Art and Museums
Future Beauty at the PEM: Avant-Garde Japanese Fashion
The fundamentals of haute couture in Europe and America — highly sexualized fitted forms, balance, finish, invisible tailoring and complementary color and pattern — are noticeably absent from contemporary Japanese fashion. Instead, imperfection, transience, austerity, asymmetry, roughness, simplicity and subtlety are valued. As designer Yohji Yamamoto affirmed, "I think perfection is ugly. Perfection is a kind of order ... things someone forces onto a thing. A free human being does not desire such things." more »
Life on a String: Bead Masterpieces Representing Wealth, Symbolizing Gender and Social Status
The show explores the use of glass beads for fashion and ornament, as traded goods and objects of ritual. Included are Venetian chevron and millefiori beads, Roman mosaic beads, West Africa bodom beads, Egyptian eye beads, Chinese horned eye beads, Japanese magatama beads and Bohemian beads imitating precious stones. North American beadworked garments and contemporary beaded objects by Joyce Scott and David Chatt are on display. more »
Beauty's Legacy, Material Opulence and Personal Excess: Gilded Age Portraits
With the amassing of great fortunes came the drive to document the wealthy in portraiture, echoing a cultural pattern reaching back to colonial times. A brilliant generation of American and European artists rose to meet that demand. The exhibit examines those portraits of famous society beauties and powerful titans of business and industry. more »
Dramatic, contemplative, violent, beautiful, dangerous and sublime: Turner and the Sea
The Battle of Trafalgar is his most complex tribute to Lord Horatio Nelson, of whom he was a great admirer. The falling mast bears Nelson's white vice-admiral's flag, while the code flags spelling d-u-t-y – both the last word of his famous Trafalgar signal and the last coherent thought he spoke ('Thank God I have done my duty') – are coming down from the mainmast. Men try to save friends and foes alike from a darkly heaving sea, in which a tangle of floating rigging resembles a monster’s head. more »