Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/111120
A LA MODE A new show at the Met explores fashion���s cultural context through Impressionism. Claude Monet���s Women in the Garden. In 1867 ��mile Zola described the work of Paris��� artistic avantgarde ���the dream all painters have: putting life-size figures into landscape.��� The Impressionists, as they were known, sure did shift things around in the landscape. Through their portraits of Parisians going about their daily routines they not only put an end to stiff, formal society portraits, but they also cast a spotlight on fashion and its importance as a class signifier. This is the subject of the sweeping, elegant and witty ���Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity��� show at New York���s Metropolitan Museum of Art (by way of Paris��� Mus��e d���Orsay), on view through May 27. It may very well be the greatest fashion show on earth. Featuring works by painters like Claude Monet, ��douard Manet, Paul Cezanne, Jean Tissot, Albert Bartholom��, Edgar Degas and Claude Renoir among many others, the show demonstrates how these artists so brilliantly captured Baron Haussmann���s ���new��� Paris in a moment of great urban transformation. But the real star of the show is fashion and the role it plays in a broader cultural context. The exhibit takes us all around Paris, both inside private homes and across broad boulevards, and we witness firsthand the luxury of the times��� or what Baudelaire called the ���daily metamorphosis of exterior things.��� We follow one Parisienne into a milliner���s store in Tissot���s The Shop Girl; Gustave Caillebotte takes us into an ordinary caf�� in At the Caf�� and Jean B��raud takes us to a ball in Le Bal Public. The idea is to capture the spontaneity of daily life, la quotidienne as the French call it, and in doing so, to get a closer look at the postures, gestures, and simple elegant city clothes that women wore in the latter half of the 19th century. In Manet���s Le Balcon, for example, we see two Parisian women dressed in white cotton day dresses staring out into the foreground or directly at the viewer. The richness of their interior life is rendered in the details: parasols and fans, an attentive servant. In Morisot���s Two Sisters we see the details on their dresses as well as the intricate floral pattern on the sofa where they sit. Each gallery presents a different context for us to observe fashion up close. One gallery is staged like a runway show, with gilt chairs lining either side of an enfilade of standing portraits. Another shows women caught off guard in intimate moments���in her bedroom (Henri Gervex���s Rolla) or in her bathroom (Berthe Morisot Woman at her Toilette). The final gallery is staged as an outdoor garden with sky blue walls and grass green floors. The Pleasure of Fresh Air is the theme, and the selected paintings depict outdoor leisure activities closely linked to the world of fashion. The dappled light falling on white cotton dresses and silk parasols in Monet���s Women in the Garden remind us that while fashion is a product of urban industrial life, it also derives inspiration from nature and can bring us back to nature. BH It may very well be the greatest fashion show on earth. 206 BAL HARBOUR IMAGE COURTESY OF METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART BY KATE BETTS