Exhibitions

It’s a rare museum that does what the Städel Museum just did: like an auction house crowing about new record prices, it sent out a release with attendance figures for its recent exhibition, Albrecht Durer: His Art in Context — and them compared them with previous monographic shows for other renowned artists. Some museums, as you know, refuse to share any exhibition numbers at all, which I think is silly. (Understandable, maybe, but still silly.)

Anyway, back to the Durer: in 15 weeks on view, the exhibition ended last Sunday, Feb. 2 — after staying open till midnight on Saturday — with attendance topping 250,000 visitors – “including some 23 percent from outside Germany,” the museum said. It added:

“Dürer” is thus surpassing major Frankfurt visitor successes such as “Rembrandt Rembrandt” (2003) with 245,000 visitors, or “Cranach the Elder” (2007/08) with 205,000, and earning the status as second most well-attended exhibition in the nearly two hundred years of the Städel Museum’s history.

The Städel stayed open until 10 p.m. on Friday and 8 p.m. on Sunday, both also extended for this exhibition.

And what artist drew more people? “With 367,033 visitors, only the Botticelli show staged in 2009 has been more successful to date,” the museum said.

The Durer show was a blockbuster and I wish I could have seen it:

The exhibition has encompassed a total of more than 250 works, including some 190 by Dürer. Altogether, the presentation has introduced the oeuvre of the German master in the entire breadth and wealth of his artistic expression. Twenty-five panel and canvas paintings, eighty drawings, a further eighty works executed in various printmaking techniques, and books written and illustrated by Albrecht Dürer have been on view….these works have been juxtaposed with examples by forerunners and contemporaries who were of importance to the artist – whether because he creatively explored their achievements, or because his own works served as points of departure for a new rendering in the oeuvre of a colleague.

It does make one wonder why Botticelli soared so high. But never mind: congratulations to the Städel for being so ambitious. I am sure the exhibition was expensive and I am glad it paid off.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Städel

 

I was cleaning out photos on my cell phone this weekend when I realized I had never posted here about the fabulous exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum* called The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk. Some of Gaultier’s designs are a bit over the top of me, so I wasn’t quite sure I’d like the exhibition. I did, and not just for the clothes, though may of them are gorgeous. I liked the exhibition because it used technology to the viewer’s advantage: it wasn’t just an add-on; it actually conveyed meaning and provided context.

Here’s the museum’s description of the exhibit:

This multimedia exhibition is organized around seven themes tracing the influences on Gaultier’s development—from the streets of Paris to the cinema—since he emerged as a designer in the 1970s. It features approximately 140 haute couture and prêt-à-porter ensembles, from the designer’s earliest to his most recent collections, many of which are displayed on custom mannequins with interactive faces created by high-definition audiovisual projections. Accessories, sketches, stage costumes, excerpts from films, and documentation of runway shows, concerts, and dance performances, as well as photographs by fashion photographers and contemporary artists who stepped into Gaultier’s world, explore how his avant-garde designs challenge societal, gender, and aesthetic codes in unexpected ways.

Those custom mannequins, which must have cost a bundle, look real and have eyes that move [above left]. The one of Gaultier himself speaks. The projections are well-done. On occasion, the mannequins are set in appropriate surroundings, with the right touch of theatricality [above right]. And the runway actually moves — the mannequins revolve around an oval [left], suggesting a catwalk. They do not sway and swing their hips, but viewers get the picture.

There’s a video on the website too.

And the clothes are really stunning, as these pictures below show — and that’s just a taste. The exhibition runs until Feb. 23.

 

Few people in the art world would say that contemporary Chinese art is underexposed, but Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China, is a stunner and perhaps a sleeper at the Metropolitan Museum* just the same.

Curator Maxwell Hearn has chosen well, I think, and better yet — though this creates a problem or two — has decided to install the show in the Met’s permanent galleries for Chinese art. This encourages, perhaps even forces, visitors to view the show through a historical lens. The downside, the problem, occurs because the show is a little disjointed, with some pieces scattered in with the collection.

Lee Adair Lawrence, in The Wall Street Journal, liked the exhibit a lot, saying:

Hard to imagine a better way to express the vitality and questioning that has characterized China’s art scene for the past 30 years. After the devastation of the Cultural Revolution, artists gradually gained easier access to European and American art scenes and could stay abroad for longer periods. They were now experimenting and pushing boundaries, looking outward and inward, wrestling with the past as they shaped their future.

Roberta Smith, in The New York Times,  was more critical, saying:

The show endures a scattered installation, includes works that don’t always rise to the occasion, and wanders off message in spots, especially with several sculptures that don’t seem to belong here. This ploy seems to allow for some signature objects by Ai Weiwei, a marquee figure whom the Met may have deemed essential but that the show could have done without.

Both know much more about Chinese art than I do, but as I implied above, despite seeing a lot of contemporary Chinese art in recent year, my eyes were opened on several occasions.

Both, of course, mentioned Xu Bing’s Book from the Sky, a fabulous installation — pictured top — and Smith called Liu Dan’s Dictionary a “bravura” work, with which I agree, pictured at right.

Others I’d call out include Yang Jiechang’s 100 Layers of Ink, No. 1, 2, 3 — I have just 2 and 3 in my photo, bottom left, a marvelous scroll by scroll by Yang Yongliang, and Shao Fan’s 2009 Landscape made in pencil. But there is much more.

If you can, go see Ink Art.

Photo Credits: © Judith H. Dobrzynski