Beauty
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 »
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 »
Killer Fashions
Rose Madeline Mula writes: At some point we have to decide whether we want to be fashionable or healthy. It should be an easy choice. Of course my health is more important. On the other hand, those stilettos do make my legs look fantastic. And if I end up in a wheel chair unable to walk, I can wear those gorgeous shoes all the time! more »
Pretty Girl: Girl with a Pearl Earring makes a stop at The Frick in New York, the last leg of its American tour
Val Castronovo writes: Girl's head, shoulder, garments and accessories stand out against a dark, solid background, which is blackened now but once was translucent green. The effect is rather like the effect of looking at this painting in an otherwise empty room — just as everything is stripped away in the Oval Room so that our attention is laser-focused on Girl, so everything is stripped away in the background of the painting itself so that we zero in on the figure’s physiognomy and accoutrements, which signal mercantile wealth and prosperity. more »