KARL LAGERFELD & VINCENT VAN GOGH
NATALIE SENIOR GREENBERG
GO AHEAD AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS — THERE ARE TWO SHOWS AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART THAT ARE NOT TO BE MISSED! THE THEME OF THIS YEAR’S MET GALA WHICH IS TAKING PLACE ON MAY 2ND, IS KARL LAGERFELD: A LINE OF BEAUTY, HONORING THE LATE FASHION DESIGNER. THE AMAZING CORRESPONDING EXHIBIT IS NOW BEING SHOWN AT THE MET’S COSTUME INSTITUTE UNTIL JULY 16TH, 2023.
And while you’re at the Met, you’ll definitely want to check out a spectacular show featuring paintings by everyone’s favorite artist, Vincent Van Gogh. This is not an immersive event, but the real thing!
KARL LAGERFELD: A LINE OF BEAUTY
Back in 2005, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented a Chanel show, Karl Lagerfeld who had been the designer at Chanel since 1983 (and would remain so until his death in 2019), refused to attend. He announced, “I dislike retrospectives. I don’t want to see all those old dresses.” The rest of us adore seeing past works by great designers, and this show does not disappoint. It traces the conceptual themes that came up in Lagerfeld’s collections from the 1950s when he began his career with Balmain, through the Fendi and Chanel years.
The show features more than 150 pieces, spanning the designer’s six-decade career (1950 to 2019), and most importantly, the pieces are accompanied with a corresponding sketch. The showcasing of Lagerfeld’s drawings gives us a deeper understanding of his complex creative process. The curator of the show, Andrew Bolton noted that “With Karl, everything he ever designed in his life, he drew first.” Lagerfeld said, “I draw just as I breathe.” The drawings themselves are like a secret language between Lagerfeld and his “premiéres d’atelier”(seamstresses) who brought his creations to completion. This show is an attempt to understand just what he was trying to communicate to the talented people who were constructing the garments.
In addition to tracing the evolution of Lagerfeld’s fashions from sketches to the actual fashion, the show highlights ornamental, structural, floral, geometric and abstract themes within his work.
This show is a must-see for anyone who loves fashion, and for everyone who is interested in the creative process of fashion designers.
VAN GOGH’S CYPRESSES
In 1889, while Vincent Van Gogh was staying at an asylum on the outskirts of Saint-Remy-de-Provence, he wrote to his brother Theo about a very personal vision. “The cypresses still preoccupy me. I’d like to do something with them like the canvases of the sunflowers, because it astonishes me that no one has yet done them as I see them.”
We learn much about Van Gogh’s mindset and the paintings he was creating at the time through the letters and sketches that he sent to his brother. This area of southern France was well-known for majestic swirling trees and this exhibit focuses on paintings where Van Gogh featured the cypress tree.
The exhibit will bring together two important paintings by Van Gogh. Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889 is one of the jewels of the Van Gogh collection at the Met. It will be shown along side The Starry Night, 1889 one of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, which is on rare loan to the Met from the Museum of Modern Art. This is the first time these two paintings have been shown together since 1901.
Wheat Field with Cypresses is a daytime scene, and The Starry Night is a nighttime scene but there are many similarities between the two paintings, and most prominently are the cypress trees. Both paintings capture the dynamism of the twisted forms of the trees, creating a powerful link between the earth and the heavens and both paintings show the movement of nature and evoke feelings of awesomeness.
There are over 40 works that show Van Gogh’s fascination with these “tall and dark” trees, which sparked his imagination over the course of two years in the South of France. The paintings will be shown alongside drawings and illustrated letters, some of which have rarely been seen by the public before.
Both the Lagerfeld and Van Gogh exhibits give us an extraordinary opportunity to appreciate fashion and art that have been known to us for awhile, but together with the sketches and letters give us new insights in to the artists’ minds and creative processes.
Natalie Greenberg is a former Brooklyn College Art History professor. She currently volunteers to teach Art History at the SBH Senior Division.
