head of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Asian department, Maxwell Hearn, offers us an irresistible opportunity to explore ways of seeing Chinese art and to do so with almost 100 works from a premier collection: the Met’s own.

The texts and audio prove effective allies in understanding context and ferreting out political, social and religious references. Take the 10th- to early 12th-century “Palace Banquet,” the oldest painting in the show. It depicts the imperial women’s quarters as a harmonious setting for an outdoor celebration. But why is a woman standing by a slumbering form, clapping her hands? And why are attendants about to open the gate? The allusion, the label tells us, is to an eighth-century consort famous for sleeping all day and burning the midnight oil with her lover, the emperor. When an uprising threatened the empire, courtiers thought the emperor ought to reserve his energies for governing and forced him to execute his consort. This happy palace scene thus doubles as a warning against rulers placing affairs of the heart above those of state.

Yet there is the danger of getting so carried away deciphering content that we forget to experience these works as art. Indeed, one of the show’s greatest pleasures is its variety of forms, each inviting a distinct approach. The verticality of hanging scrolls like “Palace Banquet” guides the eye from bottom up. We stand outside looking in, slowly piecing the scene and story together. It is similar to the way we approach “Returning Home Through the Snow” (c. 1455), except that in Dai Jin’s hanging scroll we enter the picture through a single figure. We take in his downcast eyes and furrowed brow and, in the artist’s quick brushstrokes, we feel the winter wind whipping his thin robe. As our eye moves up to tree branches outlined in snow, to an expanse of empty sky and distant bare mountains, the chill of this man’s lonely walk engulfs us.

By contrast, other hanging scrolls feature tiny, anonymous figures that draw us inside the scene. We climb the mountain path that stretches before them, glide along the twisting river, brush against low-hanging branches, feel our heart rate slow as we marvel at the scenery. This is similar to the way we experience horizontal handscrolls. One of the oldest forms of painting in China, they are meant to be unfurled from right to left. Short scrolls can be viewed in their entirety, but the long ones—of which the show offers fine examples—invite us to journey through them in stages, each about an arm’s length.

Since no museum could ever allow us to actually do that, we have to emulate the experience by blocking our view (hands up like blinders on a horse works—don’t worry, nobody is looking). When we experience Zhao Cangyun’s “Liu Chen and Ruan Zhao Entering the Tiantai Mountains” (late 13th-early 14th century) this way, we discover just how clever Zhao’s composition is. Like all handscrolls, his begins with an expanse of beautiful silk. This is the “moat,” whose purpose is akin to that of sorbet between courses—it cleanses our mind of whatever occupied it before. First comes a block of text, which a label beneath helpfully translates. It relates the tale of two men who set off to gather medicinal herbs; we next see two elderly gentlemen, a basket to the ready. For two more scenes, text precedes image, priming us for the sight of “green peaks, lofty and contorted” and a stream in need of crossing. We watch the men wade in—then, suddenly, in the next scene, two beautiful women appear on the opposite bank. This time, Zhao has delayed the explanatory text, so we share the men’s surprise.

This way of engaging handscrolls also brings out the beauty and power of nonnarrative paintings. A seemingly repetitive composition like Wang Yuanqi’s 1711 “Wangchuan Villa” morphs into discrete scenes of startling variety. Meanwhile Fang Congyi’s 14th-century “Cloudy Mountains” begins with a geology so vibrant it seems to still be shifting. Yet as we move forward, diagonal lines propel us on a journey that paradoxically builds in intensity even as the landscape’s details dissolve into mist. By the time we reach the expanse of space at the end of the painting, some deep part of us registers what our eyes can’t see: that there is form in this emptiness.

On a lighter note, we can’t help but imagine how the rhythmic waving of a fan might animate trees and birds painted on its surface. Or visualize how the play of light might bring alive deep carvings on a wood brush-holder or ivory table screen. Or contemplate how revealing the album format can be. Wen Zhengming’s ostensibly modest “Garden of the Inept Administrator” (1551) forces viewers to savor, page by page, his poetry, calligraphy and painting. The Met even provides the perfect setting for such musings: the adjoining Astor Court, modeled after a 17th-century Chinese garden, complete with mock pavilion, greenery and evocative rocks.

By KAREN ROSENBERG

Published: March 1, 2012

Like the family it chronicles, “The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is fragmented and contentious, with flashes of brilliance.

Multimedia

Slide Show

‘The Steins Collect’

The exhibition, which comes to the Met by way of the Grand Palais in Paris and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, explores the closely intertwined collections of the siblings Leo, Gertrude and Michael Stein (and Michael’s wife, Sarah). It casts these wealthy American expatriates as ahead-of-the-curve art patrons, whose tastes and social networks shaped Modernism as we know it. (They introduced Matisse to Picasso. Enough said.) 

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/02/arts/design/the-steins-collect-matisse-and-...