exhibits

Jeny Howorth - Lulu Serena Morton Jeny Howorth’s works of art are like time capsules. They hark back to a time when young people read and collected all sorts of magazines, ripped out the pictures and stuck them on to bedroom or study walls. Appropriating artwork, collecting and listening to music was a shared generational activity much as social media is today.

Howorth’s artistic North London upbringing provided early exposure to what was happening in British culture and she was encouraged to be creative. Later through her career she was surrounded by art directors, fashion editors and photographers and within this likeminded group achieved recognition as one of the most successful British supermodels of her generation. Alongside her professional work, Howorth was obsessively collecting images from books and magazines and she started to build the montages which capture her life, loves and influences.

The examples of collage, viewed in museum exhibitions, was appropriated into British pop art making and was a contemporary visual language. Pasting up your choices you freely join a tribe. It was an agreeable pastime for an internet-free youth who unwittingly would leap from an industrial world to electronic future, when house music exploded upon the night club scene. Howorth has taken that memory base and the behavior of a generation and immortalized it into these iconic, splendidly boxed collage works. Fashion is on display during the press preview for the The Costume Institute’s exhibition “About Time: Fashion and Duration” on October 26, 2020, which will be on view from October 29,

About Time: Fashion and Duration Metropolitan Museum of Art The latest exhibit at the New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art explores fashion’s reputation and reinvention at delayed for months by the pandemic, and that time was used, in part, to tweak its presentation on account the Black Lives Matter movement.

Normally the city’s social event of the year, 2020’s Met Gala organized by Vogue Editor-In-Chief Anna Wintour -- which usually opens the costume exhibit -- was cancelled, like every major indoor gathering since midMarch.

To commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Met, Andrew Bolton, head curator of the Costume Institute, aimed to highlight the museum’s own collection that includes 33,000 pieces of clothing and accessories. “When I began working on the show, it started

Ketchup Kate, 2018; Collage 80 x 80 cm.

is relates to time. The show had been 2020 to February 7, 2021 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show traces 150 years of fashion, from 1870 to the present, along a disrupted timeline, in honor of the Museum’s 150th anniversary. TIMOTHY A. CLARY / AFP.

off as this sort of meditation on fashion and temporality,” he told a press preview of the exhibit entitled “About Time,” which will run until February 7.

However, Bolton did not want to focus on chronology, instead presenting concepts in pairs -- two pieces, two parallel time periods with similar aesthetics, for a 124-piece show featuring a single gown to close. “By having past and present coexist together, it sort of takes you outside of the confine of chronology and makes you think about time very differently,” Bolton said.

The concept of the exhibit creates an ongoing dialogue between older pieces from the 1870s when the Met was founded and more recent items from the 1960s and beyond. For example, elements that were popular in 1870s-era wardrobes are seen again in the work of modern designers considered particularly innovative, including Alexander McQueen, Yohji Yamamoto, and John Galliano.

“Fashion is always for the movement,

always about this succession of time and notions of, novelty and ephemerality and sometimes obsolescence and that’s one aspect of time,” Bolton said. “But at the same time fashion looks back on itself often.”

With shorter skirts and dresses and cuts that flow rather than restrict, modern designers give a contemporary edge to older pieces, like the iconic Chanel jacket. A mini-skirt pairing gives the piece a facelift, thanks to the innovation of Karl Lagerfeld, a master of reinterpretation. Today’s designers play with a far wider spectrum of materials than were available to their predecessors, thanks to technological progress and the evolution of use and taste.

Raf Simons embellishes a 2013 black strapless bustier dress with the satin flowers of Hubert de Givenchy in 1957 but in leather, a material only in recent decades popular with womenswear. And sometimes older styles stand the test of time: Yves Saint Laurent’s tuxedo for women, for example, or his belted minidress of 1966.

Bolton decided to modify the show in light of the enormous anti-racism protests that followed the police killing of George Floyd in May. According to Bolton, the original version included “some designers of color... but not a huge amount.” He and Wintour worked together closely to make the tweaks.

Vogue’s leader has faced accusations since June from some collaborators and journalists of long favoring fashion created by and for white people, and sidelining people of color at Conde Nast. Wintour, 70, attended the press preview of the exhibit but remained silent.

“Undoubtedly, I have made mistakes along the way, and if any mistakes were made at Vogue under my watch, they are mine to own and remedy and I am committed to doing the work,” one of fashion’s most powerful figures told the Times recently.

Changes at the exhibit include a contri-

Clyfford Still, (left to right) “PH-931” (1974), “PH-891” (1972), “PH-892” (1973) (image courtesy Clyfford Still Museum).

bution from Black American pioneering designer Stephen Burrows, next to a Xuly.Bet dress from the Franco-Malian designer Lamine Kouyate.

Bolton made assurances that the initiative would not be short-lived, saying all exhibitions will now include diversity efforts.

The Late Works: Clifford Still in Maryland Clifford Still Museum Clyfford Still was one of the longest living artists of the Abstract Expressionism movement, but remains best known for his work made between 1942 and 1960.The exhibition The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland, now on view at the Denver museum devoted to the artist, offers a historical pivot by focusing on the last 20 years of his life, revealing his most productive period and foregrounding work that is rarely discussed.

“I had taken [the densely worked paintings] as far as I could go and felt I was coming up against a dead wall of abstraction, manipulation and device,” Still told biographer Betty Freeman in 1962, a year after leaving New York City to live in rural Maryland. That year he started simplifying his compositions, working more economically like other mature artists such as DeKooning in his late “ribbon” paintings or Motherwell in his Open series.

Many argue it was Still’s exit from New York — or his refusal to sell his work — that deterred critical responses to the 372 paintings and 1,132 drawings made in Maryland. However, reception was more likely darkened by the declining popularity of Abstract Expressionism. “Those understood to be making ‘the next inevitable step’ now work with any material but paint” wrote Artforum editors in September 1975. After all, the artist had an aggressive exhibition calendar that proves he never stepped away, including shows at the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute of Contemporary Art (1963), at Albright-Knox (1966), at New York’s Marlborough-Gerson Gallery (1969), at SFMOMA (1976), and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1979).

Less visible in the galleries are the sentiments of a professional artist with doubts. Distressed remarks about whether paintings would be misconstrued as pretty or that he was already part of history, “a dead man now,” were recorded by Freeman in her notes. The paintings are distinct, complicated, and sometimes vulnerable, a description rarely associated with Clyfford Still.

The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland continues through February 21, 2021 at the Clyfford Still Museum The exhibition is curated by Dean Sobel.