Fashion in the Museum

I know that there are some who think that fashion doesn't belong in the museum and that there are others who mostly go to museums to see the fashions, whether on mannequins or in paintings.

The Boston MFA has placed costumes from Hollywood’s Golden Age on display with a wall showing clips from the films where the costumes were worn. The costumes appear remarkably different in person from the screen. In person, I noticed the dresses’ beadwork and color, but saw them for their structure and movement in the black and white films. If museums serve to help us become more visually aware, then this show reminds us that what we see on screens, film, television, or computer, may not be what we would experience in person.

No bad thing in that.

As I attend a talk at the National Arts Club (tonight, Friday 1/23 7pm) on the fashion designer Bill Halston, I will also confront the club’s own uncertainty about the committee. They often organize some of the more popular events, and yet they are derided as a “light” committee, unconcerned with real art. Almost all the clothes that we wear do not constitute art, but I would be hard pressed to reject all fashion across time as having no place in a discussion of art.

Fashion is intimate and it most obviously accepts our superimposed desires, but is that truly reason to dismiss it? Hasn't other art done the same?

What Do You See?

Charles Sheeler’s View of New York (1931) is obviously not a view of New York City. 

It is an interior painting of his studio, with a window through which we see a blue sky outside. Inside, an empty chair, an unlit lamp, and a covered camera are not only signs of the artist not working, but are made dismal by the gray walls and tone that cover the main body of the painting. The covered camera was indicative of Sheeler’s work as a photographer, though he was switching to painting. I am amused by the window centerpiece with the blue sky outside because of the fact that artists so often sense that their worlds trapped inside a studio are gray and lifeless, where outside, where they cannot be, is full of color and vibrancy. Those of us on the outside might not always agree, but Sheeler’s painting highlights that narrative to an amusing degree.

The Change You Want To See In The World

In the Gordon Parks: Back to Fort Scott exhibit currently at the MFA, through September 13, 2015, I heard a woman my age explaining to a little girl, maybe around six years old, that these pictures depict a time when kids of different color had to go to separate schools.

"Separate schools?" Incredulity mingled with confusion as the adult sighed, "Yes."

But the little girl looked perplexed rather than upset, and I was glad that she found it odd and attached no personal significance to this fact.

She was the change that many in the exhibit had hoped for. Elderly couples walked hand in hand looking at the photographs that Gordon Parks took in his hometown of Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1950. They show the way racism and segregation still quietly defined the life of those he knew. That would change soon, but not soon enough. The photographs were supposed to be published in Life magazine in 1951, but were suspended. The 42 photographs on display have never been seen before. The exhibit includes examples of his typewritten pages from his novel, The Learning Tree (1963). Parks confronted racism at every stage of his career, working in Chicago, but then also during his fellowship for the Farm Security Administration in segregated Washington DC, no better at the war office, and certainly not once he left those bureaucracies and tried fashion photography, though he was able to get freelance work from Vogue.

His work is an implied indictment of racism by showing the humanity of those so rudely dismissed. Given the racism the United States that still confuses the United States, the show could not come at a better time.

A Bow

This picture stands out for me because of the blue ribbon. I was in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston last Spring when I saw this painting. I had already been there for hours, taken a break, and started again when this blue bow made me take note.

The painting of Mme de Jurjewicz is by Winterhalter, an unknown artist to me before. I am unfamiliar with his other work. I keep meaning to find out more and get distracted by other things.

I don't look at paintings the way a painter would, or an art critic would. I know that not only intuitively but from my various conversations with either. I see different things, meaning where perhaps there was none, something simple where others need more complications, difficulty, strategy to pull the painting into a new and different place. I see a bow that is the perfect velvet from a memory I can't recall, that folds along the side of my mind in layers of fabric wrapped with childhood joys, and am happy.

I like learning the way a better eye sees a painting; I learn how to see more strategically. The challenge is, of course, also maintaining an innocent eye that enjoys the work uncomplicated by knowledge of technique and style, one that appreciates technique and style radiant with seeming effortlessness, permitting a passer-by to stop and look with pleasure, to bow to a simple bow.