Tag Archive | The Met

Modern Art Monday Presents: Lyonel Charles Feininger, Lehnstedt

Sep24

Lehnstedt
All Photos By Gail

Born in New York to German American musicians,  Lyonel Charles Feininger (1871 – 1956) travelled to Germany in 1887, and remained in Europe for several years to study art. While in Paris, he encountered Cubism and embraced its rationality and abstraction of form and space. “Cubism is a synthesis,” the painter explained, “but it may be degraded into mechanism. My Cubism is visionary, not physical.”

Feininger most famously applied his visionary style to architectural subjects that resonated with metaphysical meaning, especially churches. Here, the artist depicts the village church of Lehnstedt (1917) and its wooded environs with his characteristic crystalline and refracted forms.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

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Eye On Design: Jean Paul Gaultier, Communion Ensemble

Aug22

Gaultier Communion Ensemble
All Photos By Gail

Have you already been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see this year’s fashion extravaganza, Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination?  It’s pretty amazing, right? But did you know that the exhibit also extends to The Cloisters museum in upper Manhattan? If you haven’t made it up there yet, then you are seriously missing out on seeing many of the best pieces in the exhibit! But don’t worry, you’ve still got time to see everything, including this ethereal design by one of our favorites, Jean Paul Gaultier!

Communion Dress Bust Detail

The Communion Ensemble, from Gaultier’s Spring /Summer 2007 Haute Couture Collection, is made of pink silk mousseline and displays a chalice formed out of gathered chiffon and overlaid with a brown cotton lace applique, which echoes the delicate filigree of an adjacent chalice displayed on the same gallery. While the foot of the chalice rests on the stomach of the wearer, the bowl quit literally “cups” her breasts — a typical JPG provocation.

Sandals Detail
Sandals Detail

JPG Communion Ensemble

Given the chalice’s role in celebrating the Eucharist and containing the consecrated wine believed to be transformed into the blood of Christ during Mass, this garment’s placement in The Cloisters all the more incendiary.

Photographed at the Met Cloisters. Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, is on View Through October 8th, 2018 at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Fifth Avenue and Cloisters Locations) in NYC.

JPG Communion Ensemble
Installation View

Modern Art Monday Presents: David Hockney, Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday

May7

Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday
Photo By Gail

In the late 1980s, David Hockney bought a house on the beach in Malibu, California and proceeded to paint interiors that showcased the incredible view of the sea from his picture window. “When you live this close to the sea,” he said, “when it literally comes up and splashes the windows, it is not the horizon line which dominates, but the close movement of  the water itself. It’s like fire and smoke, endlessly changing, endlessly fascinating.” In Breakfast at Malibu, Sunday (1989) the Pacific Ocean is almost opalescent and seems to blend in with the horizon near the top edge  of the canvas.

Part of a Private Collection, This Painting was Photographed While On Loan to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

 

 

Modern Art Monday Presents: Paul Delvaux, Small Train Station at Night

Apr2

Small Train Station at Night
Photo By Gail

Trains play a prominent, reoccurring role in Paul Delvaux’s surrealist imagery, including this eerie depiction of two locomotives leaving their terminus at night. Unpopulated, the composition of Small Train Station at Night (1959) invites the viewer to imagine inhabiting the space, this evoking a sense of loneliness and vulnerability. An unnaturally large moon casts the scene in a cool, still light that produces protracted, ominous shadows. These features betray Delvaux’s debt to Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who likewise explored the train as both subject and symbol in his work.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Elizabeth Murray, Once

Mar26

Once
Photo By Gail

In 1978, Elizabeth Murray (1940 – 2007) made a series of irregular, star-shaped paintings with the aim, she said, of “trying to complicate and obfuscate the edges” of her medium. Indeed, the jostling contours and vivid colors of Once appear to explode outward, as if pressing the very form on the canvas into new arrangements. Murray’s dynamic compositions, charged brush strokes, and radical disruption of the frame transform the picture plane into both surface and object. While these paintings appear purely abstract, hints of imagery and reference return in subsequent works. Drawing on Cubism, Surrealism and Minimalism, Murray’s fragmented geometries and biomorphic shapes reinvigorated formalist painting in the 1970s and 1980s.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.

Modern Art Monday Presents: Custom Print 1 By Peter Phillips

Mar19

Custom Print 1
Photo By Gail

Before attending the Royal College of Art in London, Peter Phillips (b. 1939) studied graphic design and technical draftsmanship. He applied his skills to establish a style marked by the juxtaposition of images, like the Pinup Model and Car Part in Custom Print I (1965), which were sourced from magazines and other mass media in montage-like compositions. The title of this print —  the first in a series three — refers to custom auto-body shops where a polished enamel sheen is appleid to cars. Phillips worked with Chiron Press, a screenprinting studio that produced posters and greeting cards. The press encouraged him experiment with nontraditional materials such as silver foil and glossy inks, which complement the artist’s brash and vibrant style.

 Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

Eye On Design: Wolf Kahan Tuxedo Owned By Adolf De Meyer

Feb21

Adolph De Meyer Tuxedo
Photos By Gail

A member of the “international set” in fin-de-siècle Europe, Baron Adolf de Meyer (1868–1946) was also a pioneering photographer, known for creating works that transformed reality into a beautiful fantasy. De Meyer likely acquired this tuxedo from the venerable tailor Wolf Kahan during a visit to Vienna. Kahan’s shop, designed by the modernist architect Adolf Loos, catered to the city’s leading artists. The tailor’s son Louis worked from 1925 to 1927 as a designer for the Paris couturier Paul Poiret, whose collections De Meyer photographed.

De Meyer was considered an arbiter of style; he wrote columns for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar that instructed American women on the latest European trends in fashion and interior decoration. His columns  also offered tips on hostess etiquette and entertaining. For a time, De Meyer produced his own couture line, Gayne House, sold through his New York shop, Zarah.

Adolph De Meyer Tuxedo
Wolf Kahan Tuxedo Circa 1930. Jacket and Trousers: Black Wool Broadcloth and Silk Satin
Vest: Black Wool Twill, Rayon Grosgrain, and Silk Plain Weave

Photographed as Part of the Exhibit, Quicksilver Brilliance: Adolf De Meyer Photographs, on View Through April 8th, 2018 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.