China: Through the Looking Glass in Met museum

China: Through the Looking Glass

On May 4, 2015, fashion’s elite  walked  the red carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s annual Costume Institute Benefit, known to the world at large as the Met Ball.  “The Party of the Year”—generates millions of dollars for the institute’s popular exhibitions.
Irene Lewisohn,  heiress and philanthropist who spent much of her time in the theater,   together with American costume designer  Aline Bernstein founded the Museum of Costume Art in 1937.  Lewisohn’s own closet of costumes was the starting point.   Today  collection contains more than thirty-five thousand costumes and accessories represents five continents and seven centuries of fashionable dress.  

In 2008, the American Costume Collection of the Brooklyn Museum merged into the Costume Institute. Prior to the move, 23,500 objects from the Brooklyn collection were digitized and these images are now shared by both organizations.  At the time of the merger, the Met costume collection consisted of 31,000 objects from the 17th-century onwards. The collection of the Brooklyn museum is older, having been formed from private donations by former New York high society personalities.

May 2014, Michele Obama

In  May 2014 Anna Wintour Costume Center in Metropolitan museum, that now houses the collection of the Costume Institute, was formally  opened by  Michelle Obama.   Many famous people, such as Sarah Jessica Parker, Diane Von Furstenberg, Tory Burch, Zac Posen, Ralph Lauren, and Donatella Versace, were at the center's opening.  The opening exhibition in 2014 featured work by British-born designer Charles James, an important figure in New York fashion of the 1940s and 1950s. 

Anna Wintour

Fashion icon Anna Wintour is best known as the  editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, and for her iconic pageboy haircut and large sunglasses. Anna was born in England in 1949. In 1988 she was named editor-in-chief of Vogue and moved to New York.
One of Wintour's former assistants, Lauren Weisberger, wrote The Devil Wears Prada (2003), a fictionalized account of her days at Vogue. Her main character, played by Meryl Streep, was a demanding boss not unlike Wintour.
Anna was chair of the Met  museum's annual Met Gala since 1995. By the way, the ticket price for the first Met Ball in 1947 was $50. Compare it to the 2015 price- $25,000!

Three days after  Met Ball   on May 7, 2015 the new exhibition "China: Through the Looking Glass" opened in  Anna Wintour Costume Center. The exhibition’s title is derived from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, where Alice is transported to another world through a mirror—what she sees on the other side is a twisted perception of the truth.


  Metropolitan Museum of Art's latest exhibition focuses on the wide-reaching influence that Chinese art and film have had on Western fashion.  Four months before  the exhibition  formally opens,     the museum previewed the show in Beijing.

China: Through the Looking Glass

“China: Through the Looking Glass” compiles over 140 high-fashion pieces from Dior, Chanel, Yves Saint Laurent, and more, alongside their one-of-a-kind Chinese inspirations: ornate 15th century jars, ancient writing, and royal court apparel.
At a press conference   Andrew Bolton, the curator of the Costume Institute, said that Western designers have embraced Chinese influences from art and film for centuries, though they don't always fully understand them.



China: Through the Looking Glass

These designers have adopted inspiration from Chinese calligraphy, textiles, crafts and more, while taking plenty of liberties with them, imbuing them new layers of meaning.

It's this creative process and the interplay between East and West, art and fashion, and the old and new that are at the core of the exhibition, which is intrinsically aware of its cultural appropriation throughout.
I visited the exhibition and it was stunning!  With the use of reflective surfaces; cinematic lighting; and a winding, mazelike format, artistic director Wong Kar Wai and production designer Nathan Crowley have created a truly immersive experience.

Andrew Carnegie, the second-richest man in history of US, and his house

One of the captains of industry of 19th century America, Andrew Carnegie helped build the American steel industry. Carnegie was considered as the second-richest man in history after John D. Rockefeller.  He started as a very poor son of a very poor parents.  "I began to learn what poverty meant," Andrew would later write. "It was burnt into my heart then that my father had to beg for work. And then and there came the resolve that I would cure that when I got to be a man." 

Andrew started his working career  as  a bobbin boy in a cotton factory   for $1.20 a week when  he was thirteen. He read a lot and moved from messenger boy to telegraph operator and then to a series of positions leading to the superintendent of the Western Division of the Pennsylvania Railroad. In 1865, he organized the first of his many companies, the Keystone Bridge Company, and in 1873, the first of his steel works.

Andrew Carnegie  built the Carnegie Steel Company which in 1890s was the largest and most profitable industrial enterprise in the world. In 1889, Andrew Carnegie   wrote the book The Gospel of Wealth. The quotation for which he is most famous comes from this  book :   “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” 

In 1901 Carnegie sold his steel company  the company to J.P. Morgan.   At a dinner party with Morgan, Carnegie writes out four hundred and eighty million on a piece of paper. The equivalent today of four hundred billion dollars, or the entire budget of the US Federal Government.

 After selling the company Andrew became a full time philanthropist.
In 1898 Carnegie purchased a land for his house by further north than most mansions. He asked   his architects Babb, Cook & Willard for the "most modest, plainest, and most roomy house in New York". The house was a marvel of modern technology. Outside air was brought in and heated or cooled to the desired temperature. In the sub-basement, a miner's cart carried coal along a railroad track from a massive bin to three large boilers. On a typical winter day, it took two tons of coal to heat the house.

It was also the first American residence to have a steel frame and among the first to have a private Otis Elevator. The property included a large private garden, a rarity in Manhattan.

From his private office in the mansion, Carnegie donated money to build free public libraries in communities across the country and to the improvement of cultural and educational facilities in Scotland and the United States.
By the time of his death in 1919, Andrew Carnegie had given away about $350 million,  over $60 million of which went for the establishment and construction of Carnegie Libraries around the country. Carnegie  said about libraries:  “Libraries are reservoirs of strength, grace and wit, reminders of order, calm and continuity, lakes of mental energy, neither warm nor cold, light nor dark....".

Mrs. Carnegie remained in the house until her death on June 24, 1946.  She willed it to The Carnegie Corporation which, in 1972, donated it to the Smithsonian Institution for use as the Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design. The museum was closed for renovation in 2008 and opened  in December 2014.  I'll write about the museum in one of my next posts.

Rockefeller and cannibals

The Metropolitan Museum’s Oceanic, or Pacific Islands, collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive in the world.   Nearly 1600 objects from the ''primitive'' cultures of Africa, the Pacific Islands, and the Americas are on view in The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Michael C. Rockefeller Wing.

Before 1982, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the nation’s premier encyclopedic museum, had no galleries devoted to the cultural achievements of Africa, Oceania, or pre-Columbian art. Early generations of directors of the Met, which opened in its current location on Fifth Avenue in 1880, didn’t think such objects belonged in an art museum.

Kykuit, the Rockefeller Estate. Nelson Rockefellerr lived there.

That was Nelson A. Rockefeller,  who made it his lifetime mission to open the museum to the non-Western cultures whose art he collected and championed.   And he founded  his own museum in 1954  , the Museum of Primitive Art.     Nelson Rockefeller  is the son of D. Rockefeller, Jr. after whom Rockefeller center was named.   He was elected governor of New York in 1959 and was later vice president under Gerald Ford.  As coordinator of the Office of Inter-American Affairs in the early ’40s, he traveled widely in South America.

13-15 West 54

The Museum of Primitive Art opened to the public in 1957 in a townhouse on at 15 West 54th Street, located adjacent to Nelson Rockefeller's boyhood home and directly across from the Museum of Modern Art.  Nelson  donated to the museum his own collection of Tribal art.  Michael, the fifth and last child of Mary Todhunter Rockefeller and Nelson Rockefeller, was 19 when the museum opened.  Michael became one of its board members.

Michael Rockefeller was   born in 1938. He graduated cum laude from Harvard University with a B.A. in history and economics. In 1960, he served for six months as a private in the U.S. Army and then went on an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to study the Dani tribe of western Netherlands New Guinea.  

Asmats  poles in Met Museum

Michael and a friend left the expedition in June for a trip to the southern coast of New Guinea to explore the possibilities of collecting art from the Asmat tribe, one of the last surviving Stone Age cultures.
The Asmats  lived right next to the coast along a main waterway.  They lived without steel, iron, paper or roads, relying solely on wooden canoes to traverse the Arafura Sea.
In October 1961, Michael with anthropologist Rene Wassing visited 13 villages in three weeks, never spending more than three days in one location.  He gathered hundreds of items, among the most prized possession, four sacred bisj poles, spiritual artifacts that are often dedicated to the deceased. The trip was a full success but one trip was not enough.
After a brief stay at home, Michael went back. For nearly two months, he and a friend visited native villages along the coast of New Guinea and up the rivers. On November 18, 1961, in heavy tides and swift currents at the mouth of the Eilanden River, their catamaran overturned.

Two native assistants swam to shore for help. Michael and his friend clung to the canoes for nearly a day. With no help in sight, Michael decided to swim the 12 miles to shore with the help of a life preserver he fashioned from two gas tins tied together with his belt. He was never seen again. His friend stayed with the overturned canoes and was rescued.
A book entitled "Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primative Art" by Carl Hoffman, published in March 2014 gives significant credence to the idea that Michael was killed and eaten by cannibals.
“Headhunting and cannibalism were as right to them as taking communion or kneeling on the carpet facing Mecca,” Michael writes.   But Rockefellers never believed in it.
Twenty years later in 1982, the Rockefeller wing  in Metropolitan museum  opened sponsored by Governor Nelson Rockefeller as a memorial to his son, Michael Rockefeller.   The Museum of Primitive Art closed in 1976, and its collections were transferred to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



''In opening the installation,'' Philippe de
Montebello, director of the Met, said, ''we are closing the last gap in our encyclopedic coverage of the arts of man, placing works by artists from so-called 'primitive' regions on the level of oriental, classical, medieval and other more recognized arts of the civilized world.''
Some of the most impressive New Guinea pieces include Asmat bis poles that were collected during the Michael Rockefeller expedition of 1961.

Celebrating the Saxes in Metropolitan museum

The exhibition “Celebrating the Saxes” opened at Metropolitan museum   last November.   Though the saxophone is instantly recognizable as a symbol of jazz and swing, its creator Adolphe Sax could not have imagined such 20th-century music when he invented the instrument in the late 1830s. The bicentenary of Sax’s birth on 6 November 1814 at Dinant, Belgium, was   widely celebrated last year.

Sax's father was a    maker of musical instruments in Brussel.   From a young age, Sax learned the craft at his father's side.  He started out on his own instrument, the clarinet, when he was   15 years old. He improved the instrument, changing the bore and exact locations of the holes, to make it sound better.  Later Sax borrowed some money, built his own workshop, and started making a range of what he called "saxhorns."
In 1841, he succeeded, inventing the first saxophone—a C bass sax he called a “bass horn”—which he promptly showed to his friend Hector Berlioz. This instrument   was given its debut at the  Industrial Exhibition in Brussels.  As it was not yet a finished product, Sax insisted on having it played behind a curtain.

As an experiment to prove the tonal importance of the saxophone, Sax pitted the 35 members of the French army band, with only oboes, bassoons, and French horns, against a 28-member band that included saxophones in a “battle of the bands.” Sax’s band was the clear winner, and so in 1845, he was allowed to replace the French army band’s standard instruments with B-flat and E-flat saxophones. Soon, the saxophone  was considered a vital part of all French military bands.
In 1846, Sax unveiled a patent for his  "saxophone"  .  French military music made its way to the United States through New Orleans, where the sax was first introduced into the underground “jazz” sound emerging in nightclubs in the 1910s.
By the 1920s, the saxophone was a hot item, used in big bands playing both Dixieland and swing jazz. Even though jazz (and by extension, saxophones) was becoming more and more socially acceptable in U.S. society, there were still many old-fashioned folks that questioned the sound's respectability. 

In 1903, Pope Pius X wrote the Motu Proprio on Sacred Music, which prohibited certain instruments ( including  the saxophone  ) “that may give reasonable cause for disgust or scandal”   as being “unworthy of the House of Prayer and of the Majesty of God.”
In the 1930s, Ladies Home Journal, a magazine for proper American gentlewomen, spoke out against the questionable morals of jazz.
The Nazis banned it as an instrument of American “jungle music”. Their poster for the 1938 exhibition of “Decadent Music” (Entartete Musik) in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1938  featured a caricature of an African-American man playing the saxophone and wearing a Jewish star. The superintendent of the Weimar National Theatre  explained in an opening speech of the exhibition  that the decay of music was "due to the influence of Judaism and capitalism".

Stalin despised the instrument “of capitalist oppression” so much that he not only banned it but sent its players to Siberia. Many other Eastern European countries felt obliged to copy his stance, the ban on its performance remaining in place in some countries until the 1980s.  By the way, the Papal prohibition has never been revoked.
Adolphe Sax died in 1894, and is buried in the Montmartre Cemetery in Paris. Once the sax took its place in the big bands of Duke Ellington and Count Basie, its rise was unstoppable.
The Saxophone becomes  the head of a new group, that of the brass instruments with reed. Its sound is of such rare quality that  there is not a bass instrument in use nowadays that could be compared to  the Saxophone.
 The exhibition Celebrating Sax: Instruments and Innovation, is on display in gallery 682 of The André Mertens Galleries for Musical Instruments through April 30, 2015. Rare saxophones, brass instruments, and this exquisite ivory clarinet are among the twenty-six instruments selected to showcase the innovative work of the Sax family.

Secret free museum in Greenwich Village: Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation

Walking past the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation at 526 LaGuardia Place, you just might miss it. The Foundation is the house-museum of American sculptor Chaim Gross located in historical 1830s townhouse in the heart of Greenwich Village. 
  Chaim was born to a Jewish family in the then Austro-Hungarian village of Wolowa (it is now part of Ukraine). IN 1914 when Chaim was 10 Russian troops invaded their home and his family became refugees for the remainder of World War I.

Gross began his art studies in Budapest but the studies were interrupted after foreigners were expelled from Hungary. Chaim and his family immigrated to the United States in 1921. The majority of his work being carved from wood. Works by Chaim Gross can be found in major museums and private collections throughout the United States. The townhouse, located just south of Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, was built in the 1830s, in an area now best known for New York University.

 In the 1880s, the property was converted into an industrial loft. Chaim and Renee Gross the house in 1963. The Grosses converted the building back to residential living, while also adding the sculpture studio on the ground floor. The artist and his wife of 59 years lived in this building from 1962 until 1991. The studio, which remains as it was during Gross's lifetime, is the only space of its kind in New York City. It was designed by Gross himself, who laid in the intricate wood floor and constructed the dramatic skylight. 

 The studio exhibits major wood and marble carvings spanning sixty years, and is a testament to the life and process of the artist. On view are 100 sculptures by Gross and 600 objects from his extensive collection of African and modern American art, featuring important paintings by de Kooning, Avery, Hartley, and Burliuk, among many others. 
 The museum is free and open to the public on Thursdays and Fridays from 1-5 pm.

 

The Hispanic Society of America. Part 2

The Hispanic Society of America was founded in 1904 by  Archer Milton Huntington to establish a free museum and research library representing the culture of Spain and the peoples it has influenced.  It is located in  the  neoclassical building on West 155.  Museum is open every day except Monday and is free. Just try to avoid in   hot summer -there is no air conditioning in the museum.

 I wrote about the history of museum a week ago, and now I'd like to talk about its' wonderful collection of the paintings,  ceramics and sculpture.
In the center of the museum there is a beautiful  two-story terra cotta main court  with a  the light-filled balcony  lined with paintings. The most renowned painting in the collection is Goya's portrait of the Duchess of Alba. There are three  portraits of Velasquez, "Saint Jerome"  and "Holy Family" by Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco and a lot of others, maybe not so well known paintings  on the walls.  

 There is a separate room with spectacular murals by the Spanish artist Juaquin Sorolla. Early in 1911, Sorolla visited the United States  with the exhibition and met museum founder Archer Huntington.     Later that year Sorolla   signed a contract  with Huntington to paint a series of oils on life in Spain. He completed the final panel by July 1919, was  by his own admission, exhausted   and  suffered a stroke in 1920, while painting a portrait in his garden in Madrid.

Paralyzed for over three years, he died on 10 August 1923. 
The Sorolla Room  opened to the public in 1926.  The room closed for remodeling in 2008, and the murals toured museums in Spain for the first time and had a great success. The Sorolla Room reopened in 2010, with the murals on permanent display.  The  murals range in size from 12 to 14 feet in height, and total 227 feet in length and are really  stunning. Each panel in Sorolla room is a beautiful scene of Spain. The murals are remarkable and amusing: luminous dancers, market sellers, paraders, penitents, cowboys, sheepherders.
  Sorolla murals reminded me  Thomas Hart Benton's "America Today Mural Rediscovered"  - the exhibition in the Metropolitan museum. "America Today"  depicts a panoramic sweep of rural and urban American life on the eve of the Great Depression.
Archer   Huntington was fascinated with the ancient past of the Hspanic world. He sponsored significant archeological expeditions near Sevilla, Spain on the site of the Roman city of Italica. Through these expeditions The Spanish society has been able to assemble the most important collection of Spanish antiques outside of Spain.

In addition to Ancient and classical sculpture collection contains extraordinary works dating from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century.
The collection of Spanish ceramics,  in the narrow hallways on the second  is one of the largest collections both in the U.S. and in Spain. The collection is arranged chronologically. The display begins with works in the Hispanic-Moresque style made in Al-Andalus (Moorish Iberia) during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and ends  with the piece from the twentieth century adorned with flapper and art deco zeal.

The museum has early first-century mosaics, medieval furniture, tomb effigies and a wonderful collection of 15th-century door knockers. There are also wood carvings, ivories, examples of hand-crafted gold and silver, as well as contemporary works.
I visited the museum last fall on a weekday. The museum was almost empty- really a well hidden secret...

The Hispanic Society of America. Part 1

Only in New York  a cultural site of such   significance can go  mostly unnoticed -  and not only not only by tourists, but by New Yorkers as well. This is really a hidden gem in Washington Heights. If the museum, and especially the courtyard,   were near Central Park, it would be one of the City's most visited attractions. By the way, it is free!

You'll very likely be alone viewing works by Goya, Velasquez, and El Greco as well as a stunning collection of Spanish earthenware from the 16th through the 19th centuries. Walking into the complex from the street, there was  almost a ghostly feeling permeating the atmosphere. 

The Hispanic Society of America was founded on May 18, 1904, by Archer Milton Huntington, the stepson of railroad magnate. It  is located on Audubon Terrace between 155 and 156 Streets in the Upper West Side in the Beaux-Arts building  that dates from 1908.
Huntington had been thinking about building a museum since he was a child, when he used boxes as gallery rooms and pictures cut out of magazines. Archer spent a year learning Arabic and Spanish in preparation for his first journey to Spain.   He traveled often to Spain, collecting books, manuscripts, art, ceramics, textiles and coins. The master plan for the site was drawn up by his cousin, architect Charles P. Huntington. 

Archer Huntington took a deep personal interest in the details of every aspect of the building and design, even going so far as to design his own cases for the museum’s collection.
In 1904, Huntington’s collection included not only sculpture, paintings, maps, and archeological artifacts but also an extensive library, containing approximately 40,000 books .

The museum location was very remote. Archer   assumed that other museums would soon join him.  However the elevator and steel frames changed  the direction of real estate development in Manhattan at the beginning on the 20th century.  The city began   to develop vertically instead of going north as it was in the 19th century- so most of the organizations which located on Audubon Terrace were headed by or strongly connected to Huntington.

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Audubon Terrace was named   for naturalist and artist John James Audubon.  His book  "Birds of America" , printed between 1827 and 1838,   contains 435 life-sized watercolors of North American birds, all made from hand-engraved plates, and is considered to be the archetype of wildlife illustration.
With the success of the book, Audubon purchased a 14-acre estate along the Hudson River north of New York City. Part if his estate he  donated for the Trinity Church Cemetery in which he is now buried.
 The museum sits behind two sets of wrought-iron gates in a   plaza with   a   statue of El Cid(a Castilian nobleman and military leader in medieval Spain ) created by   Anna Hyatt,  the wife of  Archer  Huntington.  This heroic equestrian figure is surrounded by four smaller bronze statues of seated warriors. On either side is a small reflecting pool linked to the sculpture group by two flagpoles on bronze bases, also designed by Anna Huntington.

There are also  reliefs of Don Quixote and Boabdil  done by Anna  She was the first woman artist to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Initially the complex  included American Numismatic Society, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, the American Geographic Society and the Museum of the American Indian, each housed in its own magnificent structure on Audubon Terrace. The New Yorker declared that Huntington had created a veritable “Parnassus.”

Soon  the Museum of the American Indian, the American Geographical Society and the American Numismatic Society  relocated, leaving behind only their deteriorating buildings.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters remains on the terrace but is open to the public only a few months a year. Boricua College, a private school, occupies the former Geographical Society building.


Between 1907 and 1930, The Hispanic Society of America was the foremost institution promoting Hispanic culture in the United States. When the Met sought to display the very best artifacts in its new Islamic galleries, it went to the Hispanic Society to arrange loans for 27 of its works.
The museum averages now are only 20,000 visitors a year, down from about 50,000 annually in the mid-1950s.  What a shame!
In my next post I'll tell more about museum collections - paintings, ceramics, sculptures.