Superfine: Tailoring Black Style is a special exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. It is put on by the Met’s Costume Institute and brings together examples of Black fashion over 300 years. It ties it to celebrities of different centuries and eras and how the past influences the present.
Seeing the Met’s custom collection is always exciting. New York is the center of America’s fashion industry after all. Over the last 20 years, fashion and cloting as art have made a larger presence at the Met. This exhibit connects high fashion to and the influence of Black pop-culture.
“Sargent in Paris” is a new retrospective at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met) showcasing the early career of American painter John Singer Sargent. John Singer Sargent is one of my favorite painters and was a rare American artist who created some of Europe’s most iconic portrait paintings during the late 19th Century’s “Gilded Age.”
Sargent grew up traveling throughout Europe with his parents. He studied art and painting in Paris under famed portrait artist Carolus-Duran. Paris in the 19th Century was the center of the art world. It was also a time when tastes and style were being transformed by Impressionism and the Industrial Revolution.
This retrospective includes works Sargent created while a student and during his travels around Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. It explores contemporaries and influences, and friends like Claude Monet and Rodin, and includes pieces by Renior, Manet, and Sargent’s mentor Carolus-Duran.
The exhibit culminates with the portrait of “Madam X”, a painting that would make Sargent famous, because of the mini-scandal it created in Parisian high society. The painting was presented at the 1884 Paris Salon exhibition and created a stir among the public and Art Critics due to the hanging dress strap as worn by Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau. She was the Kim Kardashian/Paris Hilton of her day.
