Make Art, Not War

I'll admit, my determination to see a fashion show at the Jewish Museum before departing New York for the season seemed a little off kilter in the context of world events.  But it turns out Mood of the moment: Gaby Aghion and the house of Chloé was more about the work of other designers. Aghion, a beautiful, Egyptian-born businesswoman had a feel for comfort, an eye for talent and an innovative marketing vision.

After World War II, Aghion and her husband, a communist born to a wealthy cotton exporter, took refuge in Paris from political repression in their homeland.  Within in a decade, she was selling women's luxury clothes off-the-rack or, as she put it first, "prêt-à-porter." Fearing both workplace sexism and the potential embarrassment of failure, Aghion shrewdly chose a feminine-sounding French name instead of her own to brand the new business.

Chloé hired a "shy" young German to design the line in 1963.

Karl Lagerfeld, who worked for Chloé twice in his career, referenced many sources for his designs, likely including a major retrospective of a neglected Art Nouveau artist for this Aubrey Beardsley dress in 1968.

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Not long afterward my friend JoAnn gave me a risqué wall hanging of a woman with pigtails and bare buttocks, adapted from an illustration Beardsley had done for an edition of Lysistra, a Greek comedy I soon would read in college.  Call "Two Athenian Women in Distress," which I finally encountered in full more than 50 years later at the Getty Museum, my introduction to camp.

Designers don't get much campier that Lagerfeld.  I rest my case with his sequinned faucet dress.

Illustrator Antonio Lopez took the concept and ran with it.

Later clothes designed by Stella McCartney and Phoebe Philo lacked Lagerfeld's encyclopedic inspiration, although they must have been popular with women for the brand to have lasted as long as it has.  Aghion sold the company in 1985.  She died in 2014 at the age of 93 which raises this question of the exhibition:  why now?

Chloé Blouse by Stella McCartney (2001)

The 7 October 2023 Series by Zoya Cherkassky

Museums rarely mount exhibits about events as current as the most recent (and worst to date) terrorist attack on Israel.  Cherkassky, who emigrated to Israel from Ukraine in 1991, began creating these graphic works almost as soon as she fled the country with her daughter.

"The Terrorist Attack at Nova Music Festival"

Not long after I saw these evocative drawings, I heard a podcast interview with a Palestinian poet who asserted that female soldiers in the Israeli military had beaten him mercilessly in detention after he tried to cross the border into Egypt despite his American citizenship.  Cognitive dissonance appears to be our new reality.

"Crying Soldiers"

"Grandma & Grandpa"

Marta Minujín: Arte! Arte! Arte!

Stumbling upon the work of an unfamiliar Argentine artist came as a relief.  Eighty-year old Marta Minujín seems to have done a bit of everything in her lengthy career, including a "corny" partnership with another conceptual artist that seems eerily prescient given the current state of her country's economy.

"Paying Off the Argentine Foreign Debt with Corn, 'the Latin American Gold'"  

Speaking of Andy, the Jewish Museum must rotate luminaries from his "Ten Portraits of Jews of the Twentieth Century," once poorly received.  Sarah Bernhardt was displayed during my last visit.

Gertrude Stein (1980)

Back to Minujín:  her more work isn't really my thing but there's an appealing, colorful liveliness to much of it.

"Soft Maze" (2010)

"Global Vaccination" (partial, 2021)

Sea legs are critical for safely experiencing "Implosión!," a disorienting installation

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