Washington, D.C. Museum Videos Reach 14 Million YouTube Views

Posted on July 1, 2013 by MsSusanB

Since Smithsonian branches and other Washington, D.C. museums, zoos, and gardens began posting videos on line in 2007, collective YouTube views have climbed to 14 million, as chronicled in our latest report, Washington D.C. Museums: 2013 Video and Social Media Rankings.

Although the 14 million total is less than the 49 million views racked up by New York museums, don’t forget that two high-profile DC institutions – National Geographic and the Smithsonian – produce significant amounts of programming distributed on their popular cable TV channels, dedicated apps, and snazzy web sites. Even though it has a DC museum space, NatGeo (a joint venture with Fox Cable) has largely abandoned YouTube; however, the 18 individual Smithsonian branches are all still posting their own stuff regardless of the more comprehensive joint venture with Showtime.

In the Top 2012 Cultural Museum Video, archival footage is cleverly coupled with behind-the-scenes looks at the National Archives’ 1940s Census release

In the Top Cultural Museum Video, archival footage is cleverly coupled with behind-the-scenes looks at the National Archives’ 1940s Census release

Here are some findings from our report on video and social media produced by DC institutions:

As of year-end 2012, the Washington museums having the highest number of total YouTube channel views were the Library of Congress (4.5M), the National Archives (2.1M), and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1.6M). The top two are information powerhouses with massive collections to push out for public consumption, and the third is right on their heels with an innovative series with curators interpreting interesting items from their collections.

All-time top DC museum video, one of Edison’s earliest films, with over 329K hits on YouTube

Edison still delivers. It’s interesting that the top ranked DC museum video of all time is Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, Jan. 7, 1894, the earliest surviving copyrighted movie – suggesting that our greatest media innovator is having the last laugh, contributing over 329,000 hits to the number-one ranking by Library of Congress on YouTube. It’s short enough for Fred Ott to be on Vine.

Four museum video channels have surpassed 1 million views. To put the DC numbers in context, if they were merged with the New York museum video rankings, the Library of Congress (4.5M) would rank seventh, just ahead of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Library of Congress would rank eight (2.1M), just ahead of the New York Public Library.

The National Zoo produced Washington’s top-viewed 2012 museum video – Shanthi, the National Zoo’s Musical Elephant, Plays the Harmonica!. Over 290,000 viewers watched this middle-aged mom experiment with a musical instrument in her enclosure and listen to her keeper talk about her performance. Shanthi’s viewership greatly surpassed the numbers generated by the most popular 2011 Washington museum video, the National Portrait Gallery’s Conan O’ Brien as Seen by Artist John Kascht. Surely, Conan would be amused.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Top Exhibition Video of 2012 features curator Chris Melisinos describing why video games belong in an art museum

The top cultural video was a behind-the-scenes work at the National Archives for the release of the 1940s census. Over 115,000 family historians watched Learn About the 1940s Census, which showed the Archives census team, provided information on how to find your family’s records, and worked in interesting archival footage from the original census.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum produced Washington’s top video about a museum exhibition. Over 28,600 people watched The Art of Video Games: Chris Melissinos, Curator, a brief look into the evolution of the stories, technology, and visualization advances of this mass entertainment medium.

A few of the Flickr sets from Library of Congress

The most active Twitter users are the National Museum of American History, the National Air and Space Museum, and the National Postal Museum. But except for Air and Space, it’s a different set for Facebook followers.

The most active Flickr users are the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Archives has organized its photos into creatively themed sets, such as “White House Wednesdays,” “Millinery Monday,” pictures of the 1940s census being taken, and pets of the First Families. The Library of Congress also posts a folder containing “mystery” photos and asks the public to help to identify them.

All the detailed video and social media statistics on 42 museums are in the report. Click here to see what’s included and make a purchase from our Its News To You Reports shop.

Enjoy the most popular DC museum video, a musical visit with the National Zoo’s sensation, Shanthi:

More Time Tripping at Grand Central

Posted on June 26, 2013 by MsSusanB

Annex window view of Lothar Osterburg’s model of his dream of Grand Central as a zeppelin docking station back in the 1930s

Even if you didn’t manage to board the historic train cars at Grand Central in May, you can still go back in time, courtesy of 18 artists featured in the GCT exhibition in the New York Transit Museum Annex, On Time: Grand Central at 100.

Inspired by The Clock and the continual flow of people and trains through Grand Central, MTA Arts for Transit cooked up a delightful mix of contemporary 2D works, models, videos, and digital art that puts a smile on the face of every commuter, tourist, and art-seeker that we’ve seen inside the tiny Annex.

Look closely to find this minute secret portal: Ledge with Lunette, 2013 by Patrick Jacobs

Look closely to find this minute secret portal: Ledge with Lunette by Patrick Jacobs

Have you seen the mysterious Zeppelin posters by Lothar Osterburg on the subway? Right in the Annex window you’ll see the gigantic, fun-house model that he created to photograph as one step in the process of making the photogravure you see on the A train. Kids and parents can’t resist Lothar’s newspaper-covered multi-story GCT impression and the funny, fat yellow old-time taxis and zeppelin ends that poke out. Right next to it, you can examine his resulting print, Zeppelins Docking on Grand Central.

People are usually transfixed by the 2008 video documenting Frozen Grand Central, where Improv Everywhere staged a 250-person flash mob, where people “froze” for 5 minutes as commuters, tourists, and workers wondered what was going on.

Another hit is Grand Central Diary. London Squared Productions interviewed tourists and commuters about GCT, animated the furniture and items around the terminal, and…well, just watch The Clock and the Maintenance Cart speak for themselves:

Nearby, several small digital screens show Alexander Chen’s Conductor, a 15-minute video loop that animates the subway lines, suggesting trains moving through the system. He turns the subway lines into an animated stringed instrument. No wonder he’s working for Google Creative Labs. Spend a few moments, take a look, and experience it here.

Close-up of Viewmasters and other leave-behinds inside Jane Greengold’s Lost and Found.

Another must-see piece (among many) is Jane Greengold’s Lost and Found. She’s created a sort-of fiction about the dozens of tagged items in the vitrine, evoking the memories and observations of generations of conductors who found items that train passengers left behind. Actually, the items you’re looking at are actual leave-behinds collected by real-life conductors, so Jane’s work isn’t entirely made up. The archeological discoveries include things from the old Lake Shore Limited on the NY Central, a 1948 boxed baby tooth, 1943 ration cards, 1952 Viewmasters, a Kennedy campaign button, and a Kindle.

Get to the Annex before July 7. In the meantime, check out curator Amy Hausmann and her artists telling about the fun they had contemplating time, architecture, fashion, and Jackie O.

Bird Watching Opportunity at The Met

Posted on June 23, 2013 by MsSusanB

Detail from Flock of Cranes (1767-1784) by Ishida Yutei, a six-panel folding screen

An avian free-for-all is happening on the second floor of the Met’s Asian Wing, with a lot of flapping, stalking, crowing, and displaying for all the world to see through July 28.

The birds (and one big, hairy deer) really come alive in the Sackler Wing show, Birds in the Art of Japan, The curators went into the collections to dig out masterworks featuring dozens of species of birds native to Japan, including medieval to modern clothing, jewelry, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and baskets. If you’re a bird-lover still wondering whether the AMNH will ever bring back the Birds of the World dioramas in all their splendor, you’ll find comfort on examining all these species close up in the quietude of the Met,

The exhibition starts behind the 12^th century Buddhist temple platform and just past the 13^th Century Bodhisattvas, where you’re greeted by a charming rooster that’s actually an 18^th century incense burner. Turn the corner and you’ll come face to face with a startling 2011 Japanese sculpture — Kohei Nawa’s PixCell-Deer#24, an auspicious presence (ref. the messenger animal of the Shinto deities) in the form of a taxidermy specimen that Kohei creativly covered in glass bubbles.

How did Kohei Nawa’s deer get in here?

Every gallery delivers a surprise, from the water birds area right through to the “exotics”. Exquisite paintings of the 1700 are interspersed with startling realistic works by the masters of the forge. One of the show-stoppers is a spectacular life-size iron eagle hovering from his perch in the raptor gallery that the curators reckon was made for display at one of the late 19^th century world expositions. The detail is amazing. Each feather was forged and riveted individually onto the bird’s metal body. It’s no wonder that the eagle, a nearby raven, and another headdress normally live in the Arms and Armor Department at The Met. Nice collaboration!

Check out our Flickr site for a walk-through of some of our favorite works, including the embroidered Phoenix-covered kimono, the 1908 Peafowl painting/screen by Mochizuki Gyokkei, Asano Toshichi’s hawk-shaped zither, and Kamisaka Sekka’s artistic book, which is brilliantly displayed in interactive form by the Met’s digital team.

Spectacular iron eagle lent by Arms & Armor Department

Enjoy this wildlife walk through the eyes of artists on the other side of the world, and be sure to relax in the George Nakashima reading room – a kind of “fire pit” roundtable where we found visitors sharing their impressions of the show. Check out the Met’s on-line catalog of the exhibition, but do yourself a favor and hike over to the Met in the next month before these birds fly away back to the collections.

You won’t be seeing the birds in the wild, but it’s likely that J.J. Audubon would approve. You’ll find joy in getting to know your new Asian friends, who you will likely spot in future exhibitions or in the aviary at the zoo.

Kimono embroidery detail. What did the Phoenix signify to this 19th c. bride?

Mary Cassatt’s Tech Start-Up Chronicled by NYPL

Posted on June 18, 2013 by MsSusanB

Woman Seated in a Loge (1881). The only lithograph Cassatt ever did, personally inscribed to Mr. Avery.

Still using a flip phone? Don’t know how to code? There’s nothing wrong with sticking with what you know, but expanding horizons with new technology is always good. In 1876, it’s exactly why Mr. Degas invited 32-year-old Mary Cassatt into his studio, showed her some of his printmaking techniques, and encouraged her to jump in and try something new. She did, and her technological triumph is the story of NYPL’s illuminating third-floor show, Daring Methods: The Prints of Mary Cassatt, which ends Saturday.

The show gives you a new slant, documenting this American artist’s struggle to make new work, push her technical boundaries, and mash up styles to total critical acclaim at the turn of the last century. NYPL found itself in a unique position to mount this show, since art dealer/print collector Samuel Putnam Avery made an unprecedented donation back in 1900 — more than 17,000 19^th-century prints, including dozens and dozens he purchased directly from Cassatt as evolved her printmaking between 1878 and 1898.

The Letter – 1891 color print with drypoint and aquatint. This is an earlier state (iii/iv) of Cassatt’s famous print minus the wallpaper pattern and letter on the desk

This show provides art-lovers with a unique, chronological walk-through of Cassatt’s technical trial-and-error, beginning with her early drypoints (1878 costume studies suggested by Degas), simple drypoints and etchings, and her only litho (see right). Cassatt continued to experiment throughout the 1880s, perfecting her softground, drypoint, aquatint, and etching techniques, often mashing them together – brave moves by a stylish, curious female artist of the modern era.

Gallery visitors walk slowly from print to print, taking in the subtle changes, redirects, and reworks of this modern, mid-career artist determined to find status and success in the male-dominated Parisian art scene of the late 19^th century.

The NYPL curators decided to hang multiple versions of similar subjects side by side, so you can really examine the mind of the artist at work. It’s interesting that Cassatt let Avery have prints off cancelled plates that she pulled after the “good” print run was finished. You’ll see the scratched-up images in the show next to the best ones.

The Fitting – 1891 color print with drypoint and aquating, printed with three plates

The Fitting – 1891 color print with drypoint and aquatint, printed with three plates

In 1890, everything changed for Cassatt, when she saw an exhibition of Japanese woodblock prints took the Parisian cultural community by storm. It was the moment that her technical experiments paid off and her printmaking vision, style, and legacy became sharply focused. In the last portion of the show, you witness her brilliant response — making intaglio look like woodblock, applying multiple areas of bright color, injecting pattern into domestic surfaces, and zooming in for low-angle close-ups of private moments in women’s lives.

Enjoy NYPL’s selections from Mr. Avery’s collection and spend some time examining the multiple states of the most beloved prints in the Impressionist canon, mash-ups of aquatint and drypoint. It’s a master class in color, ink, and composition.

If you can’t get to the show this week, download the PDF and take a look at Ms. Cassatt’s technical journey. Then go out and try something new.

Impressionist Line Ends at Frick

Posted on June 12, 2013 by MsSusanB

Toulouse-Lautrec, The Jockey, 1899. Color-printed lithograph on cream wove paper

Toulouse-Lautrec, The Jockey, 1899. Color-printed lithograph on cream paper

If you’re already nostalgic for the grand Impressionist show that ended at The Met, you can still find your favorites filling the Frick’s two downstairs galleries and the room next to the gift shop. While the Clark Art Institute (Williamstown, Massachusetts) was undergoing renovation, the Frick borrowed some of their finest works on paper for the gem-of-a-show, The Impressionist Line from Degas to Toulouse-Lautrec: Drawings and Prints from the Clark.

If you loved seeing Al Hirschfeld apply his pen and ink to paper in our last post, you will delight in perusing how lines by Degas, Manet, Lautrec, and Gaugin created a profitable niche in the rapidly expanding art market at the 19th century’s end. (By the way, Hirschfeld fans, who knew that Monet drew crazy caricatures to support himself early in his career? Claude’s Man with a Snuff Box looks like it was drawn in the 1950s…not the 1850s!)

Toulouse-Lautrec, Miss Loïe Fuller (1893), Lithograph printed touched with gold and silver powder. Source: Clark Art Institute

Although a few politically charged works are in the show (like Manet’s 1874 print of the Commune uprising The Barricade), the majority are masterworks of portraiture, everyday life, cafes, and modern entertainments like horseracing, circuses, and boulevard promenades. Some of our favorites are Degas’s sketches of horses in motion and Lautrec’s circus-themed sketches that he drew from memory while in rehab.

If you can’t get to the show, the Frick web site allows you to peruse all of these works in detail (with the curator’s descriptions) by decade, by artist, or by the order in which they’re hung in the exhibition.

For sheer theatricality and delight, Lautrec takes the cake in this show, as shown in the images here. The hand-painted 1896 Lumiere Brothers film below shows silk-clad modern dance pioneer Loïe Fuller making the moves that inspired Lautrec to create dozens of experimental lithographs (sprinkled in gold and silver powder, no less!) of her abstractionist performances.

Yes, it’s all about the line.

If you have time, watch the video of the co-curator’s lecture about Impressionist line and how sketches, watercolors, woodcuts, lithographs, pastels, and improvised etchings created a revolution in affordable art.

Toulouse-Lautrec, The Englishman at the Moulin Rouge, 1892. Color-printed lithograph

Tony Week Pilgrimage to NYPL

Posted on June 8, 2013 by MsSusanB

Al's studio at New York Public Library of the Performing Arts

Al watches over his studio at NYPL for the Performing Arts

Tony favorite Kinky Boots is playing at the Hirschfeld, but as you contemplate the number of awards it will pick up Sunday night, walk over to the entrance of NYPL at Lincoln Center to pay tribute to Al himself. Peek through the window of NYPL for the Performing Arts to see the nook where every Broadway star since the 1920s had their portrait done –the studio of Al Hirschfeld, the man who immortalized them all.

Look through the window and you’ll see his drawing table, lamp, and the cozy, cushioned barber chair where he perched day after day, recording entertainment history over the decades with his unmistakable whimsical flair and line. The Lincoln Center library is a fitting home for Al’s studio furniture, since he consulted the NYPL theater archives for a lot of his work.

Liza in Minnelli On Minnelli (1999), one of more than 20 portraits Al did of her. In color for The New York Times. Source: Library of Congress.

Liza in Minnelli On Minnelli (1999), one of more than 20 portraits Al did of her. Source: Library of Congress.

It’s hard to believe that Hirschfeld first began drawing celebrity caricatures in the 1920s, and continued his illustrious career for the next eighty years. Click on this link to his dealer’s site (Margo Feiden) to scroll through all the plays and musicals he’s covered, documenting the quirks, panache, and performances of everyone from Fanny Brice to Martin Short.

You can click through the “time table” of Al’s work at the gallery site, or in the Timeline of the Hirschfeld Foundation’s website. Every drawing after 1948 was done from a cushioned barber chair in which he could swivel to his heart’s content. Initially, he found it on the Bowery for $3.00, but the one you’ll see in the Performing Arts library entrance is the replacement (the original just wore out), which he bought in 1993 from a barber shop in the Chrysler Building.

So, pay tribute to Broadway’s most beloved artist. And before we post about the Impressionist Line show at the Frick, why not watch a 20^th century master of line make his mark so you can imagine all the creativity that emanated from the table you see in the window. The clip from The Line King, uploaded to YouTube by Al’s grandson, documents the legend drawing a caricature of Paul Newman as he appeared in Our Town.

Enter House of Memory at The Customs House

Posted on June 3, 2013 by MsSusanB

Detail of Dad’s House, (2012). Horse hair, feathers, cotton cloth, Photo by Clarissa Rose Pepper.

Detail of Dad’s House (2012). Installation with horse hair, feathers, cotton cloth, Photo by Clarissa Rose Pepper.

What do you remember about where you grew up? About your family when you were young? C. Maxx Stevens, an artist of the Seminole/Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma, answers these questions for herself (and us) in the evocative show, House of Memory, in its final weeks at the Customs House at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Stevens, currently teaching art at University of Colorado-Boulder, scrounges around in junk stores and yard sales out west to find the ephemeral materials for her installations – slightly transparent gauze made into hoop-skirt structures and large multimedia recreations of 1950s homes with floating scrims. Can you see through the haze?

The experience of walking around the show takes you back to corners of Stevens’ memory growing up in a multitribal community of Plainview, Kansas, just outside Wichita. It may not be like your own experience, but the stuff she weaves, scatters, and constructs will cause you to tap into your own memories.

Three Graces (2004) installation. Source: Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis

Three Graces (2004) mixed-media installation. Source: Eitelijorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis

The first gallery with The Three Graces is a tribute to her relationships with her sisters, and a must-see for lovers of fabrics, textiles, and interwoven mixed media.

The second gallery has several installation that resemble mini-stage sets that trigger memories through scattered photos, altered clothing, suspended objects, horse hair, garden stakes, and evocative combinations of other props – Dad’s House, Mum’s House, Sister’s House, Four Directions House, and House of Transitions.

Detail of Cultural Landscape installation of 1950s houses (2012). Photo: Clarissa Rose Pepper

Cultural Landscape is an immersive installation with tiny illuminated homes (found in thrift stores), scrims, and multimedia that “remembers” the 1950s streets of her suburban Kansas community.

The Smithsonian chose to publish black-and-white photos of the installations, which we’re using here. It’s kind of fitting…not quite of-the-moment and a little back-in-time feeling.

Want to reflect more about your own childhood home, your grandparents, and your neighborhood? Take a trip down to the Customs House before June 16, and let Stevens take you on that journey.

NMAI is making the leap into downloadable digital media with this show, so go to the iTunes U store, type in “NMAI-NY” and download the app, which contains an audio guide for this show. If you’d prefer to read about Stevens and her work, download the PDF.

Whitney to Remove Gigantic Rose (Again)

Posted on May 28, 2013 by MsSusanB

Jay DeFeo working on what she then called The Death Rose, 1960. Photo: Bert Glinn. © Bert Glinn/Magnum Photos

It was hard enough to get it out of the apartment after she created it nearly 50 years ago. Get to The Whitney’s show Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective this week before the moving crews come back. The Rose, DeFeo’s legendary painting (or is it a sculpture?) is the focal point of this Bay Area artist’s exhibition.

Early in her career, DeFeo drew inspiration from prehistoric art, the cosmos, and terrestrial forces of nature. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, she painstakingly built up the surfaces of her oil paintings, which often evoked geologic forces – slow, large-scale shifts of monumental proportion. (See the installation view of three of these works).

DeFeo was invited to show at MoMA in the historic, 1959 all-star show, Sixteen Americans, which included Rauchenberg, Johns, Kelly, Stella, de Kooning and Nevelson. She sent some of her 3D impasto works, but didn’t consider her largest piece, The Rose, quite finished. She became obsessed and spent six more years layering paint on the canvas. Listen to DeFeo herself talk about the difficulty in creating the 3D effects in The Rose in a drafty apartment in the late 1950s.

The Whitney removed the side panels of The Rose and used a two-ton gantry to get it as close to the wall as possible. Source: Whitney Museum. Photo: Paula Court.

Unfortunately, she couldn’t even get it out of her apartment, because the 3D surface she created ended up being too big to fit through the door and weighing…oh, about a ton. DeFeo had a small army of movers come upstairs to her apartment-studio, rip out the wall, and lower it to the street with a forklift. Watch and listen to Bruce Connor’s take on how it all came down in his interview with SFMoMA).

After that, The Rose went on display in California, but ultimately was installed as the showpiece of a conference room at the San Francisco Art Institute. For all the right reasons, temporary wall was built to conceal and protect it, but ultimately The Rose was hidden from view from 1979 until 1995, when the Whitney team unearthed it. Now, they own it.

Recently, the Whitney had the task of getting a truly monumental work out of storage, shipping it to the West Coast for the SF edition of the show, and bringing it back to New York.

Recently, The Rose arrived back at the Whitney from the show’s run at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It’s one of the most complicated pieces for the museum to ship, move, and install – just like the original transfer.

Click on this link and scroll down to find the Whitney’s photo show of what it took to get it up to the Fourth Floor. See how a crew of handlers got a one-ton work from the street to the gallery.

Get to the show before it closes June 2, and enjoy DeFeo’s jewelry, geology-inspired work, drawings, and never-before-seen photos of this Beat-era innovator.

Installation view at The Whitney. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins

Monumental Impression of Fashion at the Met

Posted on May 20, 2013 by MsSusanB

Monet’s Women in the Garden (1866) from the Musée d'Orsay, Paris features impressions of fast-changing dappled sunlight and ladies’ fashions (e.g. the fad for soutache)

Monet’s Women in the Garden (1866) from the Musée d’Orsay, Paris featuring impressions of fast-changing dappled sunlight and ladies’ fashions (e.g. the fad for soutache)

You can witness the collisions of the new crashing into the old in the Metropolitan Museum’s joyous show, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity. Impressionism’s heaviest hitters (Manet, Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, and Morisot) are displayed alongside stunning 19^th Century dresses, suits, accessories, and underthings to prove a point — that incorporating the latest fashions was one of the cudgels that these rule-breakers used to facilitate their revolution in painting.

The show features paintings from three grand Impressionist collections (the Met, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Musée d’Orsay), and includes breathtaking dresses from NYC’s fashion-collection superpowers – the Met, the Brooklyn Museum, FIT, and Museum of the City of New York.

The Met’s website explains the key themes of the show, but it’s no substitute for going through the galleries in person. Why? The tiny photos cannot do justice to the monumentality of these paintings, where scandalous 19^th-century fashionistas stormed the barricades of the French Salon, in large-format framed paintings normally reserved for staid, moralistic history paintings.

Summer day dress worn by Madame Bartholomé in her husband’s painting In the Conservatory  (1880)  Source: Musée d'Orsay

Crisp summer day dress worn by Madame Bartholomé in her husband’s 1880 painting In the Conservatory. Source: Musée d’Orsay

The size, colors, and techniques are amazing, especially as the Impressionists moved outdoors just as new technology was encouraging lifestyle and fashion revolution. Steam-powered train lines were inventing the concept of the weekend getaway for City hipsters, so a lot of the paintings feature dappled sunlight with high-fashion young people lolling about in nature. (See the show’s highlights.)

The show’s curators shine the spotlight on how fashion, innovation, and the art world influenced one another: New aniline dyes allowed hot pink, bold color-blocking and vivid hues for extravagant skirts and dressing gowns. New fabric-finishing technology enabled super-white cotton fabric to be crafted into diaphanous, desirable, but high-maintenance dresses and gowns for the first time in fashion history.

The Met scatters mass media throughout the galleries, just to demonstrate fashion’s democratization during 1850-1890. New printing technology enabled trendy fashion magazines to be consumed by the masses. New-fangled duplication techniques revolutionized the studio photograph by inventing the eight-image carte-de-visite – a paper-based way to market your “celebrity” self and show off your fashion chops long 150 years before Facebook and YouTube.

Silk and ivory French parasol (1860-69) from Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Met (Source: gift of Mrs. William Ashbaugh)

Pop-art pink velvet, boleros with pompoms, lace parasols, Worth gowns, kid gloves, top hats, corsets, hat shop girls, high-end boutiques, and Cezanne’s surprising oil painting based on a fashion-magazine layout. Which part of this show is the best?

Go before May 29, when the show decamps for Chicago for its June 26 opening.

Morgan Deconstructs Degas’s 19th c. Cirque-du-Soleil Experience

Posted on May 4, 2013 by MsSusanB

Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando, 1879. Oil on canvas. Source: National Gallery © National Gallery, London / Art Resource, NY

Long before Cirque du Soleil began selling $180 seats to eight shows in Las Vegas or Floating Kabarette came to Brooklyn, high society and avant-garde crowds were flocking to extravagant theaters on Montmartre in Paris to see the finest aerialists from Europe.

The Morgan Library’s exquisite micro-show, Degas, Miss La La, and the Cirque Fernando, documents the meticulous work of Mr. Degas to portray the magic, daring, and wonder inside a 2,000-seat arena where he experienced the artistry of one of the must-see acts of 1879 – a mixed-race German aerialist who hung from a trapeze clenching an apparatus in her teeth from which she dangled a firing cannon.

As in the Met’s blockbuster show, Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity (which also features a circus-themed painting in its last gallery), the Morgan makes the case that Degas selected this subject because was associated with the height of fashion (along with café concerts and racetracks). Although this particular work was the only circus image Degas would ever paint, just tackling the dazzle and glamour of Miss La La dangling 70 feet in the air (before the cannon stunt) showed that he was capturing what was “happening” among high society and artsy types in their “modern” life.

A vibrant pastel study of the artist by Mr. Degas. Source: Tate, London/Art Resource, NY

Although we can marvel at how well Degas captured this fleeting moment, the Morgan lays bare that this work was planned in meticulous detail. They’ve displayed preparatory works, sketchbooks, and even architectural drawings of the theatre’s interior that Degas created to work out the feeling, look, composition, and setting for this spectacular work. As Degas said, “No art was less spontaneous than mine.”

If you love Impressionism and theatricality, get over to the Morgan to enjoy the mechanics behind the creative process and flip through the digital version of our artist’s sketchbook (which was to fragile to be sent from France) right inside the colorful upstairs gallery.

Visit Mr. Degas and Ms. La La before May 12, when they leave for the Continent. (Sorry, no video, but here’s a photo of the star herself.)

Photograph of the artist, Miss La La (c. 1880). Albumen silver print. Source: Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University

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