Just in time for the gift-giving season, the most splendiferous gift of all arrived November 12th at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Jewelry: The Body Transformed. So what’s it going to be? Alexander’s Golden Legacy consisting of arm bands with sea gods and a tritoness? Foot coverings fit for a queen from Thebes, circa 1479-1425 B.C.? Gold earrings with elephants and winged lions from 1st century B.C. India?
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With the opening of “Delacroix” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I instinctively knew it was as time to say au revoir l'été and bonjour l'automne. Yes, goodbye to summer—to bees buzzing the hydrangea on the terrace, to children sailing boats in Central Park and to the Park Avenue mall bursting its buttons all summer long, thanks to hardy begonia. And hello, Autumn—hello to cooler crisp mornings, to showy trees with brilliant canopies and to things getting started again.
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Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, currently at the Met, is an enchanting show featuring rare treasures from the Sistine Chapel Collection that have never traveled before, and 150 exquisite creations by designers raised in the Catholic tradition. In great abundance and with consummate attention to detail, the exhibition illustrates the extraordinary ways in which designers, from Coco Chanel to Donna Versace, have adopted the imagery, metaphors and storytelling integral to the Catholic faith.
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The Metropolitan Museum of Art had its origins in Paris in the year 1866. It was then that a group of Americans, having visited the Louvre and Versailles determined to create ‘a national institution and gallery of art to bring art and art education to the American people.’ And so it was that the museum took root. Surely, those foresighted men would be delighted to see what their efforts have brought about: Met Fifth, Met Cloister and now Met Breuer.
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Are you longing for Spring? Tired of winter-grey skies and the dreary parkas scurrying by? Take it from me, it won’t be long in coming. I've seen the signs. For starters, last week the calendar was reminding me to change the clocks from Daylight Savings to Standard Time. Spring Forward!
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Hello and welcome back Guys and Gals!
I hope your summer was refreshing to body and soul, whether you were at-home or abroad, at the seashore or in the mountains. Mine was spent in front of the computer screen, happily researching and writing another memoir. Why leave home if you’re having such a good time?
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Throughout the nineteenth century, the ‘fairground’ —loosely translated as the ‘sideshow’ of the traveling circuses of the day—was a popular theme with the press and artists alike.
Anchoring an exhibition of 100 related works on this theme at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a masterpiece of the museum’s collection, the sublime Circus Sideshow (Parade de cirque) painted in 1887-88 by Georges Seurat (1859-1891).
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When art critics released their best exhibitions for 2016, "Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio" rose to the top of the most discerning lists. As the show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be closing January 16, time is running short. So, drop everything, run right over. If that's not possible, then read on for a fresh look at an old master. And Valentin de Boulogne is an "old master," if one we may not have heard of until now.
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Bonjour mes amis!
The current exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Max Beckmann in New York," was a breath of fresh air, as well as a chance to revisit an old friend. The focus is on 25 paintings he did between 1920-1948 that would enter New York collections and 14 other paintings done during the sixteen months he and his wife lived in New York (1949-1950).
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Calling all Francophiles! Calling all fashionistas! Calling all bookworms!
The stars fell into alignment over The Museum at FIT this week as several international experts on Proust and the Belle Époque, gathered for a fashion symposium marking the opening of a superb exhibition: Proust’s Muse, The Countess Greffulhe.
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If you like comics and live in New York, you're in luck! The French Comics Framed Festival featuring leading French cartoonists has arrived in town, with nearly all the events open free to the public. The festival runs from September 27 to November 5, 2016 with events scheduled at various venues. ‘Meet the Artists,' for instance, is scheduled for booth #1558 at the Comic Con Convention Oct.6-9, at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. This event, with many attendees wearing the costume of their favorite comic book or video game hero, in not open free to the public. In fact, I've been told it sells out within minutes of the tickets becoming available on-line. Had you wanted to go this week, you would have needed to buy a ticket last April. And thousands did!
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“Jerusalem 1000-1400: Every People Under Heaven,“ opening September 26, 2016 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, does what every monumental exhibit aspires to do: It enlarges the mind and nourishes the spirit. And in this particular case, it brings hope that a luminous city that once brought together people from all over the world, to live and trade in harmony, might become that way again. The exhibition accomplishes this by opening a portal to a poorly understood era in human history; namely, the Medieval epoch in Jerusalem. That was a time when the city was the one place on earth for which all hearts ached and the focus of three major faiths -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
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Don’t delay, hurry on down before September 25th to see “Stuart Davis: In Full Swing,” a retrospective of more than 80 significant works by the American modernist painter on exhibition at the Whitney Museum.
At the age of 16, Davis talked his parents into letting him quit school and join a group of painters known as the Ashcan School, under the leadership of Robert Henri. Other notables in this group included Edward Hopper and George Bellows, both of whom have major works in the Whitney’s permanent collection. What was revolutionary about the Ashcan School was their subject matter—the urban landscape of America, bustling with millions of immigrants and stamped with grittiness and vitality.
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At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, membership previews were held this week for: Vigée Le Brun: Woman Artist in Revolutionary France. Hers was not a name I was familiar with, yet she was French, so I rushed right over to investigate. Installed in the Special Exhibition Gallery, #199 on the first floor off the Roman and Greek wing, the show with eighty paintings has come to New York by way of Paris.
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On the early side for lunch at Chevalier, I cross to MoMA intent upon revisiting ahandful of long-standing friends, including one staggering beauty -- "The Dream "by the French painter Henri Rousseau (1844-1910). This would be Rousseau’s last painting, the one he exhibited at the Salon des Independents in the spring of 1910, only months before his death in September of that year.
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Long before Lady Gaga, Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé and Taylor Swift, there was the Countess Jacqueline de Ribes. Lacking the advantages of social media that today’s stars enjoy, the Countess, a well-born aristocrat, had a sense of style and inventiveness that enabled her to establish herself as one of the leading fashion icons of the 20th century.
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At this once-in-a-lifetime exhibition, Picasso Sculpture, at the Museum of Modern Art through February 7, 2016, the viewer is treated to wonderful insights into the artist’s work. It's an epic showing of 140 pieces, arranged chronologically, with the sculptures occupying the museum’s entire fourth floor. What becomes clear as you walk from gallery to gallery is that sculpting was an integral, if spasmodic, part of Picasso'slife. In 1902, at the age of twenty and still living in Barcelona, he created a clay model known as Seated Woman. Five years on, Picasso would have a mind-altering moment when he visited the collection of African and Oceanic sculptures at the Musée du Trocadero in Paris. That visit, which came at the suggestion of the great painter André Derain, stimulated the young Picasso to try his hand at wood carving.
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When the Whitney Museum of American Art came into view, it, quite literally, took my breath away. Designed by the world-famous architect Renzo Piano, the museum -- all steel and glass, all light and air-- is a beauty. With its welcoming plaza andterraces extending from the fifth and sixth floors over the High Line, the Whitney climbs and soars above a lively neighborhood scene on Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking district. What a welcome change for what's widely-regarded to be an unsurpassed collection of modern and contemporary art. And what a fitting tribute.
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