Category Archives: Museums

Metropolitan Museum – First Monday of May Exhibit

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Monday May 1 hosts the annual Metropolitan Gala. Presented in the Museum’s Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Exhibition Hall on the second floor, the exhibition will examine Kawakubo’s fascination with interstitiality, or the space between boundaries. Existing within and between entities—self/other, object/subject, fashion/anti-fashion—Kawakubo’s work challenges conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and, ultimately, fashionability. Not a traditional retrospective, the thematic exhibition will be The Costume Institute’s first monographic show on a living designer since the Yves Saint Laurent exhibition in 1983.

“In blurring the art/fashion divide, Kawakubo asks us to think differently about clothing,” said Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of The Met. “Curator Andrew Bolton will explore work that often looks like sculpture in an exhibition that will challenge our ideas about fashion’s role in contemporary culture.”

In celebration of the opening, The Met’s Costume Institute Benefit, also known as The Met Gala, will take place on Monday, May 1, 2017. The evening’s co-chairs will be Katy Perry, Pharrell Williams, and Anna Wintour. Rei Kawakubo will serve as Honorary Chair. The event is The Costume Institute’s main source of annual funding for exhibitions, publications, acquisitions, and capital improvements.

“Rei Kawakubo is one of the most important and influential designers of the past 40 years,” said Andrew Bolton, Curator in Charge of The Costume Institute. “By inviting us to rethink fashion as a site of constant creation, recreation, and hybridity, she has defined the aesthetics of our time.”

Rei Kawakubo said, “I have always pursued a new way of thinking about design…by denying established values, conventions, and what is generally accepted as the norm. And the modes of expression that have always been most important to me are fusion…imbalance… unfinished… elimination…and absence of intent.”

The Costume Institute’s spring 2017 exhibition will examine the work of Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, known for her avant-garde designs and ability to challenge conventional notions of beauty, good taste, and fashionability. The thematic show will feature approximately 150 examples of Kawakubo’s womens wear for Comme des Garçons dating from the early 1980s to her most recent collection.

The galleries will illustrate the designer’s revolutionary experiments in “in-betweenness”—the space between boundaries. Objects will be organized into eight aesthetic expressions of interstitiality in Kawakubo’s work: Fashion/Anti-Fashion, Design/Not Design, Model/Multiple, Then/Now, High/Low, Self/Other, Object/Subject, and Clothes/Not Clothes. Kawakubo breaks down the imaginary walls between these dualisms, exposing their artificiality and arbitrariness.

Exhibit runs May 4 – September 4, 2017.

http://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-to-watch-met-gala-2017http://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/Images/Exhibitions/2017/Rei%20Kawakubo/Select%20Images/4.jpg?w=1440&hash=76901F81392B2F463AB1CE1DA5EA586337FF5E02

http://www.metmuseum.org/-/media/Images/Exhibitions/2017/Rei%20Kawakubo/Select%20Images/8.jpg?w=1440&hash=68939933AF367773611182BF0E820B8202471E75

Paris Musings & Vermeer at The Louvre

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I sat in cafes, walked for hours, rested and observed the VV (very very) chic locals in the petite parks, nibbled on yummy desserts (heavenly macaroons!) at Ladurée, sipped très cher cappuccinos in the lovely bar at Le Meurice and The Ritz Garden.

Just opened at The Louvre, an exquisite look at Vermeer’s masterpieces.The exhibit  travels to The National Gallery in D.C. in October until March 2018. Five years in the making, “Vermeer and the Masters of Genre Painting” presents a third of the Dutch Golden Age master’s gift to art lovers. It is the biggest such collection of the old master’s work in Europe in almost two decades. Visiting the Louvre until May 22, on to Ireland and eventually Washington DC.

Dutch genre paintings of the period 1650–1675 rank among the pinnacles of Western European art. While Johannes Vermeer is currently the most renowned painter of such scenes, the Delft master was only one of many artists of the period who excelled in capturing everyday surroundings in exquisite detail. Other major genre painters included Gerrit Dou, Gerard ter Borch, Jan Steen, Pieter de Hooch, Gabriel Metsu and Frans van Mieris. These artists frequently drew inspiration from each others paintings and then tried to surpass each other in verisimilitude, technical prowess and aesthetic appeal. This vibrant artistic rivalry contributed to the exceptionally high quality of their combined collections.
Vermeer’s subjects, compositions and figure types owe much to works by artists from other Dutch cities. Vermeer also freely borrowed from artists from Dordrecht, Leiden and Amsterdam. In turn, genre painters from outside Delft adopted stylistic and thematic elements from his work to elevate their own compositions. Thus, rather than presenting Vermeer as an enigmatic artist working in isolation, the aim of this exhibition is to highlight his relationships with his contemporaries.

This exhibition invites visitors to take on the role of seventeenth-century art lovers and compare small groups of paintings that reflect the cross-currents of inspiration. Visitors will also be able to observe that artists had individual ways of inserting, changing and disguising their borrowings.
Begin here and consider adding to your arts date book with ballet or opera. If Opera Garnier is available during your visit, it is not to be missed; the building alone, instigated by Emperor Napoleon III, is an opulent, ornate statement, a monument to French style, capped by it’s Marc Chagall painted ceiling.

Art is sometimes found where you least expect it.