Inside Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty
By Max Berlinger 9 August 2011
***Updated Monday August 7, 4.12pm: *** The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced today that Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty is the eighth most visited exhibition in its 141-year history, putting the designer in the same category as exhibitions including Treasures of Tutankhamun (1978), Mona Lisa (1963), and Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2010). In total 661,509 visitors viewed the exhibition during its run from May 4 to August 7, making it easily the most-viewed show since the Costume Institute became part of the Museum in 1946.
"We are enormously gratified that visitors turned out in record numbers to view this powerful exhibition of McQueen's work," said Thomas P. Campbell, director and ceo of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The show was an elegant tribute to the designer's artistry, and we are proud to have shared it with such a broad audience, eager to experience the breadth of his genius."
The exhibition could not be extended further because the galleries need to be prepared for the next exhibit - Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India, 1100-1900 - which will open on September 28, the Museum said today.
Updated Friday July 29 9.03am: The Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition will open until midnight for its final weekend.
SEE INSIDE THE EXHIBITION HERE
"We have created these late hours to satisfy the unprecedented interest in this landmark retrospective," Thomas P. Campbell, director and ceo of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said. "Visitors from across the globe have come to see this remarkable exhibition, and we want to keep it open for as many people as possible. Indeed, these midnight hours will mark a fitting conclusion to this powerful exploration of McQueen's work."
The exhibition will remain open until midnight on its last two days - Saturday August 6 and Sunday August 7. This is the first time the Museum has kept an exhibition open until midnight.
SEE LIBERTY ROSS' TAKE ON THE EXHIBITION
Updated Thursday July 21, 9.27am: More than 500,000 people have now seen Alexander McQueen's Savage Beauty exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the British brand has revealed via its Twitter. The exhibit closes on August 7, a week after the original closing date due to unprecedented demand.
Updated Tuesday May 31, 10.48am: The Met's Savage Beauty McQueen exhibition has been extended due to huge popularity. The display will now close on August 7, a week later than its original closing date. Its opening day was the biggest ever for the Met, with over 150,000 visitors having since visited the exhibition. The New York museum is also launching a Met Mondays with McQueen programme on June 6 - where visitors will have special access to the galleries between 9.30am and 2.30pm, while the rest of the venue is closed.
Updated Thursday May 5, 9.03am: Monday night's Met Ball launched the first retrospective of the career of a design maverick - Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty - and we were amongst the first to step inside his incredible archive.
Last Friday, April 29 2011, Alexander McQueen posthumously helped usher in a new era for the British monarchy. A ten-year courtship ended with a wedding of epic proportions - with bride Kate Middleton in a luminous white dress by Sarah Burton for Alexander McQueen.
SEE KATE'S MCQUEEN WEDDING DRESS HERE
Across the pond, launched by the Met Ball, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute paints a vastly different portrait of designer Alexander McQueen and his work in its exhibition Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, now open until July 31. Looking back through McQueen's nearly twenty-year archive, curator Andrew Bolton recovers pieces that point towards a decidedly more ominous - but richer and more potent - understanding of the designer's oeuvre. In fact, after seeing the show, Middleton's wholesome dress is a rather anti-climactic denouement in a career that married meticulous craftsmanship with fantastical, if often sinister, inspirations.
The show, which features approximately 100 garments and 70 accessories from the McQueen archives as well as private collections, traces the designer's work from his post-graduate collection in 1992 (derived from the legend of Jack the Ripper), through his time as creative director of Givenchy and then on to his own eponymous label, ending with his suicide in February 2010. Knowing the tragic outcome of his life, partnered with his often perverse artistic motivations which wrought such macabre costumes, there is a surprising lack of morbid melancholy in the show. Instead, the focus seems to highlight McQueen's quest to uncover grace from what the everyday eye would dismiss as repulsive. Multiple moments foster a transcendent appreciation of the genius McQueen possessed. And a genius he was - a word that should not be used too aggressively in the world of fashion design (a profession so heavily influenced by commercial concerns), but McQueen, it seemed, eschewed such base motivations and instead aimed to illicit visceral reactions from his fans and critics. This show demonstrates that at his core, he was an artist whose chosen medium was fabric and the human form.
SEE OUR TRIBUTE TO MCQUEEN IN PICTURES
The opening room shows stripped-down early works that emphasise his impeccable hand at tailoring, learned during his time apprenticing on Savile Row, but moves quickly into the opulent, provocative works that originated from his fecund psyche. His obsessive quest to find balance between archetypal notions of beauty and the hideous underline much of the exhibition, with quotes from the designer ("Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places," reads one. Another: "I find beauty in the grotesque, like most artists. I have to force people to look at things."), helping to provide context to his opulent and disturbing creations. McQueen credits his time at Givenchy as having helped him cultivate a lightness and delicacy in his work - highlighting yet another contradiction he wrestled with in his métier. Together with his austere sense of tailoring, his canon explores his desire to synthesise antithetical maxims: rigidity versus pliancy; the revolting versus the splendid; the carnal versus the violent, the demonic versus the divine, Victorian restraint versus evolutionary freedom. Bolton posits that balancing the ongoing tensions of these oppositional forces became the crux of his mien.
<a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/search/default.aspx/Shows/?designer=Alexander+McQueen"> SEE THE ALEXANDER MCQUEEN SHOW ARCHIVE</a>
Moments of clarity come in a room filled with accessories (aptly called The Cabinet of Curiosities), featuring accessories which recall both earthly, organic forms and sadistic, medieval torture devices - simultaneously alluring and frightening, born of both biology and the abnormal. Other chambers emphasise his obsessions with Scottish nationalism (his controversial Highland Rape collection autumn/winter 1995-96 and Widows of Culloden <a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/show.aspx/full-length-photos/id,3432" target="_self">autumn/winter 2006/2007</a>), nature (his Darwin-inspired <a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/fashion/show.aspx/full-length-photos/id,8443" target="_self">spring/summer 2010</a> collection, Plato's Atlantis, which closes the exhibit), the raw primal energy of primitivism, and, of course, his innate showmanship demonstrated through his runway shows that deftly blended fashion and theatre (video footage from some of his more memorable spectacles help highlight these flamboyant pieces). From the dramatic, thrilling music to the nuanced lighting design and the murky, twisted sets, the entire exhibit successfully maintains a certain demented, post-apocalyptic atmosphere where the possibility of danger and beauty are one in the same. Perhaps that's why it's so chillingly effective that when turning a corner halfway through the exhibition one quote, painted emphatically on a sable wall, resonates with stunning severity: "There is no way back for me now. I am going to take you on journeys you've never dreamed were possible."
And that he did.
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty will be on display May 4 - July 31, 2011, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028. For information, visit: <a href="http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen">http://blog.metmuseum.org/alexandermcqueen</a>.
YOU SHOULD SEE: <a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/daily/110504-see-inside-alexander-mcqueen-savag/gallery.aspx" >Inside the Met's McQueen exhibition...</a>
YOU SHOULD SEE: <a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/daily/110503-met-ball-2011--costume-institute-g/gallery.aspx"> Who wore McQueen best on the Met Ball red carpet...</a>
YOU SHOULD SEE: <a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/daily/110503-met-ball-2011--costume-institute-g.aspx"> What his friends think McQueen would have made of it...</a>
TODAY IN HISTORY: <a href="http://www.vogue.co.uk/news/fashion/history/110504-kate-moss-and-sir-philip-green-on-k.aspx" >What did Kate Moss say she wouldn't do?</a>
Opening May 3, the exhibition itself is set to comprise more than 100 pieces - both couture and ready-to-wear - which feature established artisanal techniques, like pleating and lacework, contrasting with newer machine-made techniques, from laser-cutting to circular knitting. Several of the processes will be taking place in real-time workshops allowing visitors to watch how the techniques are created.
© Sølve Sundsbø /Art+Commerce
© PA Photos
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