Jason Farago

PARIS — You’ll find them up in the balcony, or in standing room, silently mouthing the libretto or humming along with the score. These are the superfans: the compulsive lovers of opera or ballet or theater who see every performance; who travel from city to city for Marilyn Horne or Mikhail Baryshnikov; who know every downbeat of “Così Fan Tutte” or “A Chorus Line.”

Most are harmless admirers. Some become lay experts. But the superfan can be conniving, as in “All About Eve,” or even murderous: the Tejano sensation Selena was killed by her fan club president. If great art stimulates the heart and the head, the superfan has the ratio out of whack: Passion wins out over reason, and appreciation tips into obsession.

In the annals of French art history, the superfan par excellence is Edgar Degas: the most Parisian of all the impressionists, and an obsessive of the first magnitude over the opera and ballet. For decades, he watched the leading singers and dancers under the new electric lights, and scrutinized the young members of the corps de ballet in the wings and backstage. Close to half of Degas’ painterly output depicts the Opéra de Paris — which was (and still is) both an opera and a dance company, and which he knew as intimately as Monet knew Giverny’s gardens.

In the year 1885 alone, Degas went 55 times to the still-new Palais Garnier. He saw one opera, the now-forgotten “Sigurd” by Ernest Reyer, at least 37 times. His images of dancers making their grandes arabesques or bending at the barre, now schmaltzy stalwarts of dorm-room posters, were the projects of true mania.

“Degas at the Opéra,” a deep, enlightening, rather perverse exhibition on view here at the Musée d’Orsay through Jan. 19, strips away the sentimentality that has accreted onto Degas’ pictures of dance and music, to reveal the compulsion and single-mindedness that drove their innovations.

It includes more than 200 works in a panoply of media — paintings and pastels, monotypes and painted fans, even solarized photographs of dancers in shocking orange — but only one subject: the hermetic world of Paris music theater, a place of grand spectacle and even grander depravity. The show also features a bronze cast of the tutu-clad “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” the only sculpture Degas exhibited in his lifetime; the wax original is in the National Gallery of Art, which will host “Degas at the Opéra” next March. Usually a figure as quaintly perky as Eloise, she has never looked less tender.

It turns out that today’s age of superfandom — wherein the selfie has replaced the autograph, and TV audiences mount petitions against plotlines — has roots in the theatrical milieu of the dawn of industrial capitalism. What Degas demonstrates, and why “Degas at the Opéra” feels so relevant, is that audiences have always held more sway over performers than we admit. Today’s “age of the fan” is not so new, and the opera of 19th-century Paris, in particular, was literally built for adulation and abuse.

Degas cared for music, and had particular admiration for Gluck, but he was not only at the Opéra to listen. In late 19th-century Paris, opera was a social spectacle that made it an ideal subject for a painter of modern life. For both the upper class and the new bourgeoisie, the real point of a night at the theater was to see and be seen. The performances were often stodgy or familiar — particularly the ballets, which by Degas’ time were little more than a sideshow between opera acts. Not a problem: that allowed the audience to ignore the stage and pay attention to the real theater around them.

Degas went as often as he could afford it: first to the Opéra Le Peletier, the company’s home until a fire destroyed it in 1873, and then to the choke-me-to-death-with-gold-and-marble Garnier, which opened in 1875 and which Degas despised. At both houses, he trained his eye on both the stage and the audience, which he painted from unorthodox perspectives — sometimes a sharp view down from the loges onto the dancers’ heads, sometimes a sotto-in-su gaze up from the orchestra seats to the women in the priciest boxes. In pastel, particularly, he could imitate his view of the backlit performers, their faces lost in the footlights.

Not until 1885 could Degas afford the Opéra’s most expensive subscription, which got him a seat every Monday, Wednesday and Friday — and much better privileges than that. Three-day subscribers, principally aristocrats and financiers who, like today, underwrote new productions, got to enter the Garnier through a dedicated entrance. More important, subscribers had the right to pass through a communicating door backstage, even during performances. Back here, the men would come into the dressing rooms of the divas, and proposition the dancers in the “foyer de la danse,” an opulent mirrored chamber that Garnier designed as, basically, a hunting ground. You had to sign in when you entered: At the Orsay we see Degas’ name on the ledger, day after day.

Most of the ballerinas in Degas’ paintings and prints were not the athletic, self-reliant dancers we see on the stage today, but miserable girls from the lower ranks of French society. At midcentury, more than half of the Opéra’s new enrollments were fatherless; their mothers were usually laundresses or concierges, and most girls arrived at the opera house barely fed. There the ballet masters “broke” the girls — stretching their little bodies on racks, reshaping their feet with specially carved boxes. Onstage, or in Degas’ pastels, the girls in their tutus might look angelic. But to the Opéra subscribers these dancers were known as the “petits rats”: little rodents, barely paid, ripe for sexual exploitation.

The distance between the opera and the brothel was vanishingly thin in the late 19th century. For Romantic author Théophile Gautier, the dancers at the Opéra were “frail creatures offered up in sacrifice to the Parisian Minotaur,” who “each year devours virgins by the hundreds, with no Theseus coming to save them.” In Degas’ images, the most devoted operagoers hover in the wings like birds of prey, and even mothers are on hand to pimp their young daughters to the subscribers.

He made that sordor visible in 80 pitch-dark monotypes he made to illustrate a novella by Ludovic Halévy — his good friend, and the co-librettist of “Carmen.” Degas depicts portly men sitting in the Garnier foyer beside dancers who stare into space, or top-hatted aristocrats swarming around the ballerinas like vultures. (New York audiences saw these prints in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Edgar Degas: A Strange New Beauty” in 2016.)

Yet even in Degas’s now beloved, superficially sunnier pastels, the dancers appear more often like possessions than fellow artists. They are working girls, bent over, tying their slippers, slumped in the corner — rarely elegant, and always being watched. Though he admired some female painters (notably Mary Cassatt), Degas was an intense misogynist, and the formal innovations of his art went together with an avaricious focus on control.

“I have perhaps,” he once confessed, “too often considered woman as an animal.”

Little Marie van Goethem, the Belgian-born model for Degas’ statue “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen,” was one of these “petits rats.” She was born in 1865, the second of three girls. Five years later, her father died, and in the same year the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Marie, her sisters, and her laundress-prostitute mother were scrambling across Pigalle. Ballet was the only way out.

At 12, Marie entered the Opéra’s conservatory, and while the dance masters broke her she posed in Degas’ studio for extra money. He sculpted her in fleshy wax at two-thirds life size, her eyes shut tight, her face scrunched up like a wadded rag. Instead of capturing her mid-plié, Degas chose to sculpt her standing in the awkward fourth position, feet perpendicular to the torso and pointing in opposite directions. He gave her a sharp jaw and a forehead like a ski slope. To her body he affixed a real tutu, and real human hair.

If a few avant-garde types appreciated the audacious “Little Dancer” at the impressionist exhibition of 1881, most of the Paris press despised the sculpture. “Why is she so ugly?” wrote the critic for Le Temps. “Monsieur Degas is doubtless a moralist: Perhaps he knows something about the future of dancers that we do not.” A pretty coy remark — for everyone would have known that dancers were a step away from the bordello, and that their careers, even their next meal, were the gift of well-dressed fans.

Have the performing arts really given up on predation? Today’s dancers might not be as desperate (or as young) as little Marie, but the opera and the ballet have always been games of class distinction, and philanthropy has more uses than a tax write-off. I couldn’t help but think, as I made my second pass of “Degas at the Opéra,” of last year’s scandal at the New York City Ballet, in which star dancer Chase Finlay exchanged lewd texts with donors to the company, sending pictures of sex acts and pledging to treat female dancers “like the sluts they are.” (Two other fired dancers have since been reinstated.) The Paris Opéra Ballet has its own problems; last year, a leaked questionnaire revealed that three quarters of the dancers reported suffering or witnessing verbal harassment, and one quarter had endured or seen sexual harassment.

Degas never married. He left no record of any mistress. He may have died a virgin. But just because he kept his hands off Marie and the other “petits rats” does not make his art less creepy. Van Gogh, in a letter as blunt as Finlay’s texts (though tamed in this translation), wrote that Degas “watches human animals stronger than himself getting erections and having sex, and he paints them well, precisely because he doesn’t make such great claims about getting an erection.”

This painter who “didn’t like women,” in van Gogh’s estimation, found at the Opéra an arena of desire and depredation that he could translate into pure form — beautiful and stifling, modern and cold. This is the truth about superfans: they smother what they love.

“Degas at the Opéra” through Jan. 19 at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; musee-orsay.fr. Opens March 1 at the National Gallery of Art, Washington; nga.gov.

This article originally appeared in

Degas: A Superfan at the Opera, Where Art Tips Into Obsession

(Critic's Notebook)

PARIS — Even in a city saturated with excellent fall exhibitions, from the Grand Palais’ retrospective of El Greco to the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s showcase of Charlotte Perriand, the show of the season here is the decade-in-the-works “Leonardo da Vinci,” at the Musée du Louvre. Mandatory timed tickets are sold out through November for this thorough, deeply serious exhibition, which sloughs off the myths that cling to this least productive of Renaissance masters. You will find here a cleaner, sprightlier Leonardo — or at least you will in the show downstairs, where four of the Louvre’s five paintings by the artist have been relocated.

Upstairs, where Leonardo’s most famous work remains, is still a fiasco.

The Louvre houses the greatest collection of art anywhere in Europe, within a palace that is a masterpiece in its own right. It is, by some distance, the most popular museum in the world. In 2018, a record 10 million visitors, three-quarters of them foreign tourists, besieged the joint: up 25% on the previous year, and more than triple the attendance of the Centre Pompidou or the Musée d’Orsay.

Yet the Louvre is being held hostage by the Kim Kardashian of 16th-century Italian portraiture: the handsome but only moderately interesting Lisa Gherardini, better known (after her husband) as La Gioconda, whose renown so eclipses her importance that no one can even remember how she got famous in the first place.

Some 80% of visitors, according to the Louvre’s research, are here for the Mona Lisa — and most of them leave unhappy. Content in the 20th century to be merely famous, she has become, in this age of mass tourism and digital narcissism, a black hole of anti-art who has turned the museum inside out.

This past summer, amid 100-degree-plus heat, the Louvre undertook a renovation of the Mona Lisa’s gallery: the arching Salle des États, in the museum’s Denon wing, which once housed Parliament of France. What a mess this was. Relocated to the Richelieu painting wing, the Mona Lisa reduced the museum’s Flemish collection into wallpaper for a cattle pen, where guards shooed along irritated, sweaty selfie-snappers who’d endured a half-hour line. The overcrowding was so bad, the museum had to shut its doors on several days. “The Louvre is suffocating,” said a statement from the union of the museum’s security staff, who went on strike.

Now the Mona Lisa is back in her regular spot, on a freestanding wall that’s been repainted an admittedly chic Prussian blue. (Louis Frank, one of the two curators of the Leonardo retrospective, told me there was never any possibility of including the Mona Lisa in the show. The exhibition can “only” be visited by 5,000 people per day; the Salle des États gets 30,000.)

I went up with the crowds recently. Things were no better. Now, you must line up in a hideous, TSA-style snake of retractable barriers that ends about 12 feet from the Leonardo — which, for a painting that’s just 2 1/2 feet tall, is too far for looking and way too far for a good selfie.

Apparently the painting is beneath some nifty new nonreflective glass, but at this distance, how could I tell? My fellow visitors and I could hardly see the thing, and we were shunted off in less than a minute. All this for a painting that (as the Louvre’s current show confirms) is hardly Leonardo’s most interesting, and that has drowned out the Venetian masterpieces in the Salle des États, such as Titian’s “Woman With a Mirror,” or Veronese’s “Wedding at Cana,” which Beyoncé was smart enough not to neglect. The museum is admitting as much with the pathetic new signs in the Salle des États: “The Mona Lisa is surrounded by other masterpieces — take a look around the room.”

This is a gallery that makes the Spirit Airlines boarding process look like a model of efficiency, and offers about as much visual delight. If you think me some sniffy aesthete for saying so, listen to the crowds: In a poll of British tourists earlier this year, the Mona Lisa was voted the “world’s most disappointing attraction,” beating out Checkpoint Charlie, the Spanish Steps, and that urinating boy in Brussels. If curators think that they are inspiring the next generation of art lovers, they are in fact doing the opposite. People come out of obligation, and leave discouraged.

Jean-Luc Martinez, the museum’s director, has said the Louvre might take further steps to alleviate Mona mania in coming years: new entrances, timed tickets. This misunderstands the problem — for the Louvre, with more gallery space than any museum on the planet, isn’t that swamped if you can get through the security lines. On my last visit the Islamic galleries were nearly empty. The French painting wing was trafficked by just a few visitors. Even the Venus de Milo, perhaps the second most famous work of art in the museum, draws a comfortable few dozen peepers at a time.

The Louvre does not have an overcrowding problem per se. It has a Mona Lisa problem. No other iconic painting — not Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” at the Uffizi in Florence, not Klimt’s “Kiss” at the Belvedere in Vienna, not “Starry Night” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York — comes anywhere close to monopolizing its institution like she does. And if tourist numbers continue to rise, if last year’s 10 million visitors become next year’s 11 or 12, the place is going to crack.

It is time for the Louvre to admit defeat. It is time for the Mona Lisa to go.

She needs her own space. Build a pavilion for her, perhaps in the Tuileries, that is optimized for the crowds. Connect it to the main museum via the underground mall known as the Carrousel du Louvre, and sell a single ticket for both locations. Set up prime selfie stations, and let more curious visitors learn about the mysterious Gioconda with supplementary exhibits. Get it up in time for the 2024 Summer Olympics. Let Kylian Mbappé inaugurate it, maybe with Carla Bruni alongside. Sell macarons.

It will need to be big, but I cannot conceive of an easier fundraising project. The Mona Lisa Pavilion will instantly become the most popular attraction in the most popular tourist destination on earth. Surely, having spent more than $1 billion to launch the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the potentates of the United Arab Emirates would be glad to fund the new facility, especially if it came with naming rights. The Sheikh Zayed Mona Lisa Pavilion: it has a ring to it, n’est-ce pas?

We have models for this. Picasso’s “Guernica” was shown in its own pavilion in Madrid for more than a decade, before the opening of the Reina Sofía Museum. A more relevant example — given that the Mona Lisa is nowadays less a work of art than a holy relic — is the image of Our Lady of Guadelupe, the holiest artwork in Mexico City, venerated by millions of pilgrims a year. Worshippers of the Virgin stand on moving walkways. I can picture the same travelators in front of the Gioconda, smoothly guiding tourists past the Leonardo and into the gift shop.

This Paris pavilion, like the Mexican basilica, would be a pilgrimage site for a sort of worship: the worship of fame, and of one’s own proximity to it. Let Samsung or another electronics company install ultra-hi-res cameras around the Gioconda. Let visitors strike a pose on the moving walkways, and then download their cutest selfies with the Leonardo under glass. Perhaps, in exchange for further naming rights, Jeff Koons could have a handbag concession at the exit of the Sheikh Zayed-Louis Vuitton Mona Lisa Pavilion.

In the early 1990s, with the opening of I.M. Pei’s pyramid and the expansion into the Richelieu wing, the museum’s curators actually considered relocating the Mona Lisa. They balked — on the grounds that this mid-tier Leonardo needed to be grounded among her Cinquecento brothers and sisters. That might just have been true a quarter-century ago, when the museum had less than half its current attendance. In a Louvre of 10 million visitors, such a belief isn’t just wrong; it’s dangerous. The Mona Lisa is a security hazard, an educational obstacle, and not even a satisfying bucket-list item.

No work of art should make people miserable. Let Paris’ millions of future visitors enjoy the art, the shopping, the sweets and the selfies at the Sheikh Zayed-Louis Vuitton-Samsung Galaxy-Ladurée Macarons Mona Lisa Pavilion. Then let them rediscover the Louvre as a museum.

It's Time to Take Down the Mona Lisa

NEW YORK — “War is a force that gives us meaning,” wrote the veteran foreign correspondent Chris Hedges — an adage he delivered with vicious irony. War can pick up the dull, lousy clay of your little human life, and refashion you into a hero or martyr. War muffles brute inequities of power and capital, and entrances you with blandishments of honor. War is a storyteller, with a tale so grand and corrupt that even death becomes beautiful.

Five hundred years ago, at a moment of political rebellion and economic anxiety, a leader arose who understood the public allure of the martial imagination, and how war could turn a noble into something like a superman. He was Emperor Maximilian I of the Holy Roman Empire, and out of an iffy inheritance in Austria he emerged as one of the most powerful leaders in Renaissance Europe, presiding over territories from the modern-day Netherlands all the way to Croatia. He had some successes on the battlefield, yet it was not principally his military prowess that made his name. It was images of the warrior emperor, and public spectacles of chivalric glory, that made Maximilian a legend.

“The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I,” an exhibition of grand scale and heavy metal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, plots the relentless rise of this most elegant of Habsburg propagandists. It’s the largest exhibition of arms and armor the Met has presented in decades and has been organized by Pierre Terjanian, who leads the museum’s department. Although it’s armed to the teeth with flashy military gear — meant for both function and fashion, and for both men and horses — you’ll also find paintings, illustrated books and celebratory images made with the hottest new technology of the late 15th century: printmaking.

It’s a difficult show in some ways, and historical details may escape you unless you make a careful study of its timelines and wall texts. But “The Last Knight,” all told, is not so much about the biography of Maximilian as about the workings of power, and the uses of art, printing and performances to accrue political might.

The exhibition includes loans from nearly three dozen museums and libraries, including the stunning suit of armor in the first gallery here, a 20-piece knockout of ribbed and fluted steel that has traveled from the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The waistline is tapered severely, and the gauntlets are trimmed with copper studs and piping. Check out the aggressively stylish boots, with foot-long spikes so pointy even Michael Jackson would have found them unwearable.

Maximilian would have appeared resplendent when he wore this field armor at the age of 20. He needed to. Two years previously, in 1477, he married Mary of Burgundy, who upon the death of her father became the sole heir to territories in modern France, Belgium and the Netherlands. Burgundy had a court of great sophistication, but it was nearly bankrupt, and with a woman on the throne it faced incursions from pretenders outside. Maximilian, who didn’t speak French or Flemish, who couldn’t even afford the initial travel expenses to Burgundy, liked Mary’s lavish life and was ready to fight for it. And to convince his fellow nobles and subjects of his legitimacy to rule, this nonnative Burgundian had to put on a show.

In battle, where other kings stood back, Maximilian raced in on foot, and showcased his fearlessness by challenging all comers to duels. Back in town, he staged sumptuous multiday tournaments, jousting with local noblemen and foreign champions in ritualized, but still dangerous, mock combat. The most engrossing galleries of “The Last Knight” look at these grand tournaments, which were nothing less than performance art five centuries before the genre got its name.

Participants in the jousts wore specialized armor, some resembling wartime outfits and others meant only for peaceful bouts, and fought with pronged lances to unhorse their opponents or to split their own weapon (which meant you’d landed a solid blow). These jousting armors could be decidedly high-tech, by 15th-century standards. Three steel and copper breastplates here feature notches that held a shield, as well as mechanical springs that launched the shield skyward, with the humiliating finality of a game show buzzer, if an opponent struck with enough force. Terjanian speculates that Maximilian might have invented this style of combat, since it took place only at his court.

Still, for all the niftiness of these gladiatorial outfits, the most beautiful works in “The Last Knight” are a sequence of small gouaches and drawings depicting jousters, which Maximilian commissioned to illustrate a lightly fictionalized epic of his own martial exploits.

In these works on paper, an imperial alter ego called “Freydal” aims to win the hand of a princess by jousting with the very opponents Maximilian had defeated. Freydal and his competitors wear wild headgear tricked out with feathers or antlers, while their horses are draped with ritzy striped silks; the wooden lances splinter in the air like shrapnel. After a long day in the tiltyard, the jousters head to a dance party wearing women’s dresses. Maximilian liked a good masquerade.

He was hardly the richest client of the armories of Brussels, Nuremberg and Milan, and several letters and receipts in this show affirm that Maximilian struggled to pay the bills for his gauntlets and greaves. Sometimes, though, you have to spend money to make money — and as several letters here from the emperor attest, armor had profounder uses than mere protection. Armor served to craft an image of courage, virtue and panache, which would make your subjects love you and your opponents think twice about invading. It also could function as an instrument of diplomacy. The engraved, heavy-duty bard (or equine armor) that opens “The Last Knight” was a gift to the young Henry VIII, a fellow prince who loved jousting almost as much as Maximilian did.

“He who makes no memory of himself during his lifetime will have none after his death, and will be forgotten with the tolling of the final knell,” Maximilian intoned in another lightly fictionalized narrative. The emperor saw to his own immortalization by commissioning literary works and also prints — above all the giant “Arch of Honor.” This demented act of self-glorification, more than 11 feet tall and spanning 36 sheets of paper, praises his ancestors, war victories and diplomatic alliances. (It took 195 woodblocks to print; Albrecht Dürer and Albrecht Altdorfer were among the many artists who undertook the work.)

Maximilian preens at the top, looking very young for his now advanced years, while beneath him lie acres of battle scenes, showcases of strength and poetic invocations of imperial grandeur. As a work of printmaking, the “Arch of Honor” is a landmark. As a work of political propaganda, even a North Korean dictator might have found it over the top.

Maximilian died in 1519, reduced in a death portrait here to a simple old man in bed — and, with an eye on Christian immortality, the penitent Kaiser left orders for attendants to whip his corpse, shave his head and take a club to knock out all his teeth. But he could not foresee how quickly his knightly exploits would seem antique. A new world had been discovered across the Atlantic, and in Saxony a professor named Martin Luther had nailed some thoughts on religion to a church door. Merchants from Lisbon to Venice were making fortunes, and chivalry became a hang-up from an earlier age.

Early modern Europe was dawning. Wars of religion were about to begin, and it was a bit late for jousting. Who would become the most famous knight-errant of the century after Maximilian’s? A fool from La Mancha, tilting at windmills.

‘The Last Knight: The Art, Armor, and Ambition of Maximilian I’

Through Jan. 5 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan; 212-535-771, metmuseum.org.

At the Met, Heavy Metal on a Continental Scale

(Critic's Pick)

All right, the new MoMA is here. When can I get in?

The museum reopens to the public Monday. Daily hours are 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. (a half-hour longer than before!) and until 9 p.m. Fridays — and on the first Thursday of the month.

How do I get there?

The main entrance is on West 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, now tricked out with a sharp new canopy. You can also enter on West 54th Street.

How much does a visit cost, and when is it free?

Tickets are still $25. Those 65 and older pay $18, students pay $14, and children under 16 are free. Admission is free for everyone on Fridays starting at 4 p.m., but don’t show up right at 4 unless you like waiting in line.

Buy your ticket at the new kiosks in the museum’s expanded lobby or at moma.org. Your ticket also covers admission to all movies screening at MoMA that day and to PS1, MoMA’s sister institution in Long Island City, Queens.

You can always see everything on the ground floor without buying a ticket. That includes — if you head east — the MoMA sculpture garden, still home to Aristide Maillol’s torqued sculpture of a tumbling nude, and an entire Paris subway entrance. If you head west you’ll be able to access two free galleries in the new extension: a design exhibition and a painting show by Kenyan-British artist Michael Armitage (on view through Jan. 20).

How much time should I expect to spend at the museum?

The new MoMA is definitely larger, with 30% more gallery space. If you want to see everything, budget a solid four or five hours — and you’ll still be moving fast past many works. (I’m assuming you don’t want to watch all five-plus hours of “Sleep,” part of MoMA’s significant restoration and digitization of Andy Warhol’s movies.)

Unlike at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where tickets are valid for three straight days, MoMA still sells only a one-day ticket. The museum ought to consider a multiday offer, especially if it’s encouraging visits to both the larger museum and PS1, too. Until then, if you plan to visit several times in the next year, it’s cost-effective to buy an $85 individual membership. Members get in free and can visit for a half-hour before the general public each morning.

You should plan to visit more than once anyway. MoMA’s curators will be regularly rotating the collection displays; come April, all 20 of the westernmost galleries will be rehung.

I’m still in the lobby, and I’m confused. Which way do I start?

I’d suggest starting on the east side of the museum. (Look for the suspended helicopter.) Take the escalators or elevators to the fifth floor, where the chronological display of the collection (1880-1940) begins. You’ll see Cézanne and van Gogh with new company and then discover “Lime Kiln Club Field Day” (1914), the first feature-length film (according to MoMA) with an African American cast.

The galleries are numbered, so you can work counterclockwise, moving from the older building into the new wing and back. If you’re enjoying the chronological approach, you can do it again on the fourth floor (for postwar art, 1945-75 or so) and the second floor (for contemporary art, from the late 1970s to the present).

But if you’re more adventurous, head west from the ticket desk, hit the design gallery and Projects gallery, then hop on the new “blade” staircase by Diller Scofidio + Renfro/Gensler. This way will plunge you into the middle of the timeline; ascend to the fifth floor for Amy Sillman’s exquisite Artist’s Choice show, “The Shape of Shape” (through April 20), and to the sixth for the new terrace.

Tell me the three collection galleries I absolutely cannot miss.

Gallery 503 features the knockout juxtaposition of Pablo Picasso with two later American artists, Louise Bourgeois and Faith Ringgold.

In Gallery 406B you’ll find Henri Matisse’s pulse-quickening “Swimming Pool,” whose fragile blue cutouts can only be shown rarely.

And in Gallery 206 you’ll find work by women from India and Romania to Colombia and South Africa, a reflection of the museum’s deepening global engagement.

Some galleries have funny names. What kind of a title is “Stamp, Scavenge, Crush”?

Many rooms in the new collection display still orbit around art movements — dada, surrealism, abstract expressionism, pop. But the wall texts encourage conversations and cross-fertilization. (This gallery includes Robert Rauschenberg’s “Canyon,” a painting with a taxidermied bald eagle affixed to the surface, but also less famous artists who incorporate repurposed materials into their works.)

Some galleries have precise focuses, whether on early Russian book design (Gallery 507) or on ’80s downtown New York (Gallery 202). Others are broader and more thematic, like Gallery 414, “City as Stage,” which unites graffiti tags by Rammellzee with Trisha Brown’s gravity-defying “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building.”

I can’t find the photography galleries …

Many photographs are included within the general flow of the collection display, offering you the serendipity of coming upon something you wouldn’t have sought out, while others appear in spaces for photography alone.

Currently those are Galleries 502, 510, 520 for prewar (don’t miss the vernacular photo-booth portraits in the last of those), and Galleries 409 and 419 for postwar (the first of which features abstract imagery by Harry Callaghan, Rauschenberg and several Japanese photographers).

What about architecture and design?

Visit Galleries 216 (social housing and its discontents), 511 (skyscrapers), 519 (architecture of modern museums) and 417 (modular construction, including a glass wall of the United Nations building and a clip of Jacques Tati in a maze of modern architecture from his 1967 film, “Playtime”). And the show “Taking a Thread for a Walk,” on the third floor, presents textiles and other fabric works.

I’m in a dark room with stuff hanging in midair. It sounds like I’m in the Amazon.

That’s “Rainforest V (Variation 1),” the sonic sculpture by David Tudor that is the first presentation in MoMA’s new Studio on the fourth floor, a dedicated space for media and performance. “Rainforest V” is only here until Jan. 5.

Some people are dragging giant jingle bells around the floor.

You must be in the atrium, where South Korean artist Haegue Yang is presenting “Handles,” six monumental sculptures on wheels that are skinned with silver and bronze bells. Every day at 4 p.m., performers activate Yang’s work by rolling the sculptures, which produces an eerie, ritualistic rattle.

My brother-in-law asked me to buy him a van Gogh umbrella.

The new Museum Store occupies an enlarged concession below the lobby. It’s the hub for all art books from MoMA’s own imprint and from other publishers, as well as toys, umbrellas, calendars and cards. You’ll also find umbrellas on 2 and across the street in the MoMA Design Store.

I need a coffee. Or maybe a drink, and definitely a cell recharge.

On the sixth floor is MoMA’s new Terrace Café, with flashy Grand Antique marble and art by Kerstin Brätsch. On the second floor, the Italianate Café 2 has been spiffed up, and there’s also a coffee cart that makes espresso and sells pastries. It’s next to the phone recharging bank.

Downstairs, as before, is the museum’s fancier restaurant, The Modern, where a six-course meal in the main dining room will run you $188 (service included). The livelier Bar Room has a less expensive a la carte menu (roasted mushrooms with polenta is $24 and excellent).

Museum of Modern Art

The museum, at 11 West 53rd St., Manhattan, reopens to the public Monday; moma.org.

Braving MoMA: What to Know Before You Enter

NEW YORK — We’ve been asked many questions about how to visit the newly expanded Museum of Modern Art. Based on roughly a dozen visits, I’ve figured out some of the answers.

It was early September, six anxious weeks from the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. After three years of piecemeal renovations, the museum had shut its doors for the summer, preparing for a top-to-bottom rehang of the world’s finest collection of modern and contemporary art, with about 47,000 additional square feet to play with.

Two senior curators were still installing the cardinal gallery, the one with “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Pablo Picasso’s grand, violent painting of five contorted Catalan prostitutes.

For decades, MoMA’s curators have paired the aggressive “Demoiselles” (1907) with the smaller, perspective-shattering cubist works he and Georges Braque painted a few years later. Two of them were here, propped against the wall on foam blocks.

Now, though, Picasso had new company, younger, from across the Atlantic. Ann Temkin, MoMA’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, and her colleague Anne Umland, a Picasso specialist, were introducing the “Demoiselles” to a large painting of a race riot by Harlem-born artist Faith Ringgold. Called “American People Series #20: Die” (1967), it shows white and black Americans, blood-spattered, clinging to one another for safety, their faces contorted in a similar manner to Picasso’s damsels.

Ringgold painted “Die” after countless visits to this museum as a young artist, studying the “Demoiselles” and Picasso’s later “Guernica,” which hung here before returning to Spain. Temkin’s department bought “Die” in 2016, showing it at first in a hallway — and now the curators were scrutinizing it alongside MoMA’s most renowned canvas.

Pairing Picasso with a black American artist from the 1960s would have been unthinkable here 15 years prior; it shatters the museum’s chronological spine, and magnifies the colonial and sexual violence inherent in the African-influenced “Demoiselles.” But there was a problem: Between these two propulsive canvases, the smaller cubist works were getting lost.

“They’re not happy campers here,” Umland admitted.

Temkin gave a sigh of agreement. “Can we move these two to the wall at the other end?” she asked. A quartet of black-gloved art handlers hustled the cubists out of the way.

“Anne and I are in the ‘try everything once’ school,” Temkin said.

Meet the New Neighbors

How do you convert the archetypical institution of 20th-century art into one fit for the 21st? During a dozen visits to the closed museum this summer, I watched Temkin and her team of curators polish their new narrative of modern art, and eavesdropped as a huge crew of handlers steered some 6,000 works between galleries and storage facilities. Monets sat wrapped in blankets, while curators positioned stand-in cardboard Brancusis. Contractors, laying down new floors, had a taste for surfer rock; on one afternoon, “California Girls” was blasting.

MoMA undertook a major expansion in 2004, but almost immediately upon reopening, curators were thinking about the next. Outside its doors, an endless market boom and the rise of museum-size commercial galleries like Hauser &amp; Wirth and David Zwirner had transformed New York’s terrain of contemporary art. Inside, all six of MoMA’s department heads had retired, replaced by a new generation of curators, mostly in their 40s and 50s, who were keener on collaboration and intent on unearthing forgotten artists. Audiences complained of overcrowding. Institutions with smaller collections — from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to Tate Modern in London — staked their claims to more diverse, more global art histories.

By 2014, MoMA was ready to press reset, and its curators had funds they could rely on, as the museum went from rich to crazy rich. In 2016, MoMA received $100 million from media mogul David Geffen, whose name adorns a new wing. This year, it received a record gift of $200 million from the estate of David Rockefeller, the philanthropist and banker who died in 2017. (His mother, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, co-founded the museum.)

The ambitions take form on Oct. 21, when MoMA welcomes you into its new galleries, housed in the lower floors of a supertall designed by Jean Nouvel, as well as new construction where the American Folk Art Museum formerly stood.

If the museum’s $450 million expansion — planned by architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro in collaboration with Gensler — is about half the price of the 2004 project, it heralds a far more profound reorientation of MoMA’s mission and approach. You will see much more of the nearly 200,000 objects in its collection, but you will see them in changing — and possibly challenging — circumstances.

The new MoMA has binned the Whiggish movement-by-movement logic that William S. Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, Temkin’s predecessors, relied on to classify the art of the last century. Now, some 60 galleries will be reconceptualized on a regular basis, with a third rehung every six months. (“More work for more people, is our motto!” Temkin said with a grin.)

The rotation starts with 20-odd new spaces in the Nouvel tower. A gallery with Marcel Duchamp’s works is conceived around the theme of the ready-made; in April, curators will choose other Duchamps around the theme of chance.

When the museum opens, you’ll see Jasper Johns’ “Flag” amid earlier fabric experiments by Ruth Asawa and a newly acquired ink rubbing of a SoHo sidewalk by overlooked artist Sari Dienes.

The rotating galleries will feature new acquisitions that have diversified and globalized the museum’s Euro-American core. The most noteworthy arrivals are almost 200 works of Latin American art from the collection of the trustee Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, debuting in their own mic-dropping showcase.

The presentation is still broadly chronological, but features detours, anachronisms and surprise encounters. Photography and architecture, shown in their own discrete zones for decades, now commingle with paintings, drawings, prints and even performance. There are movies projected throughout, even in the hallowed prewar galleries, where pre-1900 French paintings lead to flickering images of the then-young New York subway, shot in 1905 on the then-young technology of film.

Love it or no, this juddering, fluctuating display is the most contemporary feature of the new MoMA, whose collection now offers the sort of fortuitous collisions familiar from digital browsing and searching. But even digitally conditioned audiences may find the constant crosscuts jarring.

“It’s moving away from ideas like ‘masterpieces’ and ‘breakthroughs,’ to a kind of art history of dispersion,” observed Michael Lobel, a professor of art history at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center. “It makes sense from the point of view of contemporary artistic practices. But different kinds of objects have different kinds of reception.” The museum’s challenge, he said, will be to master that dispersion: “Paintings, or other two-dimensional works, can suffer.”

MoMA’s elevation of the collection to its center ring wasn’t a certain outcome five years ago. In 2014, architect Elizabeth Diller first revealed expansion plans that called for the erection of a triple-height garage, christened the “Art Bay.” The schematics made MoMA look rather like the Shed, her firm’s other recent hometown undertaking. They overemphasized large, temporary projects — the museum was then planning a survey of Björk’s career that critics savaged a year later — and shortchanged the collection’s space.

MoMA heard the disappointment. Diller redesigned. Now the collection is front and center, to an almost intimidating degree. The larger MoMA will open with just about every gallery devoted to what it owns.

“We as institutions are so trained to treat our temporary exhibition program as the main tent,” said Glenn D. Lowry, MoMA’s director. “And we made the commitment, financially, programmatically and intellectually, that we’re going to shift that. That our main tent is our collection.”

Moving Pictures

Suppose you come to see Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night,” a gem of the collection since 1941. You will find it, as before, in the first gallery on the fifth floor, along with all-stars of 19th-century French painting.

Now, however, canvases by Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin cohabitate with art beyond France, and even beyond painting, such as wobbly bowls and pitchers by Mississippi craftsman George Ohr, known as the “Mad Potter of Biloxi.”

The next room features dozens of early photographs, the subway short, and “Lime Kiln Club Field Day” (1915) — the first feature film starring black Americans, momentously rediscovered in the MoMA archives in 2014. The film’s joyous performers offer an astonishing preface to Picasso’s “Demoiselles,” lording over the next room.

“This sequence? This is a ten-year conversation,” said Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film, watching the subway footage on a pinned-up sheet of paper. “When I arrived, curators would say, ‘Oh, I don’t know anything about film.’ Could I walk in and say, ‘I don’t know anything about painting?’ I could never say that!”

It took a decade of discussions, struggles and experiments before curators refined their new disjunctive, cross-media approach. They studied displays at other modern museums, notably the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. They observed younger visitors interacting with art in new ways, shifting their attention between paintings on the walls and information on their phones. “Whole new generations are learning first to understand the world through an image,” said Roxana Marcoci, a senior curator of photography. “It will never be that perfectly contemplative experience anymore.”

Shortly after being appointed painting chief in 2008, Temkin instituted mandatory weekly meetings, where department leaders would hack out joint proposals. They also studied the demographics of MoMA’s visitors, who have grown to some 3 million annually — even as admission hit $25.

“Nobody in 1970 could have imagined, in their wildest dreams, that level of general audience,” Temkin said. “It was such a narrower demographic that was coming to MoMA, and it was fairly safe to assume a certain level of familiarity with cultural history from the last century. You look at our visitors today, and you know that’s not the case.”

She recalled giving a public tour and watching the faces of visitors. “I would be talking about ‘Fauvism’ and then ‘German expressionism,’ and I heard the words coming out of my mouth.” She recalled thinking, “This is ridiculous — these people did not sign up for an art history course.”

So you won’t find the words “Dada” or “abstract expressionism” in any gallery titles. Even “pop” is banished; art of the early 1960s appears in a room titled “From Soup Cans to Flying Saucers.”

Galleries instead highlight ideas and epochs, such as “Design for Modern Life,” devoted to the Bauhaus and other modernist schools of the 1920s. The gallery blends paintings by Klee and El Lissitzky, chairs by Mies van der Rohe, a Soviet film by Dziga Vertov and reams of printed fabrics and letterhead samples. “Which makes historical sense,” said Martino Stierli, chief curator of architecture and design, “because these people were all doing architecture, painting and everything at the same time.”

Dominating the room is an entire kitchen (1926-27), excised from a Frankfurt, Germany, apartment block and designed for maximum efficiency by civic architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. “Pretty good!” said a laughing Temkin, admiring the canny organization of the shelves. “A woman, obviously ...”

The Most Fragile Masterpiece

One day this summer I watched as Christophe Cherix, chief curator of drawings and prints, and his colleague Esther Adler installed a small, staggering new acquisition that would never have had a chance in the “Art Bay.”

On a pair of tables, the curators gently flipped sheets from the “Prison Notebook” of Ibrahim el-Salahi, a Sudanese artist who, in 1975, was wrongfully implicated in an antigovernment coup. Shortly after his release from jail, el-Salahi filled a notebook with drawings of gates, nooses and his own chest crisscrossed with jail bars.

“This was, for him, maybe the most cherished possession,” Cherix said. “A very tiny sketchbook.” The museum bought it two years ago; it has never shown it before, and won’t again for a while, because of the fragility of works on paper.

Now the notebook anchors an entire gallery, called “War Within, War Without,” orbiting around themes of violence and internal exile around the 1970s. Half the works here, including a gouache by feminist artist May Stevens and a self-portrait by African American shape-shifter David Hammons, were acquired in the past four years. All these new pieces, said Cherix, typify “a generation trying to redefine what art can be in a moment when art is not heroic anymore.”

The abbreviated runs in these galleries have encouraged curators to delve into areas MoMA often neglected, including prewar folk art and art from 1940s Harlem.

Sarah Suzuki, a drawings curator overseeing the museum’s reopening, observed that, before, “it might have been hard to see how — I don’t know, Polish posters — could fit into the unidirectional narrative. And this actually opens it up. It’s like, you know what? Let’s do those Polish posters! Let’s not be so wrapped up in where it fits into our big scheme.”

Rest assured, MoMA’s most renowned objects — Monet’s “Water Lilies,” Picasso’s “Demoiselles” — will surely not disappear.

“I like to say we’re not in the business of breaking hearts,” said Suzuki, who did a year’s worth of shifts at the museum’s information desk, learning which artworks the public wanted to see. (The most requested is Warhol’s “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” from 1962, though more imperative than any artwork is the location of the bathrooms.)

Go East, Go South

On the second floor, Marcoci was supervising art handlers on cherry pickers, as they hung a newly acquired sculpture by Chinese-born French artist Huang Yong Ping. It’s a bamboo palanquin, the sort of chair used for transport, its poles draped with dry snakeskin. A colonist’s pith helmet is the only indication of its absent occupant.

The chair dangles in a gallery titled “Before and After Tiananmen,” exploring themes of modernization and urbanization in the years around the 1989 massacre. It’s one of the bolder forays in the museum’s contemporary section, which makes heavy demands of American audiences less familiar with Chinese history.

“We’re trying to look at this moment in ’89, and everything it represents about the changing nature of Chinese society and of Chinese art,” said Stuart Comer, chief curator of media and performance. The era, he added, saw artists in Beijing “really embrace photography, video and performance. We’re still just beginning to address China properly.”

Nearly every curator I spoke to, when asked to name the museum’s most transformative undertaking of recent years, mentioned its in-house global think-tank, Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives. Founded 10 years ago by Kathy Halbreich, MoMA’s recently departed associate director, C-MAP was the museum’s response to the Guggenheim, the Louvre and others establishing franchises in the Middle East and Asia.

The museum rejected the idea of multiple MoMAs, Lowry said, turning instead to what he called “self-education.” They invited over colleagues from Latin America, Eastern Europe, South and East Asia. More than 60 MoMA curators and researchers took regular trips to India, South Africa or Brazil. They were learning, listening, decentering themselves.

In a large new space overlooking West 53rd Street, Comer conferred with artist Sheela Gowda, who’d come from Bangalore to set up a room-size installation, which joins thousands of carved wood figurines with the door jambs of torn-down houses. She is one of four Indian women included in MoMA’s initial collection display, and they are joined by artists from Colombia and Argentina, Sierra Leone and Morocco, Poland and Romania.

“We are of our time, inevitably, and we don’t want to fight that,” said Temkin a few days later. “We want, we need, to be of it. Matisse said a great painter had to be of his time.”

Yet even this nimbler, globe-trotting MoMA has roots. “It’s returning to the 1930s aspiration that, over the decades, got more academicized,” she suggested. “The open-mindness, the curiosity, the commitment to a multiplicity of disciplines: That was all there in the ’30s.” She added, “I don’t think any of us feel that Alfred Barr, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, would be looking at this and saying it was anything but fulfillment of the founding mission.”

The decade of reshaping was nearly complete. Still, Temkin had one room to resolve, the Picasso room, whose new inhabitants would express the renewed spirit of a 90-year-old museum.

Along with the “Demoiselles” and the Faith Ringgold, Temkin had requested a wooden sculpture from the early 1950s by Louise Bourgeois — a grouping of five totems, painted white and light blue, symbolizing the artist and her family. The handlers unscrewed the crate holding “Quarantania, I,” removed the gauze wrapping and gently slotted each part onto a plinth. Temkin got up close to the five abstracted bodies, each one chiming with the five stylized “Demoiselles.”

“That’s her spot,” said Temkin with a note of finality. “Doesn’t she make you happy?” The curator looked at her colleagues. “Perfect,” she murmured. “Perfect.”

Remaking MoMA for the 21st Century: To See Art Anew, Change Your Vision

NEW YORK — Picasso and Braque were looking a little forlorn: unsure of their new home, unsure of their new acquaintances.

“Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion,” now on view at the Brooklyn Museum, offers a swinging reintroduction to Parisian style in the 1960s and 1970s, when the New Look gave way to thigh-high boots and dresses of heat-molded synthetics. The Concorde was flying, Françoise Hardy and Joe Dassin were singing and women (and men) cruised the Left Bank in Cardin’s stretchy knits and swooping miniskirts.

With 85 ensembles, the earliest dating from 1953 and the most recent from this decade, “Future Fashion” is not, strictly speaking, another ’60s show. But its core are the space-age outfits that Cardin designed in a young, newly prosperous Paris, seen here on mannequins as well as in photographs and films of Jeanne Moreau, Mia Farrow and the cast of “Star Trek.” Some are chic, many are risible; all of it has an exuberant view of the future that marks it as decidedly from the past.

Cardin, one of the most commercially successful of all French designers (and still working at 97), was never a great artist in the manner of Christian Dior, Cristóbal Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent. Born Pietro Cardin in 1922, he fled with his family from fascist Italy to Vichy, which would become the seat of France’s nominal government in 1940. After the liberation of France, he moved to Paris and apprenticed with the couturier Jeanne Paquin. Later he worked in the studios of Elsa Schiaparelli and Dior, went into costuming and presented his first couture collection in 1953. He won acclaim for his “bubble dresses” (disappointingly absent from this show), cinched at the waist and hem. Here are a beige coatdress of beige bouclé wool, plus a fitted day suit worn by Jackie Kennedy; both have thick roll collars that would become a Cardin signature.

In 1959, Cardin did something shocking: He mounted a ready-to-wear presentation, at Printemps department store in Paris. It was one of the first by a named designer, and for his effrontery he was kicked out of the French haute couture guild. (He was later readmitted.) But Cardin was ahead of his time in anticipating the allure of high fashion for the middle classes, enjoying the 30-year postwar boom later christened the Trente Glorieuses.

He masterminded a business approach now gone general: glamorous couture as a loss-leader, ready-to-wear as the profit center and licensing deals to radiate your name worldwide. It made Cardin rich — he would go on to buy and to franchise the famed Parisian bistro Maxim’s — even as these licensing arrangements left the Cardin brand, stuck onto bottled water and tinned cassoulet, diffuse and cheapened.

Where he excelled was in bold, futuristic daywear, often with unorthodox cuts that reshaped or disguised the body. A pink leather jacket from 1980 has bulging shoulders like the pauldrons of medieval armor; the arms of a wool woman’s suit disguise the wearer’s body with oversized fabric circles. One mannequin sports a brown sweater and paneled skirt as well as a Plexiglas helmet, like a on-trend Apollo astronaut. Cardin took his space travel seriously: In 1969, he went to Houston and quizzed officials at NASA headquarters about how to stay stylish on the moon.

Like his colleagues André Courrèges and Mary Quant, Cardin proposed a sleek, forward-dawning fashion that sometimes dissolved gender distinctions — above all in his “Cosmocorps” collections of the mid-1960s, whose zipped sweaters and belted jumpsuits could be worn by men and women. Other outfits from the late ’60s are rather less unisex, like a “porthole” dress with cutout nipples. A man’s jumpsuit of teal wool felt features a leather thong worn over the trousers: one part Superman, two parts Tom of Finland.

Especially when compared to the daywear, most of Cardin’s evening gowns are tacky and uncreative. He is hung up on stretchy fabrics shaped by stiff hoops; one dress of black jersey incorporates six parallel rings, spaced out from the waist to the feet, that give it the look of a collapsible laundry hamper. None of these ensembles, presented together in a pin-lit gallery meant to evoke a sky full of stars, displays any of the exacting craftsmanship that Issey Miyake or Hussein Chalayan would bring to body-disguising gowns. And only a few, like a “light-up” dress with an LED tube sewn onto the chest, have the daffy futurism of the Cosmocorps.

The late ’60s and early ’70s in Paris were a time for dreaming, of new societies and even new planets. Those dreams, at least, have not gone out of fashion; even the background music in this show, by such contemporary French DJs as Air and Mirwais, conveys the enduring appeal for new artists of earlier Paris night life. Leather masks, neoprene harnesses, hooped shoulders, dresses you can see in the dark: All of them, even the most recent ones, bristle with the memory of a European economic miracle that has come and gone, but which endures all these years later in our visions of the future.

Remember the future? Most of the clothes in “Future Fashion” were made two decades before I was born, and before our ecocidal species had the full number on the uninhabitable earth that awaits us in the 21st century. In the catalog, Cardin is asked to imagine what we’ll all be wearing five decades from now, and with a laugh he says, “Women will wear Plexiglas cloche hats and tube clothing; men will wear elliptical pants and kinetic tunics.” A nice vision — yet, as this show affirms, also weirdly retro; that was what we were already wearing 50 years previously, not 50 years hence. I’ve been trying to imagine a more serious future fashion for 2069: cuffed, waterproofed trousers for wading through flooded megacities, maybe, or coverall onesies with holsters for ice packs.

Exhibit Information:

‘Pierre Cardin: Future Fashion’

Through Jan. 5 at the Brooklyn Museum, 200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn; 718-638-5000, brooklynmuseum.org.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/arts/design/pierre-cardin-brooklyn-museum-review.html" id="296f2fa9-866c-39c3-a23b-153f230f2a2c">The New York Times</a>.

Back to the Future With Pierre Cardin's Space-Age Fashion

NEW YORK — Our museums, movies and magazines have been on a yearslong binge of ’60s nostalgia, pegged to a rolling sequence of 50th anniversaries: the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Neil Armstrong, Woodstock and the Manson murders. It seems Americans can’t get enough of the era, and the optimism that percolated amid great social upheaval. But well beyond our borders, before the 1973 oil crisis tanked the global economy, other countries were partying and protesting just as hard, and a youth c...

Visitors shouted and bawled in front of “Olympia,” a radically flat depiction of a common prostitute, her servant and her cat with pitiless candor. Art students threw punches. Security guards had to be called in. The newspapers published brutal caricatures of Manet and his models, and art critics savaged it as “vile,” “ugly,” “stupid,” “shameless,” a work that “cries out for examination by the inspectors of public health.”

A more bohemian artist might have relished the hatred. Not Manet. He was a bourgeois Parisian, hungry for public approval and civic honors, even as he painted works of such frankness that they kept him outside the establishment. He had struck the first blows for modern art, but it came at a punishing social cost. And as he got older, he leaned away from the plainness of his scandalous youth to paint flowers, fruit bowls, and fashionable women, all in a lighter, pleasanter key that found favor even in the hidebound Salon.

This is the great paradox of the 19th century’s greatest painter, and it’s the crux, too, of the exhibition “Manet and Modern Beauty,” on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, which focuses on the art of Manet’s last six or seven years before his early death in 1883, at age 51. Fresh, charming, a bit evasive and almost too stylish, “Manet and Modern Beauty” sticks up for these later portraits, genre scenes and still lifes — which the last century’s art historians, enraptured by “Olympia” and her ilk, tended to dismiss with the three Fs: frivolous, fashionable and (worst of all) feminine.

“Manet and Modern Beauty” has a further mission: to pump up the reputation of one of Manet’s last paintings, “Jeanne (Spring),” which the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired in 2014 after more than a century in the shadows. Painted in 1881 — and first exhibited in the 1882 Salon with the much more famous “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” (not on view here) — “Jeanne” depicts a fashionable Parisienne lost in thought as she walks through a garden.

Its forthright cheerfulness comes as a challenge to those of us still hung up on the brawnier, more shocking image of modernity Manet forged two decades earlier with “Déjeuner” and “Olympia.” (The show will travel to the Getty in October; it’s been organized by Gloria Groom, the Art Institute’s chair of European painting, and the Getty curators Scott Allan and Emily Beeny.)

Manet’s embrace of beauty in the late 1870s went together with a keen gaze on the social milieu of the new Third Republic, finally recovering from its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and throwing off an old moral order. Brilliant scenes of Paris cafe culture — including “Plum Brandy” (1877), depicting a glum woman musing over a drink and a cigarette at a marble table, and “The Café-Concert” (circa 1878-79), in which a top-hatted gent and a working-class woman nurse beers together — display an engagement with public leisure and sexual mores that would culminate in the optical and social riddle of the “Bar.”

Many late still lifes, too, make a virtue of pleasure and urbanity. One astounding painting here, from a private collection and not exhibited in nearly 20 years, depicts a half-dozen oysters and a chilled Champagne bottle with arresting briskness, and includes a Japanese fan that would have been the height of fashion. “One must be absolutely modern,” Rimbaud commanded a few years previously, and Manet held fast to that principle — treating the cafes and parks of Paris as not just sites of enjoyment but also venues where new life was made from scratch.

Manet had always been an adept of women’s fashion, and “Manet and Modern Beauty” looks carefully at how clothing and accessories work to signal modernity in the artist’s late work.

In the large, tight, equivocal “In the Conservatory” (circa 1877-79), a woman on a bench stares impassively into the middle distance, while a man leans down in silent vexation. Their left hands, each sporting a wedding band, dangle near each other but do not touch. What compounds the painting’s ambiguous force — is this a flirtation? a breakup? a reconciliation? — is the woman’s up-to-the-minute outfit: a form-fitting gray dress with an accordion-pleated train, set off with a silk belt and bow and enlivened with a hat, glove and parasol in jasmine yellow. The picture is as open as “Olympia” is blunt, and Manet captures it all with indefinite, flowing brush strokes that give it a startling freshness.

Unlike the plein-air impressionists who worshipped him, Manet was a studio artist to the end, and as his health began to fail in 1879 he took to smaller formats, sometimes aimed at the market and often shared with friends. He wrote letters that included exquisite sketches of plums, chestnuts, even a shrimp.

Pastels become a favored medium after 1880, especially for pictures of women. Small, luscious still lifes of fruit and flowers, made when Manet was in chronic pain, display a judiciousness that makes them even more delectable. (One here, of four apples balanced precariously on a white table, is on loan from the collection of Jeff Koons.)

“Manet and Modern Beauty” owes a lot to feminist scholarship on the artist over the last 30 years, and even the curators’ choice of walls of muted rose and dusky lilac signals their embrace of the “feminine” epithet that opponents of the late work once hurled. But there have always been many Manets, and even the later, tenderer Manet coexists with an artist of deep political engagement and historical sweep. The glaring absences in this exhibition — even more than the “Bar” — are Manet’s 1881 portrait of the exiled Communard Henri Rochefort, as well as his two late great seascapes, both titled “Rochefort’s Escape” and painted in 1880-81. As Allan writes in the catalog, Manet’s last years coincided with “an epochal political shift leftward” in France, and these maritime paintings with a political prisoner form the last act in Manet’s long interweaving of historical painterly styles and current events.

I suspect those works are not here so as to leave the last word to “Jeanne,” the Getty’s prize, who also appears on the catalog’s cover and on posters all over Chicago. May the gods of French painting forgive me, but “Jeanne” is a banal and overly refined picture, and its marriage of fashion and foliage tips exhibits a vulgarity wholly unlike the cool, careful “In the Conservatory.” The curators make hay from the fact that in 1882, visitors and critics at the Salon preferred the bright, pleasant “Jeanne” to the darker, stranger “Bar.” But I’m not sure why the same contemporary critics who slimed “Olympia” now get to have the definitive word on which Manets matter most.

I made three passes of “Manet and Modern Beauty,” and between the second and third I went upstairs to see the Art Institute’s most prized Manet: the pancake-flat “Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers,” which survived the outraged crowds of the 1865 Salon. Its blank background and disdain for illusion are miles away from the floral profusion of “Jeanne.” And I tried to shake my conviction that “Jesus Mocked” — a masterpiece of candor, so proud to be a two-dimensional slab of oil and canvas — counts for more than the fashionable scenes below.

Why do I value this early Manet so much more? It is only because I think art has a higher vocation than delivering joy?

Or is it because, poor modern boy that I am, I have been trained by more than a century of artists and writers to be suspicious of beauty — that ruse, that luxury, that feminine thing? The received history of modern Western painting, over which Manet looms like our great bourgeois Allfather, can feel like a succession of attacks on beauty by generations of arrogant men, each more certain than the last that their art would at last redeem an ugly society. But Manet knew that there is as much rebellion and insight in a dress, a bouquet or even a pile of strawberries if he could see past their surfaces to the richness within. That is another path to modernity, grounded in what his dear friend Baudelaire, in “The Painting of Modern Life,” called “beauty, fashion and happiness.”

Additional Information:

Through Sept. 8 at the Art Institute of Chicago; artic.edu.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/arts/design/manet-modern-beauty-review-chicago.html" id="0c97ef0e-130b-31c4-afa5-e179d5e971e8">The New York Times</a>.

CHICAGO — I wonder how often he thought back on it: the outrage, the reproaches, the shame, the folly. In 1865, two years after they rejected his “Déjeuner sur l’herbe,” the gatekeepers of the Paris Salon accepted two paintings by Édouard Manet into Europe’s most prestigious exhibition. One was a slablike, Spanish-influenced religious scene of Christ mocked by Roman legionaries. But it was the other that eclipsed more than 3,500 other works in the Salon, and set off a scandal that makes the r...

Jason Farago

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