Matisse and Picasso exhibitions will never be in short supply, and you’ll never have to go far for them. But a comprehensive survey of one of Italy’s greatest 16th-century artists, Agnolo Bronzino, is a once-in-a-lifetime affair, and to see it you’ll have to travel to Florence, where “Bronzino, Artist and Poet at the Court of the Medici” appears through Jan. 23.
Bronzino (1503-72) was court painter to Cosimo I de’Medici, and a brilliant multi-tasker. His aristocratic portraiture, with its chilly hauteur and lacquered perfection, set a fashion for all of Europe, and some of the grandest will be assembled for this occasion. He was also a superlative religious painter, contributing work to Florence’s most important churches. Many of those paintings are still in their original locations. And while the show is installed at the Palazzo Strozzi, Florence itself will function as a kind of Bronzino museum, and a necessary stop on any European art tour.
Similarly, Paris will be an extension of “Mondrian in Paris: 1912-1938” at the Pompidou Center from Dec. 1 to March 31. The Dutch painter spent most of his long career there, until World War II forced him to leave for London and then New York. With a reconstruction of Mondrian’s dazzlingly designed Rue du Départ studio as its centerpiece, this overview will trace his development toward abstraction in pictures shaped by the jazz rhythms and architectural lines of the City of Light.
Although Paul Gauguin had virtually no association at all with London, he’s the toast of the town now that “Gauguin: Maker of Myth” is at the Tate Modern. This enormous show, his first major British survey in half a century, includes his South Seas paintings, a roomful of self-portraits, and — perhaps most interesting — an archive’s worth of illustrated letters and sketchbooks revealing the not necessarily attractive human side of an artist who was himself a myth. (After the show closes on Jan. 16, it moves on to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.)
HOLLAND COTTER
Paying Homage to Japan’s Raw Edges
“THE eye adjusts,” as fashion people say, a truism routinely exploited in defense of styles so extreme that they often affront conventional tastes. It took some adjusting indeed to digest and assimilate the groundbreaking trends spawned in Japan in the early 1980s — a period of fashion revolt that ushered in radical innovations like breastplates and street-sweeping skirts.
Those pioneering inventions — more “bleeding edge” than cutting edge, according to the fashion historian Valerie Steele — are highlighted in “Japan Fashion Now,” an exhibition at the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, one that traces the Japanese influence on runways and urban streets.
The exhibition, conceived and organized by Ms. Steele, the museum’s director, showcases contemporary designers, among them avant-garde labels like Phenomenon, whose designer, known as Big-O, has offered swirling skirts for men; and Chitose Abe, whose eccentric designs for Sacai appear to be a hybrid of beat-up old sweaters and silk shirts. Also represented are modern Tokyo’s quirky fashion subcultures, some inspired by manga or anime; others, like the mori (forest) girls, are a bizarre pastiche of Central European folkloric costume pieces.
Perhaps most tellingly, the show reintroduces the designs of renegades like Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake and Yohji Yamamoto, designers who gained cult followings by dispensing with the hallmark nipped waists and contour-hugging fabrics of traditional Western fashion in favor of the asymmetric, overscale and patently distressed looks that ushered in a brash new age.
Dismissed in their day as sexless and ungainly, these wayward experiments look remarkably relevant — not surprising since many have resurfaced on the catwalks, recast and updated for a modern eye.
No comments:
Post a Comment