LA Whimsy Runs Riot at The Met

Posted on September 17, 2013 by MsSusanB

The catalog cover shows a close-up of Price’s finely sanded surface

Catalog cover close-up of Price’s finely sanded ceramic surfaces

If you want to feel happy, step into the Frank Gehry-designed space at the back of the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art before September 22 to see Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective. You’ll find colorful abstract ceramic sculptures that absolutely defy you to smile.

Blobs, twists, eggs with things popping out, and joyful fantasy shapes abound in the clean, white space. It’s impossible to make sense out of any of it, except the feeling that you are let loose inside the mind of a California artist, who claimed to have a “highway to the unconscious.”

Price, a superstar on the West Coast, is fairly unknown here in the East, so it’s nice to get to know him. As a student, he was tutored by legendary ceramic artist Peter Voulkos and then worked mostly around Venice, California (and occasionally Taos) for the next 50 years, producing delightful, collectable pieces, and hanging out with LA greats Rusha, Irwin, Keinholz, Bell, and Bengston.

Pastel, 1995, fired and painted clay. Courtesy: James Corcoran Gallery. © Ken Price. Photo: © Fredrik Nilsen.

Pastel, 1995, Ken Price’s fired and painted clay sculpture, courtesy of the James Corcoran Gallery. © Ken Price. Photo: © Fredrik Nilsen.

The show begins with Price’s most recent work and works back through time, so you’ll encounter some of the larger, crazier, colorful pieces right as you walk in. Some of the ceramic surfaces of look pebbly and coarse, but this is right where Price worked his magic. He painted coat after coat atop his fired pieces, and then meticulously sanded it all down to make a silky smooth surface. You really can’t tell unless you’re eyeball-to-eyeball with the blob sculptures, but the cover of the catalog (top left) gives you a hint.

This experience suggests the type of fun, contemporary shows that The Met will mount when it takes up residence at the Whitney’s building on Madison, once that institution decamps for the High Line in 2015.

Take 3 minutes to let curator Stephanie Barron walk you through LACMA’s installation earlier this year, which is pretty much what you’ll experience on Fifth Avenue. She tells you a little about Gehry’s gallery approach and talks about her relationship with the fun, fabulous Ken Price. Enjoy the spin, and get over to The Met for some real California fun.

Wood Goes Against Grain at MAD

Posted on September 14, 2013 by MsSusanB

Pablo Reinoso’s whimsical wooden shoes

All those years walking up and down the aisles at craft fairs may have you convinced that there’s nothing new in wood art. Get over to the final days of Against the Grain: Wood in Contemporary Art, Craft, and Design at the Museum of Art and Design.

It’s not what you’d expect, and curator Lowery Stokes Sims has done a magnificent job in telling us what’s trending now with forward-looking artists on the scene.

In short, she focuses her two-floor exhibition on seven trends that she sees: Artists, like Ai Weiwei, working on socio-political themes, whimsical designers who make us smile, digital artists pushing the envelope with wood, collages, virtuoso technique, takes on trees, and works that just capitalize on the beautiful texture in the wood itself.

Check out our Flickr feed for views of some of our favorite works, and MAD’s four-minute video as Sims herself walks you through the show, the artists, and her thinking about the pieces and themes.

Steam-bent ash chairs by Christopher Kurtz

But let’s focus on some of our favorites, which you can see on Flickr.

Wood as fashion: What about these shoes by Pablo Reinoso? If you’re thinking Dutch wooden shoes, think again, because these dainties are inspired by Thonet chairs, that he’s embellished with long, wooden “tails”. Or wooden hats by fashionable Moody & Farrell of London.

Music: How did Maria Elena Gonzalez go from looking at a fallen birch tree to creating paper-thin birch rolls that can create stunning music on a player piano? Watch and hear it all on this video of her player piano in action.

Laurel Roth’s Hominid: Chimpanze (2011) from vere wood with Swarovsky crystals in the teeth

How-did-they-do-that category: Bud Latvin’s gravity-defying wooden spiral sculptures, Christopher Kurtz’s impossible steam-bent chairs, and Elisa Strozyk’s wooden textile.

Recycled surprises: Think about what it took to turn 8,000 recycled chopsticks into a collapsible sofa. Good going, Yuya Yoshida.

If you can get to this show today or tomorrow, go. If not, take time to meet Leonard Drew in his studio, see his wood works in progress, and hear what success in wood feels like:

Stylish NYC Micro-Housing Showcased at MCNY

Posted on September 13, 2013 by MsSusanB

The 325 square-foot solution on display at MCNY: the TV wall slides away to reveal storage shelves. Source: MCNY

With all the single people living in Manhattan and the outer boroughs, it’s kind of shocking to find that building stylish, affordable micro-units is still illegal in most of the City. What’s a renter to do?

Get over to Museum of the City of New York pronto and take a look at the future in the hugely popular show, Making Room: New Models for Housing New Yorkers.

It’s no surprise that the housing stock here doesn’t match the demand. MCNY and the Citizens Housing & Planning Council got together to put on a show that raises the possibility of change, showcases several innovative solutions proposed by design teams, and presents a full-scale, walk-through model apartment: a 325 square-foot micro-space (built and furnished by Clei and Resource Furniture).

The sofa turns into a bed. Source: MCNY

Apparently our City’s is due to grow by 600,000 people over the next 20 years, so the question becomes – where is everyone going to live? How can people live affordably? Is there a way to create living spaces that are flexible as families grow? Listen as CHPC’s Jerilyn Perine lays it all out in this fascinating 11-minute presentation at the 2011 kick-off to the project, focusing on housing demand, illegal rentals, and rental history in New York.

Currently, the City regulates things such as occupancy, density, minimum room size, parking areas, lot coverage, the number of dwelling units that can be on a single lot, and the proportion of living vs. working space in some parts of town. And, yes, most neighborhoods prohibit building spaces like the micro-studio at the center of the MCNY show. CHPC’s projects imagined what could be if some of those regulations (well intended) were relaxed.

Read about the background of CHPC’s Making Room project and design competition and find links to related TED talks, sites, and the proposed design solutions – stacks of prefabricated apartments, mini-bungalows for the Bronx, and repurposed industrial spaces in Brooklyn. The CHPC site shows details of each of the five featured plans.

But the star of the MCNY show is the model studio. Here’s a video of what you can experience for a few more days. (The show was held over by popular demand.) Note the transformation of the Cubista (the ottoman-looking piece of furniture that unfolds), and so many other smart small-space design choices.

Water, Water Everywhere at the Academy

Posted on September 7, 2013 by MsSusanB

Tintagel, 1881. Large, masterful watercolor depicting castle ruins on the Cornwall coast of England, which Richards associated with the legends of King Arthur.

Tintagel, 1881. Large, masterful watercolor by William Trost Richards depicting castle ruins on the Cornwall coast of England, which Richards associated with the legends of King Arthur. Who needs to mess with oil paint and build big canvases when you can do this with water and paper?

In a brilliant pairing, the National Academy Museum has mounted dual shows by artists who draw their greatest inspiration from water. There’s no need for a trip out of town to experience crashing waves, monumental waterfalls, and wide expanses of sea and sky done by one of America’s greatest watercolorists of all time and a celebrated 21^st century painter.

William Trost Richards: Visions of Land and Sea features 60 works from the Academy’s collection – early graphite sketches, oil paintings, and beautiful, grand, sweeping watercolor vistas that are some of the tiniest, most meticulous works you’ll see anywhere. Some are on display for the first time, which is remarkable considering that critics believe WTR to be among the greatest American landscape painters of the 19^th century.

Seascape (1875), a watercolor on cream paper that’s only 9 X 14 inches. Source: National Academy

Seascape (1875), a tiny but monumental watercolor by William Trost Richards on cream paper. It’s only 9 X 14 inches. Source: National Academy

Inspired by Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites early in his career, WTR began documenting the intricacies of the Wissahickon River paths near Germantown, on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He soon became part of the American watercolor movement that began making works that were just as grand, romantic, and full of transcendence as anything by Church or Bierstadt. Quite a feat, when you’re working on such a tiny scale.

He spent years perfecting vistas of the ocean and sky from his home near Newport and on travels to the edges of the British Isles. Remarkably, he kept the horizon low to showcase the sky, all meticulously painted and built up from a ground of blue-gray wove paper. It’s remarkable how he evokes mood, rocks, night, dusk, and pale sky from that gray. Click here for more.

Steir’s monumental Blue River (2005) – one of her celebrated Waterfall series. Steir’s monumental Blue River (2005) – one of her celebrated Waterfall series. The video shows its true scale.

Pat Steir’s paintings, on the other hand, feature an opposite approach. Like Sam Francis or early post-Pop color-field painters, she pours, splatters, and drips her paint across canvases that seem a mile high and a block long. The masterwork on display at the Academy is Blue River, a virtual waterfall that’s just as mesmerizing as any of WTR’s watercolors, but done in bold, wide strokes on a larger-than-life canvas.

Go this weekend and delight in the masterful scenery. Pat herself indulges in the joy right here.

If you miss the Academy show, be sure to look for Pat’s Everlasting Waterfall hanging on the Fifth Floor of the Brooklyn Museum right next to Church.

African Art – 20th-c Modern Master Collectables

Posted on August 31, 2013 by MsSusanB

Sculptural Element from a Reliquary Ensemble: Head. The first African sculpture to be exhibited with modern masters in NY at Robert Coady’s Washington Square Gallery. This pre-1914 wood sculpture is from Gabon. Source: Curtis Galleries, Inc.

The first African sculpture to be exhibited with modern masters in NY at Coady’s Washington Square Gallery in 1914. From Gabon. Source: Curtis Galleries, Inc.

The show closing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this weekend, African Art, New York, and the Avant-Garde, is a love letter to the advent of modernist art in New York 100 years ago. In the early 1900s, artists like Picasso and Matisse began looking more closely at the exotic shapes and forms pouring out of Gabon and Cote d’Ivoire – the primary sources of wooden African statuary at the time in Europe.

The Armory Show in 1913, rocked New York, where crowds viewed disruptive cubist works by Picasso, Duchamp, and Braque. Although the edgy work startled New Yorkers and the press, American modern artists and connoisseurs went crazy for African art because it looked so “modern”.

Sensing an opportunity, Stieglitz sent his friend, Marius de Zayas, to Europe to bring back more. Good thing, since Europe was soon at war and the global art scene shifted to New York. Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery and the Washington Square Gallery in the Village became leaders of the new trend, mounting a series of shows. De Zayas had to push Stieglitz to mix African art with Picasso, and it worked. One critic looked and said, “Here are the fathers of Gaugin, Matisse, and Picasso!”

Clara Sipprell’s 1916 Portrait of Max Weber, where the artist holds a wooden figure from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He bought it in 1906, the first African sculpture to be brought back to the City by a New York art-lover. Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

This show is special because the curators really went all out – huge photo-murals of the ground-breaking shows, the actual works you see in the photos, and photos of same from the magazines and newspapers of the day. It’s an art-history, primitive art, and modernist master trifecta.

Visitors feel like they’re stepping right into 291 itself, seeing mash-ups of African art, nature objects, and European cubist works. Poking through the vitrines, you’ll see works appearing in New York for the first time since 1914, gorgeous Sheeler photos of early exhibitions, and lots of work collected by Mr. Schamberg (for whom NYPL’s Harlem library/collection/study center is named).

Stieglitz’s Picasso and Braque show at 291 Gallery (Dec 1914-Jan 1915). This features a Kota reliquary statue hung as art, like the fine Picasso nearby, a brass bowl, and a wasp nest. Source: Stieglitz photo from The Met.

Since Georgia O’Keefe gave Mr. Stieglitz’s entire collection to the Met, the show packs in many surprises — his African works, his Matisse and Rivera paintings, and issues of Camera Work. There are key pieces from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art and loans from Philadelphia’s Arnesberg collection.

In 1923, the Brooklyn Museum was the first museum in the West to show African art as “art” (versus “anthropology”), Penn was the first museum to actively collect it, and we all know what Mr. Barnes did when he displayed his magnificent modernist collection.

Check out all the objects in this amazing exhibition, but walk through the show in person if you can.

If you have some time, sit in on the curator’s talk via YouTube. Around 33:00 they start talking about the works in the show with a nice split screen that shows the speakers and the slides, so skip ahead and take a provocative, virtual tour.

Anxious, Turbulent Skies in Masterful Landscapes

Posted on August 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

Frederic Edwin Church’s depiction of the volcanic eruption in Ecuador -- Cotopaxi, painted in 1862 and exhibited the following year. Source: Detroit Institute of Arts.

Frederic Edwin Church’s depiction of the volcanic eruption in Ecuador — Cotopaxi, painted in 1862 and shown the following year. Source: Detroit Institute of Arts.

Who expects that gigantic, bold 18^th-century people-free landscapes by Bierstadt and Church to bear the heft of telling the anxious backstory of America before, during, and after the Civil War?

It’s true. Big landscapes are the booknds to the dramatic story told by the Smithsonian Museum of American Art’s exhibition to honor the 150^th anniversary of Gettysburg, American Painting and the Civil War, installed through September 2 on the upper and lower levels of the Met’s Lehman Wing.

Seeing the stunning upper-gallery works within the context of America’s troubled times is a must. You’ll never look again at a Bierstadt or Church again without checking its date to see if it was painted in the 1859-1865 range.

Sanford R. Giffins’s 1863 oil, A Coming Storm, says it all. Retouched by the artist in 1880. Source: Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Hear Smithsonian curator Eleanor Jones Harvey’s three-minute introduction to how these magnificent landscapes became the “emotional barometer” of the country and what approach genre painters took in the midst of changing times. Then, check out the Smithsonian’s nice timeline and click on Church’s Meteor of 1860 and Our Banner in the Sky from 1861 to see what was in the news while these were being created in the studio.

You’ll find Sanford Gilfford’s A Coming Storm (1863) in the timeline in 1865. Ironically, this was owned by Shakespearean superstar Edwin Booth right after it was painted, but before his brother actor John Wilkes changed history and trashed the family name. When Melville saw the painting in a New York gallery a few weeks later in April 1865, he felt the tragic irony so profoundly that he had to write a poem to process it all.

Bierstadt’s Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California, exhibited in 1865, one year after Lincoln signed legislation declaring this a public reserve. Source: Birmingham Museum of Art.

Church, Homer, and Gifford also painted camp life during the War, and those up-close-and-personal works are also featured in the show, alongside very precise oils of Confederate encampments by Conrad Wise Chapman. Thanks to Richmond’s Museum of the Confederacy, which loaned the works by Chapman, you’ll get to see the famous experimental submarine, The Hunley as it was in 1863. The submersible was raised from the depths near Charleston in 2000 with the tar bucket you’ll see in Chapman’s oil painting

But back to the giant landscape that closes the show upstairs. Bierstadt paid someone to take his place in the Union Army, so maybe that’s why his mind was free concentrate on more placid, ethereal works, such as the show’s finale, Looking Down Yosemite Valley, California of 1865 – a immersive look into the California Eden that Lincoln’s signature in 1864 preserved as public land and away from scarred landscapes of the battlefield states.

What’s the connection between Arctic exploration and unusual nighttime phenomenon of 1864? Watch this video to see how Church used them to convey the mood of the country through his powerful, gigantic, beautiful Aurora Borealis.

See a slide show of 34 paintings in the show and access the full set of video podcasts on the Smithsonian’s web site.

I, YOU, WE: Art on the Front Lines of the 80s Culture Wars

Posted on August 21, 2013 by MsSusanB

Les Levine mounted his poster everywhere in the subway in 1981, a tough time in New York. Source: The Whitney © Les Levine for The Museum of Mott Art, Inc.

It’s not a comfortable art show, but the 1980s weren’t comfortable times. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s show I, YOU, WE resurrects art from a time when artists were protesting inequality and gentrification, the AIDS epidemic was raging, Wigstock brought gender shifting into the open air, and New York’s downtown community waited apprehensively for the next police crackdown on squatters, community gardens, and anyone flaunting an alternative lifestyle.

As it prepares to move to the High Line in 2015, The Whitney asked its curators to mine its permanent collection to see if there were periods of time that might have been overlooked in the shows of recent years.

I, YOU, WE is the answer: the difficult, searching, and searing work produced by the passionate and disenfranchised denizens of New York’s tumultuous 1980s and early 1990s.

No one could miss Alfred Martinez’s 1987 screenprint. Source: The Whitney. © 1986 by Alfred Martinez

Works feature the flip side of Warhol’s Interview magazine and Studio 54 – people struggling with identities, illness, injustice, and the consequences of Washington’s culture wars against edgy art.

The Whitney produced this video about the “WE” section of the show, when artists began protesting gentrification, how they used art as the lever to galvanize the East Village, and the battles that raged for the community. Other sections of the Whitney show focus on artists’ exploration of race, gender, religion, and the AIDS crisis.

Revisit the emerging street styles – graffiti, comics-inspired drawings, stencils, and posters – as Andrew Castrucci of Bullet Space leafs through one of the seminal art-protest pieces.

When you visit, make enough time to Nan Goldin’s 700-slide extravaganza that documents everything. Scroll down here to see installation views and other works in the show by Mapplethorpe, Basquiat, Currin, Wojnarowicz, and Ligon. Tough stuff, but not tougher than the lives these artists lived during that decade.

Congratulations to the Whitney for not forgetting, presenting this work to the next generation, and testing if the work still sticks 20 to 30 years later. The show runs through September 1.

Unicorn Natural History

Posted on August 19, 2013 by MsSusanB

Detail from The Unicorn Defends Itself (1495-1505), a large tapestry in the main gallery.

Who says unicorns aren’t real? Mr. Rockefeller’s tapestry unicorns have been the celebrity draw for the last 75 years uptown at The Cloisters, and are the cavorting centerpieces of the show, Search for the Unicorn. But it took some brave curators to finally display all the unicorn-themed stuff in the Met’s collection and truly reveal the place this beloved icon has held in science, medicine, and art for the last 2,000 years.

The small micro-show in the Romanesque gallery just inside the entrance presents ivory coffers, playing cards, etchings, a carved-bone parade saddle, and coats of arms featuring unicorns in all manner of activity.

But the surprises are loans from NYPL and the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda showing the unicorn’s inclusion in scientific texts, which attest to sightings and miracle cures from the impressive cloven-hoofed trotter.

Pome’s 1694 identification of species in General History of Drugs. Courtesy: US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda.

Conrad Gesner’s Histories of the Animals (1551), the most popular natural history book during the Renaissance, included the unicorn among its 1,200 woodcut images of the world’s quadrupeds. Gesner, who also published images of fossils for the first time here, was a stickler for documentation, and asserts that unicorns had been seen in Mecca by a reliable source. He wrote several pages about how to discern real from fake unicorn horns and told how it should be used to purify water, counteract poisons, and treat epilepsy.

General History of Drugs, which achieved global circulation after it was published in 1694, was written by Pierre Pome, the pharmacist to Louis XIV known for his expertise in medicines and treatments from exotic cultures. Pome gave unicorns their own chapter and described five species living in the Arabian desert and in proximity to the Red Sea. In Chapter 33, he correctly proclaimed “unicorn horn” to be narwhal tusk.

Narwahl tooth (a.k.a. unicorn horn). Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The narwhal’s gracefully shaped, unicorn-looking incisor tooth is given a place in the show, too. One from a private collector is in the Romanesque gallery alongside one of the tapestries, The Unicorn in Captivity (the one in the fenced-in pasture); the second stands behind glass opposite the rest of the tapestries in their usual gallery.

Fancied by rich and powerful in years gone by, Charlemagne, Suleyman the Magnificent, Charles VI of France, and Lorenzo de Medici all owned this Arctic collectible.

We couldn’t take photos inside the show, but don’t worry. The Met’s done a fantastic job documenting everything online, so take time to peruse all the items in the show. Then click on our Flickr site to see the famous Unicorn gallery and glimpse the Cloisters on a perfect summer day.

Do you have 13 minutes? If so, you’ll enjoy the hilarious introduction to the show by curator Barbara Drake Boehm and her speculation on why it took the Cloisters 75 years to mount a show on unicorns. The natural history of unicorns starts around 3:40, and she’ll take you through all the key library materials. Watch to the end to find out where the unicorn was last sighted in the 21^st century. It wasn’t Toys ‘R’ Us.

Vote for Plain or Fancy at The Met

Posted on August 12, 2013 by MsSusanB

Our vote for best “fancy” object: A beach shell embellished with enamel and gold by Barnabe Sageret around 1745.

You wouldn’t think that a presentation of luxury items would emphasize democratic participation, but that’s just what the Metropolitan Museum has embedded (on line and onsite) within its thought-provoking, beautiful show, Plain or Fancy? Restraint and Exuberance in the Decorative Arts, on view on the first floor through August 18.

The curators of European Decorative Arts have assembled “plain” objects to the left side of the gallery, “fancy” ones on the right, and…well, they’ve asked you to decide about the ones in the middle. Tablet screens in the exhibition and the Met’s web site have an interactive that lets you choose if some of these are to your taste and how you’d classify them. You can enter a comment about each that shoots off to the show’s Twitter feed.

Our vote for best “plain” object: The obviously expensive porcelain bowl used by Marie Antoinette at her “fantasy” dairy farm. The curators tell us that the head of the Sèvres Manufactory was worried that his other clients would think it was too “barbaric.”

The whole idea of the show was to gather some of the greats from the European Decorative Arts collection and ask the viewers to consider their own feelings about “plain” and “fancy” (derived from “fantasy”). If something is “plain”, do you feel more noble admiring a piece’s elegant simplicity? If you see a grandly embellished bauble, does it make you cringe, or give you a sense of relief that someone else’s purchase is stimulating the economy?

The curators don’t refrain from hammering these gems into their socio-political contexts. One of the “plain” porcelains is a Sèvres bowl used by Marie Antoinette as she cavorted with friends on her fantasy dairy farm pre-Revolution. Several “plain” pieces of silver tableware were likely made from melted down “fancy” pieces after Cromwell’s 17^th-century reformation in England. The photos on our Flickr site let you in on what the curators said about many of our favorite items.

Is it “plain” or “fancy”? A clean design on a giant 1635 glass goblet inscribed with a detailed cartography of the course of the Rhine River. J.P. Morgan liked it and gave it to the Met.

Items range from the 1400s to the 20^th century. One of our favorites in the “fancy” imagination department is a snuff box made from a beach shell decorated lavishly with enamel and gold. Who wouldn’t want to look at that? Another is a gigantic Dutch glass goblet that has been engraved with a detailed map showing the entire course of the Rhine River. Amazing.

The show is filled with Wedgwood, Sèvres, Wiener Werkstätte, and other surprises. Although you can see the items in the show on the Met’s website, it’s much better to examine these items up close in person and read what the curators had to say about each.

Better yet, think about how you feel about the designs, and weigh in on Metmedia and Twitter. What do you choose?

Patching Up the Emperor’s Carpet

Posted on August 2, 2013 by MsSusanB

Installation view of the Emperor’s Carpet, second half 16th century. Iran, Safavid period (1501–1722). Source: The Met.

If royal guests had walked all over your Persian carpet for the last 600 years, how many repairs would you need? Before coming to the Met, the 16^th-century Emperor’s Carpet, covered in animals and poetry, was once owned by the Shah of Iran and the Hapsburgs.

Since this large, beautiful carpet arrived in New York 60 years ago, the Metropolitan Museum was only able to display it twice because it was in such fragile shape. When they turned it over, they saw it had been patched over 700 times. How could they stabilize it and install it in their expansive New Galleries of the Art of the Arab Lands on the second floor?

You’ll find out all about the behind-the-scenes work analyzing, stabilizing, patching, and repairing it in the micro- show, Making the Invisible Visible: Conservation and Islamic Art.

Restored corner of the Emperor’s Carpet.

The show features all manner of science, technology, and process that the magical conservators put to work for other pieces, too – ceramics, tapestries made of gold and silver threads, wood, and works on paper over the last 2,000 years. One of our favorites is the child’s coat made from antique pashmina. They also have examples of the natural materials that were crushed and pounded into pigments for all these beautiful dyes and paints.

Although the gallery is tiny, the Met decided to send visitors on a treasure hunt by providing a brochure through which seekers of conservation wizardry can locate the Emperor’s Carpet and other works throughout the dozens of Islamic Art galleries. See the details on these and more our Flickr site.

Child’s coat from India on display in the show. Tailored in the late 19th c., but but fabric woven late 18th c. The textile is from Kashmir and is likely pashmina.

One of the shockers is seeing what the conservators reckon are the true colors of the 1707 Damascus room, long a favorite of Met period-room fans. The science showed that the darkened panels that we’re so familiar with were once bright, bright blue and gold.

If you can’t see the conservator’s showcase before August 4, read about all the science and technology on line at the special web site. You’ll find links to the stories of rehab for the carpet, the child’s coat, the gold-weave chadar, and more.

If you have eight minutes, take a look at three years of work on the royal carpet by the Met’s magicians:

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