review and pic from boston.com/globe
Fashion and famous names mingle with fine art
Sometimes accessories can look better than the outfit they're meant to go with. A case in point is the couture double bill at the Museum of Fine Arts.
The main attraction at the museum is "Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006, " which pulls off the neat trick of being both crass and lame. Meant to serve as a kind of pendant to "Fashion Show" is an exhibition bearing the blandly straightforward title "Fashion Photography." Yet it's the smaller show that's by far the more satisfying, intelligently conceived, and, yes, stylish. It runs through March 25.
"Fashion Photography" mirrors its subject in being at once disparate and distinctive. Among the nearly 100 images are some of the most famous the genre has produced: Richard Avedon's "Dovima with Elephants, " Irving Penn's "Girl with Bottle, " and William Klein's "Smoke and Veil, Paris. "
Such classics are a welcome sight, of course. The Klein looks ravishing enough to render momentarily irrelevant the surgeon general's report on tobacco (well, almost). Also welcome are the many examples of fashion work by photographers not primarily associated with the genre: Man Ray, Louis Faurer , Nan Goldin , Helmut Newton , Marie Cosindas , Duane Michals .
Their work balances that of such mainstays of the fashion tradition as Edward Steichen , Cecil Beaton , George Hoyningen-Huene , Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Hiro , and Horst . Horst's 1936 "White Sleeve, Paris " has a simplicity, and elegance, that's very nearly timeless. Conversely, his "Ted in Bathing Suit, " also from the '30s, has a beefcake splendor that verges on the risible -- or delectable, depending on how you look at it.
The famous names in "Fashion Photography" don't just belong to photographers. Celebrity has always been a factor in fashion: celebrity designers, celebrity models, celebrity wearers. Kate Moss figures in two pictures. Twiggy , Christy Turlington , Naomi Campbell , Greta Garbo , Elizabeth Taylor , Uma Thurman , and Iman appear in one each. So, too, for that matter, does Alfred Hitchcock (risible, yes; delectable, no).
"Fashion Photography" offers a loosely chronological overview. One of the nicer elements is a vitrine with postcards showing stylishly dressed women from Paris in the early 1910s. Nearly every other picture in "Fashion Photography" was taken for commercial publication. Baron Adolf de Meyer's "Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in a costume by Léon Bakst " was taken for Vogue in 1913. It offers a geometry of adornment almost perfectly poised between absurdity and elegance. If only in that respect, de Meyer's photograph might be seen as prototypical.
Conversely, the de Meyer has a look of mellowed imprecision that is highly atypical for the genre. Soon enough, soft focus gave way to hard edge. The beguiling sfumato of, say, Deborah Turbeville's "Jean Muir and Friends," from 1975, is an anomaly here. Far more representative is Guy Bourdin's 1966 picture of a model's straight-angled haircut and bare back, an arrangement of follicle and flesh that, in its crisp particularity, conjures up an ecstasy of angularity.
A running theme of "Fashion Photography" is color versus black and white. Both have their strengths. Color gives a fuller report on reality, while black and white on abstracts. Overall, though, since couture trades so heavily in fantasy, black and white tends to work better. There are exceptions, of course. The sheer yumminess (that's a technical term) of Glen Luchford's "Red Sandals" owes everything to its carmine vividness. Ditto for Erwin Blumenfeld's 1952 "Décollété, New York, " though here smoochiness rather than yumminess obtains. The whiteness of the whale, which so obsessed Herman Melville, pales, so to speak, before the redness of these lips.
Fashion trades in fantasy but it never loses sight of commerce. At what point does a fashion photograph transcend its explicit aim, selling a product (which can be wearer as well as garment), and produce an image that justifies itself on purely aesthetic terms? The greatest fashion photographers, like Penn and Avedon, ignore the question, letting their work provide an answer. Others seek reassurance.
A running motif in "Fashion Photography" is the conscious aping of art. Dudley Glanfield's "Men's Formal Wear, " from the 1920s, might be subtitled, "Cubism for the Masses ." An Elie Nadelman sculpture dominates George Platt Lynes's "Mrs. Minchin Rank in Lincoln Kirstein's Apartment ." The titles of Dahl-Wolfe's "Models in Pavel Tchelitchew Setting" and Faurer's "Model in front of Alexander Liberman painting " make explicit the mingling of fashion and fine art. Ilse Bing's "The Honorable Daisy Fellowes, gloves by Dent in London" (1933) aspires to the condition of art more subtly, and most successfully, treating the gloves as if they were part of a still life. (Bing, as well as Goldin, are among the photographers with work in another current MFA show, "The Lane Collection: Recent Acquisitions," which runs through Feb. 4. There are just 22 pictures, but many are choice. For that matter, "Fashion Show" and "Fashion Photography" put together don't raise as many questions about what we wear and why as does "Designing the Modern Utopia: Soviet Textiles from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection," which runs through Jan. 21.)
Fashion asks for trouble when it takes itself too seriously. That's why something as witty as Denis Piel's "Brideshead I, Vogue," with its pairing of model and peacock outside of Castle Howard, is so refreshing or why the deadpan drollery of Jacques Henri Lartigue's 1966 "Hiro Creating Harper's Bazaar Cover," which shows the photographer hanging from a scaffolding, is such a relief. Too much wit, though, can curdle, as in Steven Meisel's "Makeover Madness, " which features a model of standard-issue thinness preparing for liposuction.
T.S. Eliot said, "Mankind cannot bear too much reality." Maybe mankind can, but fashion certainly can't. The tastelessness of a body-mass joke in a context of rampant anorexia seems almost tame compared to the emotional neediness on display in Juergen Teller's "Go-See: February 1998 ," which consists of numerous small head shots of young women eager to work as models. "These photographs capture the ordinary humanity of the modeling world," the accompanying wall text says. Extraordinary inhumanity is more like it. Effortful and artless, the faces of these young women present an unintended illustration of the difference between striking a pose and striking a pose successfully. They make us appreciate how truly difficult it is to create the illusion of chic -- and, in strictly human terms, how sad.
Fashion and famous names mingle with fine art
Sometimes accessories can look better than the outfit they're meant to go with. A case in point is the couture double bill at the Museum of Fine Arts.
The main attraction at the museum is "Fashion Show: Paris Collections 2006, " which pulls off the neat trick of being both crass and lame. Meant to serve as a kind of pendant to "Fashion Show" is an exhibition bearing the blandly straightforward title "Fashion Photography." Yet it's the smaller show that's by far the more satisfying, intelligently conceived, and, yes, stylish. It runs through March 25.
"Fashion Photography" mirrors its subject in being at once disparate and distinctive. Among the nearly 100 images are some of the most famous the genre has produced: Richard Avedon's "Dovima with Elephants, " Irving Penn's "Girl with Bottle, " and William Klein's "Smoke and Veil, Paris. "
Such classics are a welcome sight, of course. The Klein looks ravishing enough to render momentarily irrelevant the surgeon general's report on tobacco (well, almost). Also welcome are the many examples of fashion work by photographers not primarily associated with the genre: Man Ray, Louis Faurer , Nan Goldin , Helmut Newton , Marie Cosindas , Duane Michals .
Their work balances that of such mainstays of the fashion tradition as Edward Steichen , Cecil Beaton , George Hoyningen-Huene , Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Hiro , and Horst . Horst's 1936 "White Sleeve, Paris " has a simplicity, and elegance, that's very nearly timeless. Conversely, his "Ted in Bathing Suit, " also from the '30s, has a beefcake splendor that verges on the risible -- or delectable, depending on how you look at it.
The famous names in "Fashion Photography" don't just belong to photographers. Celebrity has always been a factor in fashion: celebrity designers, celebrity models, celebrity wearers. Kate Moss figures in two pictures. Twiggy , Christy Turlington , Naomi Campbell , Greta Garbo , Elizabeth Taylor , Uma Thurman , and Iman appear in one each. So, too, for that matter, does Alfred Hitchcock (risible, yes; delectable, no).
"Fashion Photography" offers a loosely chronological overview. One of the nicer elements is a vitrine with postcards showing stylishly dressed women from Paris in the early 1910s. Nearly every other picture in "Fashion Photography" was taken for commercial publication. Baron Adolf de Meyer's "Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in a costume by Léon Bakst " was taken for Vogue in 1913. It offers a geometry of adornment almost perfectly poised between absurdity and elegance. If only in that respect, de Meyer's photograph might be seen as prototypical.
Conversely, the de Meyer has a look of mellowed imprecision that is highly atypical for the genre. Soon enough, soft focus gave way to hard edge. The beguiling sfumato of, say, Deborah Turbeville's "Jean Muir and Friends," from 1975, is an anomaly here. Far more representative is Guy Bourdin's 1966 picture of a model's straight-angled haircut and bare back, an arrangement of follicle and flesh that, in its crisp particularity, conjures up an ecstasy of angularity.
A running theme of "Fashion Photography" is color versus black and white. Both have their strengths. Color gives a fuller report on reality, while black and white on abstracts. Overall, though, since couture trades so heavily in fantasy, black and white tends to work better. There are exceptions, of course. The sheer yumminess (that's a technical term) of Glen Luchford's "Red Sandals" owes everything to its carmine vividness. Ditto for Erwin Blumenfeld's 1952 "Décollété, New York, " though here smoochiness rather than yumminess obtains. The whiteness of the whale, which so obsessed Herman Melville, pales, so to speak, before the redness of these lips.
Fashion trades in fantasy but it never loses sight of commerce. At what point does a fashion photograph transcend its explicit aim, selling a product (which can be wearer as well as garment), and produce an image that justifies itself on purely aesthetic terms? The greatest fashion photographers, like Penn and Avedon, ignore the question, letting their work provide an answer. Others seek reassurance.
A running motif in "Fashion Photography" is the conscious aping of art. Dudley Glanfield's "Men's Formal Wear, " from the 1920s, might be subtitled, "Cubism for the Masses ." An Elie Nadelman sculpture dominates George Platt Lynes's "Mrs. Minchin Rank in Lincoln Kirstein's Apartment ." The titles of Dahl-Wolfe's "Models in Pavel Tchelitchew Setting" and Faurer's "Model in front of Alexander Liberman painting " make explicit the mingling of fashion and fine art. Ilse Bing's "The Honorable Daisy Fellowes, gloves by Dent in London" (1933) aspires to the condition of art more subtly, and most successfully, treating the gloves as if they were part of a still life. (Bing, as well as Goldin, are among the photographers with work in another current MFA show, "The Lane Collection: Recent Acquisitions," which runs through Feb. 4. There are just 22 pictures, but many are choice. For that matter, "Fashion Show" and "Fashion Photography" put together don't raise as many questions about what we wear and why as does "Designing the Modern Utopia: Soviet Textiles from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection," which runs through Jan. 21.)
Fashion asks for trouble when it takes itself too seriously. That's why something as witty as Denis Piel's "Brideshead I, Vogue," with its pairing of model and peacock outside of Castle Howard, is so refreshing or why the deadpan drollery of Jacques Henri Lartigue's 1966 "Hiro Creating Harper's Bazaar Cover," which shows the photographer hanging from a scaffolding, is such a relief. Too much wit, though, can curdle, as in Steven Meisel's "Makeover Madness, " which features a model of standard-issue thinness preparing for liposuction.
T.S. Eliot said, "Mankind cannot bear too much reality." Maybe mankind can, but fashion certainly can't. The tastelessness of a body-mass joke in a context of rampant anorexia seems almost tame compared to the emotional neediness on display in Juergen Teller's "Go-See: February 1998 ," which consists of numerous small head shots of young women eager to work as models. "These photographs capture the ordinary humanity of the modeling world," the accompanying wall text says. Extraordinary inhumanity is more like it. Effortful and artless, the faces of these young women present an unintended illustration of the difference between striking a pose and striking a pose successfully. They make us appreciate how truly difficult it is to create the illusion of chic -- and, in strictly human terms, how sad.
Also, if you are seeking "traditional" college environment, BU is not it.
