Tag Archives: Pablo Picasso

LILLIE P. BLISS AND BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: MAKING MoMA AND THE MORGAN

Lillie P. Bliss, seen here in a photo circa 1924, is subject of new MoMA exhibit (the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York)

LILLIE P. BLISS AND THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN
MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art
11 West Fifty-Third St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Through March 29, $17-$30
www.moma.org

“Dear Miss Bliss,” Bryson Burroughs, curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, began in a letter to Lillie Plummer Bliss upon her crucial support of the 1921 “Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Art,” “I salute you as a benefactress of the human race!”

Born in Boston in 1864, Bliss cofounded the Museum of Modern Art in 1929 with Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and Mary Quinn Sullivan. She died in New York two years later, leaving her collection of approximately 120 works by late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century French artists to the institution, including paintings by Paul Cezanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Georges Seurat, and Odilon Redon. She also encouraged the museum to sell pieces of her bequest as necessary to acquire other works, which led the museum to expand its collection with such masterpieces as Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Bliss is celebrated in the lovely MoMA exhibit “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern,” continuing through March 29. Organized by Ann Temkin and Romy Silver-Kohn, the show features such works as Cezanne’s The Bather, Seurat’s At the Concert Européen (Au Concert Européen), Marie Laurencin’s Girl’s Head, Amedeo Modigliani’s Anna Zborowska, Picasso’s Woman in White, and Henri Matisse’s Interior with a Violin Case.

The centerpiece is The Starry Night, which, if you’re lucky, you will get to experience on your own, as it’s hanging in a different spot from its usual place, free of the usual mass of people in front of it, taking photos and videos, obstructing one another’s clear views and peaceful contemplation of one of the most famous canvases in the world.

Installation view, “Lillie P. Bliss and the Birth of the Modern” (photo by Emile Askey)

The show is supplemented with such ephemera as old catalogs, acquisition notices, pages from scrapbooks, photos of Bliss as a child, and a few rare letters, as Bliss requested that all her personal papers be destroyed shortly before her death in 1931 at the age of sixty-six. One key letter she sent to a National Academician is quoted in the MoMA book Inventing the Modern: Untold Stories of the Women Who Shaped The Museum of Modern Art, in which Bliss writes: “We are not so far apart as you seem to think in our ideas on art, for I yield to no one in my love, reverence, and admiration for the beautiful things which have already been created in painting, sculpture, and music. But you are an artist, absorbed in your own production, with scant leisure and inclination to examine patiently and judge fairly the work of the hosts of revolutionists, innovators, and modernists in this widespread movement through the whole domain of art or to discriminate between what is false and bad and what is sometimes crude, perhaps, but full of power and promise for the enrichment of the art which the majority of them serve with a devotion as pure and honest as your own. There are not yet many great men among them, but great men are scarce — even among academicians. The truth is you older men seem intolerant and supercilious, a state of mind incomprehensible to a philosopher who looks on and enjoys watching for and finding the new men in music, painting, and literature who have something to say worth saying and claim for themselves only the freedom to express it in their own way.”

Bliss did it her own way as well.

Clarence H. White, Belle da Costa Greene, platinum print, 1911 (courtesy the Clarence H. White Collection)

BELLE DA COSTA GREENE: A LIBRARIAN’S LEGACY
Morgan Library & Museum
225 Madison Ave. at 36th St.
Tuesday – Sunday through May 4, $13-$25
www.themorgan.org

“My friends in England suggest that I be called ‘Keeper of Printed Books and Manuscripts,’” Belle da Costa Greene told the New York Times in 1912. “But you know they have such long titles in London. I’m simply a librarian.”

Born Belle Marion Greener in 1879 in Washington, DC, Greene became the first director of the Morgan Library, specializing in the acquisition of rare books and manuscripts, a Black woman passing for white in a field dominated by men. Prior to her death in New York City in 1950 at the age of seventy, she destroyed all her diaries and private papers, but her correspondence with others paints a picture of an extraordinary woman breaking barriers personally and professionally as she came to be known as “the soul of the Morgan Library.”

Curated by Philip S. Palmer and Erica Ciallela, “Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy” consists of nearly two hundred items, from letters, photographs, yearbooks, and board minutes to illuminated manuscripts, jewelry, furniture, and books by Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William Butler Yeats, and Dante Alighieri in addition to canvases by Archibald J. Motley Jr., Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, Ḥabīb-Allāh Mashhadī, Albrecht Dürer, Henri Matisse, Jacques Louis David, and Thomas Gainsborough. Greene’s early holy grail was Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur; she was prepared to pay up to $100,000 for the work, printed by William Caxton in 1485, but won it for $42,000 at a 1911 auction.

Re-creation of Belle da Costa Greene’s office is centerpiece of Morgan exhibit (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Just as MoMA would not be what it is today without Lillie P. Bliss, the Morgan would not be the same without Greene. While at Princeton, she became friends with Morgan’s nephew Junius Spencer Morgan, who collected rare books and who recommended Greene to his uncle; J. P. Morgan hired her as a librarian in 1905, and she was appointed director in 1924. Her starting salary was $75 a month, but she was earning $10,000 a year by 1911.

The show is divided into sixteen sections, from “A Family Identity,” “An Empowering Education,” and “Questioning the Color Line” to “A Life of Her Own: Collector and Socialite,” “A Life of Her Own: Philanthropy and Politics,” and “Black Librarianship.” It details Greene’s childhood, her successful parents, her education, and her friendship with art historians Bernard and Mary Berenson; Greene had a long-term affair with Bernard, who had an open marriage with his wife. Following Morgan’s death in 1913, Greene worked closely with J.P.’s son, Jack, to expand the institution’s holdings. The centerpiece is a re-creation of Greene’s office, with her desk, swivel chair, and card catalog cabinet, all made by Cowtan & Sons, accompanied by a quote from a letter she wrote to Bernard in 1909: “I was busily engaged hunting up particulars of a certain book & half the Library was on my desk.”

One of the most heart-wrenching parts of the exhibit explores her relationship with her nephew and adopted son, Robert MacKenzie Leveridge, who died tragically in WWII.

The Morgan show is supplemented by three online sites that offer further information about Greene’s life and career: “Telling the Story of Belle da Costa Greene,” “Belle da Costa Greene and the Women of the Morgan,” and “Belle da Costa Greene’s Letters to Bernard Berenson.”

At the heart of it all is Greene’s dedication to her work. As she also told the Times in 1912, “I just have to accomplish what I set out to do, regardless of who or what is in my way.”

Like Bliss, Greene accomplished all that and more, in her own way.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

MANET / DEGAS

Edgar Degas, In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker), oil on canvas, 1875–76 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); Edouard Manet, Plum Brandy, oil on canvas, ca. 1877 (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon)

MANET / DEGAS
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Met Fifth Ave.
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through January 7, $30 (NY, NJ, CT residents pay-what-you-wish)
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org

In 2003, MoMA hosted the revelatory exhibition “Matisse Picasso,” a dramatic exploration of the documented, nearly half-century rivalry between the French Henri Matisse and the Spanish Pablo Picasso.

The Met is now taking a similar approach with “Manet/Degas,” a deep dive into the personal and professional relationship between French artists Édouard Manet (1832–83) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917), albeit with far less direct evidence. “Each was incredibly ambitious, and their sustained, thoughtful, and at times competitive observation of one another and their contemporaries would become vital to their enterprise,” Met director and CEO Max Hollein says in the below video. However, wall text points out, “Attempts to assess the relationship between Manet and Degas are complicated by the sparse record of their exchanges,” and the narrator on the audioguide explains, “Manet and Degas would continue to push each other to take the risks that would define their careers. But they left little evidence of their relationship in their papers. For example, though Degas speaks of Manet in his many letters to others, none of his letters is addressed to Manet. And for his part, Manet left just a few letters to Degas.”

The show opens with Manet’s Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette) and Degas’s Portrait of the Artist next to each other, setting up the side-by-side nature of the exhibit, which comprises more than 160 paintings and works on paper. The men, born two years apart, met in the Louvre in 1861–62 and both became friends with artist Berthe Morisot, who later married Manet’s younger brother, painter Eugène Manet. They both copied Diego Velázquez’s depiction of Infanta Margarita. Before they met, they had each made a self-portrait in the style of Filippino Lippi. Manet’s The Madonna of the Rabbit, after Titian hangs next to Degas’s The Crucifixion, after Mantegna. At the 1865 Salon, Manet’s Olympia created a furor, as opposed to Degas’s relatively unrecognized Scene of War in the Middle Ages; the paintings hang nearby each other at the Met.

In 1868–69, Degas made a series of drawings of Manet in addition to a painting of Manet relaxing on a couch, looking at Degas as Manet’s wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, played the piano. He gave the canvas to Manet, who quickly slashed off the right side so his wife’s face and the piano were no longer visible. Degas ended up keeping the work and hanging it on his wall, eventually adding a blank strip that perhaps signaled that he was going to restore the missing section, but he never did. Manet never drew or painted Degas, but he did paint Suzanne at the piano, perhaps as a response to Degas’s work. While Degas collected paintings and drawings by Manet, Manet did not seem to return the favor. Degas helped organize the first Impressionist exhibition, in 1874, while Manet decided not to participate.

Edouard Manet, Portrait of the Artist (Manet with a Palette), oil on canvas, ca. 1878–79 (private collection); Edgar Degas, Portrait of the Artist, oil on paper mounted on canvas, 1855 (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Other telling pairings at the Met include Manet’s Standing Man, after del Sarto and Degas’s Study of a Draped Figure, Manet’s Lorenzo Pagans and Auguste De Gas and Degas’s Music Lesson, Manet’s The Dead Toreador and Degas’s Scene from the Steeplechase: The Fallen Jockey, Manet’s The Races in the Bois de Boulogne (in which the figure at the lower right might be Degas) and Degas’s The False Start, Manet’s Plum Brandy and Degas’s In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) (which feature the same model, actress Ellen Andrée), Manet’s On the Beach, Boulogne-sur-Mer and Marine and Degas’s Beach Scene and Fishing Boat at the Entrance to the Port of Dives, Manet’s Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet and Degas’s Hilaire Degas, and Manet’s Woman with a Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair and Degas’s Woman Bathing in a Shallow Tub and Nude Arranging Her Hair.

The show is divided into such sections as “An Enigmatic Relationship,” “Artistic Origins: Study, Copy, Create,” “Family Origins and Tensions,” “Challenging Genres at the Salon,” “The Morisot Circle,” and “At the Racecourse,” tracing the many intersections of Manet’s and Degas’s personal and professional lives, which continued after Manet’s death in 1883 at the age of fifty-one, as Degas, who died in 1917 at eighty-three, purchased more of Manet’s work, highlighted by his unsuccessful attempt to bring together all fragments of Manet’s masterpiece The Execution of Maximilian.

But the Met, in collaboration with the Musées d’Orsay et de l’Orangerie, has done a marvelous job of bringing together the work of the these two giants, friends and rivals whose lives overlapped in captivating ways.

[Mark Rifkin is a Brooklyn-born, Manhattan-based writer and editor; you can follow him on Substack here.]

THE NEW MoMA

MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry shows off the new museums curatorial (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry shows off museum’s ambitious new approach (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

MoMA, Museum of Modern Art
11 West 53rd St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Opens Monday, October 21, $14-$25 (sixteen and under free)
212-708-9400
www.moma.org

Perhaps no single work of art encapsulates the newly renovated, revamped, and expanded Museum of Modern Art as much as Richard Serra’s 2015 Equal, which gets its own room on the fourth floor. Eight forged weatherproof steel blocks are stacked in pairs, four on four. Despite their title, they are not the same: the random patterns on their sides are not consistent, the light that gleams through gaps in the stacks reveals the blocks are not exact replicas of each other, and they are positioned on different sides. It announces a new MoMA, reopening today with much fanfare after closing on June 16 for four months of reinstallation, a reimagination and reevaluation of how to display items from its ever-growing collection of more than two hundred thousand works. At an intimate press preview, museum director Glenn D. Lowry used all the right words and phrases to bring MoMA into 2019 and beyond, including “a more global perspective,” “pluralism,” “dialogues,” and “diversity.”

He was standing in gallery 404, “Planes of Color,” carefully chosen as representative of the institution’s updated curatorial approach. Instead of being essentially chronological, the room combines painting and sculpture in a more complex way, creating what Lowry said is a “conversation through time and space.” Thus, brought together are an obvious grouping of Russian-born American artist Mark Rothko’s No. 10 and No. 5/No. 22, American artist Ad Reinhardt’s Number 107, and American artist Barnett Newman’s Abraham and Vir Heroicus Sublimis, along with the less-expected choices of Ukraine-born American artist Louise Nevelson’s Hanging Column from Dawn’s Wedding Feast and Indian artist Vasudeo S. Gaitonde’s exquisite Painting, 4. “I hope that my painting has the impact of giving someone, as it did me, the feeling of his own totality, of his own separateness, of his own individuality, and at the same time of his connection to others,” Newman said in a 1965 interview with David Sylvester. “If a meeting of people is meaningful, it affects both their lives.” The same goes for this meeting of artworks.

Maria Martins’s The Impossible, III tears apart conventional ideas of curation (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

In gallery 503, “Around Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” thirteen works by Pablo Picasso from 1905 to 1912 are joined by Louise Bourgeois’s 1947-53 Quarantania, I sculpture and Faith Ringgold’s 1967 painting American People Series #20: Die 1967, a Guernica-inspired canvas about race, class, and violence. One of the museum’s greatest hits, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, hangs in a corner, given no special prominence. Similarly, Vincent van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy, two other perennial favorites, are side by side on a far wall in gallery 501, along with turn-of-the-twentieth-century earthenware by George Ohr. The works on display will rotate every six months, although the classics will most likely always be on view, but not necessarily in the same place. “My ambition is to get past worrying about the canon,” Lowry said. “We’re shaking it up.”

The Worlds to Come gallery on the second floor was inspired by Jack Whitten’s Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant, an eight-panel acrylic canvas depicting a tattered America as if seen from space; it is accompanied by Trisha Donnelly’s Untitled video, Kara Walker’s ink and pencil on paper Christ’s Entry into Journalism, Michaela Eichwald’s Duns Scotus on artificial leather, Deana Lawson’s pigmented inkjet print Thai, and Nairy Baghramian’s styrofoam, aluminum, and cork Maintainers A, a wide range of disciplines and artists that the wall text puts in context of MoMA’s new curatorial decision-making: “Employing a range of forms and materials, some of these works address historical traumas and their present-day echoes, while others imagine a more hopeful future rooted in multiplicity and diversity. Purposefully open-ended, this grouping of works refuses a tidy summation of the art of our time.”

MoMA mixes artistic disciplines in revamped galleries (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

You can find the unexpected everywhere. An excerpt from Jacques Tati’s 1967 comedy Playtime can be viewed in gallery 417 through a piece of the facade from the 1952 UN Secretariat Building in a space dedicated to architecture. Alma Woodsey Thomas’s Fiery Sunset is in a gallery otherwise filled with paintings and sculptures by Henri Matisse. (Matisse’s The Swimming Pool gets its own room, as do Rosemarie Trockel’s Book Drafts and Joan Jonas’s Mirage.) The “Picturing America” gallery includes photographs by Dorothea Lange, Aaron Siskind, Rudy Burckhardt, Edward Weston, Walker Evans, and others alongside paintings by Edward Hopper, another example of the cross disciplines MoMA is now emphasizing.

Visitors to the second-floor contemporary galleries are greeted by Dara Birnbaum’s Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman video, complete with explosion; to the right are two dozen of Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, while to the left is Louise Lawler’s Does Andy Warhol Make You Cry?, a photo of Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe from a 1988 Christie’s auction. It’s a bold, if cheeky, way for MoMA to exclaim its dedication to women artists, blowing up the past.

Richard Serra’s 2015 Equal gets its own room in new MoMA (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Among what’s new are the Paula and James Crown Creativity Lab, where adults can learn about process and create their own art (kids can still drop in at the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Family Art Lab in the Education and Research Building), and the fourth-floor Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio, which will host live and experimental programming beginning with David Tudor’s immersive audio installation Rainforest V (variation 1); Tudor’s Forest Speech will be performed in the space October 24, 26, and 27 ($10-$15, 8:00) by Phil Edelstein, Marina Rosenfeld, Stefan Tcherepnin, Spencer Topel, and Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste as well as three days each in November and December by different sets of musicians.

The museum’s initial exhibitions are all culled from the collection, furthering MoMA’s goal of making more of it available to the public: “Taking a Thread for a Walk,” “The Shape of Shape Artist’s Choice: Amy Sillman,” “Energy,” “Projects 110: Michael Armitage,” “Haegue Yang: Handles” (which will be activated daily at 4:00), “Private Lives Public Spaces” (home movies from dozens of artists and filmmakers), “Surrounds 11: Installations,” “Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction ― The Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift,” “member: Pope.L, 1978–2001,” and “Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window.” Philippe Parreno’s immersive, site-specific Echo provides sound, light, and movement in the entries on both West Fifty-Third and Fifty-Fourth St., yet more evidence that art is everywhere, in this case putting the visitor at the very center. “It is nearly impossible to make people understand each other,” explained Maria Martins, whose spiky 1946 bronze sculpture The Impossible, III greets people in gallery 401, the theme of which is “Out of War.” With its focus on diversity, juxtapositional dialogues, rotating works, and reconsidered approach to curation, MoMA is trying to get people to understand art, and each other, a whole lot better, in ways that make sense in our current era.

THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO

Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and French director Henri-Georges Clouzot collaborate on thrilling film about creative genius

THE MYSTERY OF PICASSO (Le mystère Picasso) (Henri-Georges Clouzot, 1956)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Opens March 1
212-727-8110
filmforum.org
milestonefilms.com

Suspense master Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Mystery of Picasso, now playing at Film Forum in a beautiful 4K restoration from Milestone, is one of the most thrilling films ever made about art and the creative process. In the 1949 short Visit to Picasso, Belgian director Paul Haesaerts photographed Pablo Picasso painting on a glass plate. Picasso and his longtime friend Clouzot take that basic concept to the next level in The Mystery of Picasso, in which the Spanish artist uses inks that bleed through paper so Clouzot can shoot him from the other side; the works unfold like magic, evolving on camera seemingly without the genius present. “We’d give anything to have been in Rimbaud’s mind while he was writing ‘Le Bateau Ivre,’ or in Mozart’s while he was composing the Jupiter Symphony, to discover this secret mechanism that guides the creator in a perilous adventure,” Clouzot says at the beginning. “Thanks to God, what is impossible in poetry and music is attainable in painting. To find out what goes on in a painter’s head, you need to follow his hand. A painter’s adventure is an odd one!” It’s breathtaking as the pictures emerge, revealing Picasso’s remarkable command of line, altering images as he pleases with just a brushstroke or two.

Pablo Picasso races against the clock to complete a painting as cinematographer Claude Renoir captures it all

Most of the works are accompanied by glorious music by composer Georges Auric, ranging from bold fanfares and classical lilts to jazzy riffs. (Several drawings have no music so the sounds of Picasso’s brushstrokes can be heard, a score unto itself.) Picasso is seen several times in the film, which is in black-and-white except for the colors in the paintings: Before the credits, he paints at an easel, closely examining the work with penetrating wide eyes; a moment later, he appears in a cloud of smoke (from his cigarette); in the middle, shirtless, he shows off his impressive seventy-five-year-old physique, battling the clock as Clouzot announces that a reel is running out, another camera revealing the basic method employed by Clouzot and cinematographer Claude Renoir, the nephew of filmmaker Jean Renoir and grandson of Impressionist master Auguste Renoir; and, at the end, Picasso boldly signs the film, which was shot over three months in the summer at Studios de la Victorine in Nice. (Among those stopping by to check out the progress were Jean Cocteau, Jacques Prévert, and Luis Buñuel.) At another point Picasso decides that he wants to switch from ink on paper to oil on canvas.

“I haven’t gone below the surface yet. We should go deeper. Risk all. Try to see one picture turning onto another,” he says as Clouzot (The Wages of Fear, Les Diaboliques) and Renoir (The Golden Coach, The Spy Who Loved Me) change to CinemaScope. The result is La Plage de la Garoupe, which was shot over eight days using a stop-motion technique so editor Henri Colpi could remove Picasso from the scene, since he had to make it the traditional way, in front of the canvas. All of the works were supposed to be destroyed once the film was completed, but it is rumored that a few still exist. Colpi wrote in Letters to a Young Editor that Picasso had kept many of the drawings but they were damaged in an accident involving his cat. In the final shot, Centaur, a sculpture Picasso made from such studio materials as a lens box, a light stanchion, an easel, and boxes, can be seen in the background; it is currently in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Mystery of Picasso might not contain the artist’s finest works, it can feel repetitive even at seventy-five minutes, and it’s not all quite as spontaneous as it seems, but it offers a captivating look inside the mind of one of the most important and distinguished artists of the twentieth century.

IN THE YEAR OF THE GRIFTER

Metrograph series about grifters includes The Grifters

Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
December 14-22
212-660-0312
metrograph.com

Tales of hustlers, swindlers, con artists, scammers, flim-flammers, and the like have been part of cinema since the early days of the medium. We often find ourselves rooting for the snake-oil salesmen while believing that we would never fall for these elaborate, costly hoaxes. From December 14 to 22, Metrograph is presenting “In the Year of the Grifter,” consisting of sixteen flicks with complicated plots involving lots of fakery and fraud, dating from 1932 to 2013. The series begins with Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane reimagination, Mr. Arkadin, and continues with David Mamet’s House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner, Frank Borgaze’s Desire, Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, and Stephen Frears’s The Grifters, among others. It’s not quite a primo collection, but it has some real doozies. Don’t forget to keep looking over your shoulder while watching these flicks.

Orson Welles explores cinematic reality and artistic forgery in F for Fake

F FOR FAKE (Orson Welles, 1976)
Sunday, December 16, 6:00 & 10:15
metrograph.com

Orson Welles plays a masterful cinematic magician in the riotous F for Fake, a pseudo-documentary (or is it all true?) about art fakes and reality. Exploring slyly edited narratives involving art forger Elmyr de Hory, writer Clifford Irving, Spanish painter and sculptor Pablo Picasso, and reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, the iconoclastic auteur is joined by longtime companion Oja Kodar and a cast of familiar faces in a fun ride that will leave viewers baffled — and thoroughly entertained. Welles manipulates the audience — and the process of filmmaking — with tongue firmly planted in cheek as he also references his own controversial legacy with nods to such classics as Citizen Kane and The Third Man. It’s both a love letter to the art of filmmaking as well as a warning to not always believe what you see, whether in books, on canvas, or, of course, at the movies.

Stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his team thinks they’re invincible in The Wolf of Wall Street

THE WOLF OF WALL STREET (Martin Scorsese, 2013)
Friday, December 21, 7:00
Saturday, December 22, 1:00
metrograph.com

Based on Jordan Belfort’s 2007 memoir, The Wolf of Wall Street relates the rise and fall of a fast-talking, high-living stockbroker, played to the hilt by an impressive Leonardo DiCaprio. But Martin Scorsese’s picture, his fifth starring DiCaprio, has trouble walking that fine line between glorifying Belfort’s money, drugs, and women lifestyle and portraying him as a greedy con man who ransacked innocent people’s savings and ruined their lives. In 1987, Belfort gets a job working for rather strange LF Rothschild trader Mark Hanna (Matthew McConnaughey) and immediately gets a taste for the business; however, Black Monday strikes, and he soon finds himself selling penny stocks with a rag-tag group of losers out of a Long Island storefront run by a man named Dwayne (Spike Jonze). But he’s able to excel at the job, taking home big bucks and eventually opening his own firm, Stratton Oakmont, with right-hand man Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill). Nearly instant success leads to endless partying, strippers, prostitutes, dwarf tossing, cocaine, ludes, and absurdly lavish expenses that enrage Belfort’s father, Max (a hysterical Rob Reiner), when he goes over the books. But nothing can stop Jordan and Donnie as they rake in the dough and do whatever they want, seemingly without consequence, even when the Feds, led by FBI agent Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler), start sniffing around. Even when it does come crashing down, it still doesn’t seem to have too much of an effect on Belfort and his buddies, who keep feeling invincible.

Things get a little out of hand at Stratton Oakmont in Scorsese financial epic

Written by Terence Winter, who previously celebrated criminals in The Sopranos and currently on Boardwalk Empire — two cable series that deal with the good/evil delineation much better — The Wolf of Wall Street is far too long at three hours, and it features a surprising number of bad continuity and synching edits by longtime Scorsese collaborator Thelma Schoonmaker. And the soundtrack lacks the usual Scorsese power, found in such films as Goodfellas, which bears a strong thematic resemblance to Wolf. The large cast also includes Jean Dujardin as Swiss banker Jean-Jacques Saurel, Cristin Milioti as Belfort’s first wife, Margot Robbie as Belfort’s second wife, Joanna Lumley as her aunt, Jon Favreau as his lawyer, Jake Hoffman as Steve Madden, Sharon Jones as a singer, Fran Lebowitz as a judge, and private investigator Bo Dietl as private investigator Bo Dietl. The real Belfort, who recently took to Facebook to explain that he is using one hundred percent of his profits from the book and film to pay back the victims of his shady dealings, makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film as an emcee. Despite its drawbacks — even PETA has attacked the film for its treatment of animals — The Wolf of Wall Street, which was nominated for five Oscars, nails the feeding frenzy that was the financial fury of the late 1980s, which set the table for future economic disasters.

Barbara Stanwyck lures an unsuspecting Henry Fonda into her alluring trap in The Lady Eve

THE LADY EVE (Preston Sturges, 1941)
Tuesday, December 25, 6:15
Wednesday, December 26, 5:00 & 9:15
Monday, December 31, 6:00 & 10:00
metrograph.com

Barbara Stanwyck delivers one of her most nuanced and beguiling performances as the tough-talking title character in The Lady Eve. Usually lumped in with her classic screwball comedies, Preston Sturges’s black-and-white film, based on an original story by Irish playwright Monckton Hoffe (who was nominated for an Oscar), is much darker and slower than its supposed brethren. A brunette Stanwyck is first seen as Jean Harrington, a con artist looking to trick a wealthy man on a cruise ship. At her side is her father, “Colonel” Harrington (Charles Coburn), a gambler and a cheat. As soon as Jean sees rich ale scion Charles Pike (a wonderfully innocent Henry Fonda), she digs her claws into the shy, humble man, challenging the Hays Code as she shows off her gams and leans into him with a heart-pounding sexiness. Pike of course falls for, but when his right-hand man, Muggsy (William Demarest), discovers that she regularly preys on suckers, Charles is devastated. However, in this case, Jean’s feelings might actually be real, forcing her to go to extreme circumstances to try to get him back. Stanwyck is, well, a ball of fire as Jean/Eve, determined to win at all costs. Fonda, not usually known for his comedic abilities, is a riot as poor Hopsie, as Jean calls him; the looks on his face when she ratchets up the sex appeal are priceless, and a later scene when he keeps falling down at a party displays a surprising flair for physical comedy. The opening and closing credits feature a corny animated snake in the Garden of Eden; in The Lady Eve, Stanwyck offers the apple, and Fonda can’t wait to take a bite. And there’s nothing shameful about that.

Kay Francis, Miriam Hopkins, and Herbert Marshall are caught in quite a pickle in risqué Ernst Lubitsch classic

TROUBLE IN PARADISE (Ernst Lubitsch, 1932)
Saturday, December 29, 1:15
Sunday, December 30, 3:15
Monday, December 31, 4:00 & 8:00
metrograph.com

“Beginnings are always difficult,” suave thief Gaston Monescu (Herbert Marshall) says at the beginning of Trouble in Paradise, but it’s not difficult at all to fall in love with the beginning, middle, and end of Ernst Lubitsch’s wonderful pre-Code romantic comedy. It’s love at first heist for Gaston and Lily (Miriam Hopkins) as they try to outsteal each other on a moonlit night in Venice. Soon they are teaming up to fleece perfume heir Madame Mariette Colet (Kay Francis) of money and jewels as the wealthy socialite takes a liking to Gaston despite her being relentlessly pursued by the hapless François Filiba (Edward Everett Horton) and the stiff Major (Charles Ruggles). Displaying what became known as the Lubitsch Touch, the Berlin-born director has a field day with risqué sexual innuendo, particularly in the early scene when Gaston and Lily first meet (oh, that garter!) and later as Madame Colet’s affection for Gaston grows, along with Lily’s jealousy. Loosely based on the 1931 play The Honest Finder by Aladár László, which was inspired by the true story of Romanian con man George Manolescu, the 1932 film remained out of circulation for decades during the Hays Code, and it’s easy to see why.

IF EVERYTHING IS SCULPTURE WHY MAKE SCULPTURE? ARTIST’S CHOICE: PETER FISCHLI

Peter Fischli’s “Snowman” is centerpiece of exhibition in Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at MoMA (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

Museum of Modern Art
The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden
West 54th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Early hours: open daily 9:00 – 10:30 am, free
www.moma.org
online slideshow

Two years ago, the subversive DIY aesthetic of longtime collaborators Peter Fischli and David Weiss was on view at the Guggenheim in the engaging retrospective “How to Work Better.” Fischli has now headed to MoMA — Weiss passed away in 2012 — for the “Artist’s Choice” show “If Everything Is Sculpture Why Make Sculpture?” It’s the thirteenth in the three-decade-old series, which has previously turned over the curatorial reins to Mona Hatoum, Elizabeth Murray, David Hammons, Stephen Sondheim, and others, and is the first one to take place in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, where the Swiss artist has created an intervention that will delight regular visitors to the outdoor space, who will notice subtle and not so subtle changes, while also charming newcomers to the garden. Only one of Katharina Fritsch’s “Figurengruppe (Group of Figures)” stands on the main level, “Yellow Madonna,” the others apparently spending the summer in the Hamptons. Ben Vautier’s word painting on wood, “If Everything Is Sculpture Why Make Sculpture?,” is a rare example of a painting hanging outside, not concerned about the elements ruining it. Only the first three bronze versions of Henri Matisse’s exquisite “The Back” adorn the north wall, the ghostly outline of the missing fourth clearly visible. Fischli and Wade Guyton’s “Untitled Aspen Wall Nr. 6” is an out-of-place gallery wall with nothing hanging on it. Fischli has left in several mainstays of the garden, including Aristide Maillol’s “The Mediterranean” and “The River,” Hector Guimard’s “Entrance Gate to Paris Subway,” Pablo Picasso’s “She-Goat,” and Isa Genzken’s “Rose II” while adding Tony Smith’s “Moondog 1964,” Herbert Ferber’s “Roof Sculpture with S Curve, II,” and Robert Breer’s “Osaka I” white dome.

Peter Fischli and Wade Guyton’s gallery wall sits empty in MoMA sculpture garden (photo by twi-ny/mdr)

The centerpiece of the exhibit is “Snowman,” a human-size, frost-covered copper snowman in a large vitrine with a special coolant system to prevent it from melting in the summer heat. It’s adapted from a 1990 commission Fischli and Weiss made for a thermic power plant in Saarbrücken, Germany, that used its own energy to keep the snowman frozen. It’s a big crowd pleaser while also continuing the artists’ DIY sensitivity — as Fischli has stated, the snowman is a “sculpture that almost anyone can make” — and questioning of just what art is. “The snowman may be a metaphor for our climate crisis, but it’s running on electricity, so it’s a contradiction, because it’s also contributing to global warming,” Fischli told the New Yorker last summer, “but the piece is about taking care of something and protecting it . . . and being dependent on something. Someone else has to take care of him. And the contradiction between artificial and nature, because I’m making snow from a machine.” Oh, and be sure to pick up a brochure in one of Fischli’s specially designed boxes. The snowman and other works selected by Fischli (by Franz West, Mary Callery, Elie Nadelman, and William Tucker) will remain on view in the garden through next spring. You can also visit the garden on Thursday nights when MoMA presents concerts at 6:30 with Combo Chimbita on July 26, OSHUN on August 2, Xenia Rubinos on August 9, Kemba on August 16, Zenizen on August 23, and Mutual Benefit on August 30.

IRVING PENN: CENTENNIAL

Irving Penn, “Pablo Picasso at La Californie, Cannes, 1957,” platinum-palladium print, 1985 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

Met Fifth Avenue
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gallery 199
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Through July 30, $12-$25
212-535-7710
metmuseum.org
www.irvingpenn.org

One of the twentieth century’s most influential and innovative photographers, Irving Penn would have turned one hundred this past June. The Met more than does justice to his legacy in the sparkling exhibition “Irving Penn: Centennial,” continuing at the Met Fifth Avenue through July 30. Both Irving and his younger brother, Arthur, knew how to tell stories visually; while Penn did it through still photography, Arthur was a successful stage and screen director, helming such films as Bonnie and Clyde and The Miracle Worker and such Broadway productions as Wait Until Dark and Golden Boy. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn tried his hand at drawing, painting, and designing before making a name for himself as a fashion photographer at Vogue, shooting 165 covers from 1943 to 2009, when he died at the age of ninety-two. In addition to fashion, Penn photographed celebrities and working people, cigarettes and other trash he found on the street, nudes, flowers, vessels, and people from Dahomey, New Guinea, Peru, and Morocco. The Met show features nearly two hundred photos, arranged in series, that reveal the breadth of Penn’s remarkable ability to capture the essence of his subject with exquisite simplicity while treating them all with equal weight, whether a Hollywood star, an Issey Miyake staircase dress, a muddy glove, a naked body, or a shoe. In a 1939 silver gelatin print, Penn, who did not like being the focus of attention himself, rarely giving interviews and spurning self-portraiture, is seen in shadow, taking a photo of the shadows of a key and a gun on a New York City street. In his Corner Portraits, he asked famous subjects to do whatever they wanted in a makeshift tight corner in his studio, resulting in iconic shots of Marcel Duchamp, Joe Louis, Truman Capote, and Elsa Schiaparelli. In “Balenciaga Sleeve,” model Régine Debrise’s face is starkly cut off at the top of the frame, breaking with tradition. In “Rochas Mermaid Dress,” model Lisa Fonssagrives, Penn’s wife of forty-two years, stands just off-center on a backdrop that Penn doesn’t hide; in fact, the backdrop is on view in the exhibit, along with one of Penn’s Rolleiflex cameras. Penn reveals his experimental side with four prints of “Girl Drinking,” taken of Mary Jane Russell in 1949 but not printed until 1960, 1976, 1977, and 2000, each slightly different.

Irving Penn, “Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972,” platinum-palladium print, 1975 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation / © The Irving Penn Foundation)

As you make your way through the show, you’ll also come upon pictures of men, women, and children from Cuzco, Peru, including a porter, two Quechuan Indians, and a street vendor wearing multiple hats; a spread-eagled Salvador Dalí; a hand in a white glove holding a black shoe; a color still-life of parts of after-dinner games, with a die, playing cards, a chess horse, and a poker chip; a group of fleshy nudes in which the folds of the bodies form abstract shapes, taken in the 1950s but not printed until 1980 because of pornographic concerns; stunning portraits of Richard Burton, Colette, Pablo Picasso, Ingmar Bergman (with his fingers pressing down on his closed eyes), and Audrey Hepburn; a New Guinea tribesman with a large nose disc; covered women from Morocco; a 1986 color print of a mouth with numerous shades of lipstick, shot for a L’Oreal campaign, that seems to prefigure the main advertising image for Jonathan Demme’s 1991 The Silence of the Lambs,; and even a 1999 ink drawing reminiscent of Morandi. The exhibition also includes a rare video taken by Fonssagrives-Penn showing her husband in Morocco in 1971, shooting portraits in his portable studio. Through it all, Penn never complicates the background, instead focusing on the object itself. “A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it; it is in one word, ‘effective,’” Penn once said. The Met show, held in conjunction with a promised gift of 187 photographs from the Irving Penn Foundation, accomplishes all that and more.