The Civil War is still an irrevocable wrent through America’s indelible fabric. As part of The Met Reframed, a new artist residency program at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid) teamed up with Jeff L. Rosenheim, the curator of photography and organizer of the Photography and the American Civil War, to present a multimedia interpretation of the exhibition accompanied by violinists, a cello, drummer, and vocalist.
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The Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art has forgotten that clothes and fashion are not art. When you go to see the PUNK: Chaos to Couture exhibit, which opened on May 9 and runs until August 14, you may think you stumbled instead into a luxury couturier’s boutique. The outré fashions are fabulous and gorgeously displayed and there’s some badass soundtrack music by Jayne County, Suicide, and the Sex Pistols, but you can’t try on any of the clothing and in the end, you are only permitted to buy over-priced T-shirts in the gift shop. Dude, I see the couture, but where the hell is the CHAOS?
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The Met has dedicated an entire room to a prized portrait painted by Diego Velázquez titled “Duke Francesco I d’Este” (1638), on loan from the Galleria Estense in Modena, Italy.
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The Metropolitan Museum director Thomas P. Campbell announced today that starting this summer on July 1, the museum will stay open every day of the week.
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I’m rarely taken aback by a Matisse. The reasons admittedly have more to do with personal taste than with aesthetic discernment, in particular an overriding interest in architectonic structure; in the “Matisseite” and “Picassoite” factions dividing Gertrude Stein’s pre-World War I salon, I would have definitely chosen the latter.
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Compared to other portraits of 19th century ladies, Édouard Manet’s painting of poet Nina de Callias was scandalously exotic, with her golden bangles, bolero jacket, Algerian shirt, and flourish of a feather in her curled hair, not to mention her open, sensual pose. A little scruffy dog rests its head on her flurry of skirts from which emerges an exposed ankle, and a tumult of colorful fans decorate the wall behind her. While the shock has totally subsided for contemporary audiences, the portrait drove her estranged husband to demand Manet not show it anywhere. Fashion and the identities it offered or constrained in the mid-1860s to mid-1880s (centering on Paris) is an undercurrent in the works by the top Impressionists, along with examples of period clothing caged in glass display boxes, in Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity, opening February 26 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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If 2012 saw museums like the Walker and the New Museum embrace the medium of the internet with redesigned websites and social media presences, 2013 might signal a renaissance for museums and multimedia. Both the Getty and the Metropolitan Museum have just launched new photo and video initiatives.
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It’s a funny thing to see one of the heroes of modern art at work. Viewing Matisse: In Search of True Painting at the Metropolitan Museum is kind of like watching a YouTube video of Pablo Picasso painting. The artistic act is present and impressive — you are seeing a great painter create great art in real time — but also somehow underwhelming, like uncovering the man behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. They’re only human, after all.
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After a plate of lukewarm gemelli in the Metropolitan Museum cafeteria, an out-of-town friend and I wandered haphazardly into the lower level of the Lehman wing, where the exhibition Bernini: Sculpting in Clay has been in residence since early October. The show, which consists primarily of terra-cotta studies and drawings that Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) made for his Baroque marble extravaganzas, wasn’t at the top of my list, especially on a Friday night with an hour left to go before the museum closed, and especially after reading The New York Times review by Ken Johnson, who called it “an important exhibition, insofar as it establishes a scholarly baseline for the study of Bernini terra-cotta work.” Not exactly a line that quickened the pulse.
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The memoirs penned by the late Andy Warhol (with help from his assistant Pat Hackett), The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and Back Again, Popism: The Warhol Sixties, and the Andy Warhol Diaries, are more like an extension of his artwork than they are great works of prose.
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