It had been my
intention to see this exhibition once and then perhaps only briefly, thinking
that it probably did not have the importance of the major Goya Exhibition
downstairs. Instead I have now seen it three times. (I recently spent two full
days in the museum: one ticket covers two visits and I am not one to waste an
opportunity.) Not having checked my calendar when I made my plans I was unaware
until I arrived at the museum that my first visit fell on Armistice Day. The
bad news here is that it seems everyone in Boston with small children considered the
holiday the ideal time to take their toddlers on a cultural jaunt. To my way of
thinking there is nothing more disturbing in a museum than precocious toddlers
demanding their parents’ undivided attention, unless it is the squeaky wheel of
a stroller. In my experience the Boston MFA is the only museum in the country,
nay the world, where the presence of loud toddlers is encouraged. I could go
on…however…despite the attending commotion, I had my planned visit. Nice.
Late in the morning of the second
day, I decided to run back upstairs to see this again hoping that things might
have calmed down. This time I found that a tour was just beginning for a large
group of interested women. Having seen the video on the museum web page, I
realized that one of the two curators, Michelle Finamore, was the tour leader.
So I used my talents for blending in. Thus there was some good back-story about
the making of this exhibition.
There are sixteen gowns in the
exhibition, a vitrine with some gorgeous jewelry that was either worn by the
stars in films or was owned by them. (Apparently Gloria Swanson almost always
used her own stuff in her films, none of it cheap). There are some lighting
sketches and dress design sketches, five movie star portraits by Edward
Steichen, including the well known Garbo with her hands over her head pressing
her skull, and a film loop playing scenes from the various films so that we can
see not only what the dresses look like up close and on the screen but how they
hang on the body and how they move. In keeping with the period of the gowns
chosen, the 30’s and 40’s, the palette of the exhibition is in shades of gray
(silver) nicely showing off the gowns
that are gold, beige, silver, black, white and gray. There is one in yellow.
Distinct
from mere costumes, these garments are what was meant in the film credits as
“Gowns by…” It was Hollywood ’s
attempt to influence fashion and apparently no expense was spared. Edith Head
described this era as one of luxury before there was budgets and economy and
the museum does a good job of incorporating that into the design of the
exhibition.
Ms
Finamore told us that it had been assumed that this would be an easy exhibition
to put together: get on the phone, get a few loans, fit them to the manikins et
voila! an exhibition. Instead it was a project of ongoing headaches. Many of
the items had been in storage for many, many years and needed serious refreshing.
Some of them had not been well cared for. The lame gowns had areas of tarnish. The
sheer gown worn in the film by Joan Crawford was missing its undergarment and
one had to be made. And so the repairs were made, more cleaning than had been
anticipated was done, etc. etc. etc.
In
the end it is an excellent presentation and if I had not been told of the
backstage problems I would not have guessed. Irene for Greer Garson, Robert
Kallosh for Norma Shearer, Schiaparelli for Mae West, Howard Greer, Rene Hubert
for Gloria Swanson, Adrian for Harlow, Crawford, and Garbo, Travis Banton for Dietrich, Lombard, and Anna
Mae Wong, And Edith Head for Betty Hutton and Betty Grable.
This
last item, last also in that it was at the top of the curving stairway used as
the setting, was a real surprise for me. I know Betty Grable from having grown
up on her Fox musicals and in my early New
York days seeing her in the art house revivals of RKO
films. I had not known that she once starred in a Paramount
picture and that she had been dressed by Edith Head. And a gorgeous gown it is…the
curator said that in repairing it she was able to study it and see that it was one
of the most beautifully constructed dresses she had ever seen. (It is the gold
lame with the crossed fabric over the bodice and around the neck.) Whereas at
RKO Betty was a featured chorine, dancing at one time with Edward Everret
Horton, and at Fox the wholesome replacement for Alice Faye, generally dressed
in a rather chaste manner (with the exception of Shimmy Like My Sister Kate),
at Paramount
she was draped to display a really gorgeous, sexy female body. Shakespeare was
right, clothes do make the man, or in this case… A gown such as this in an
exhibition gives us the opportunity to see the details that went into creating
a commodity …the star …and to understand how a consistently presented image
made it seem to be true.
Yes,
image. Downstairs in the Scarf
Center Hollywood a couple of times but he never liked
the work he did there. He prided himself on capturing a subject’s true
personality and he always felt that the Hollywood
stars had been trained to never let their hair down: they were always image,
never persons. (But even though he never liked the photographs he had them
printed, sold them, and gave them to collections. But that is another story,
also about celebrity.)
There
are two gowns in the collection by Coco Chanel, one worn by Ina Clair,
privately owned but not, I believe, worn in a film. One is your basic little black
Chanel dress trimmed in tons of jewels. (This required devising a means of
support for the fabric for this showing.) Despite this Chanel was considered
too subdued for Hollywood
and so she never made inroads there.
At
the end of the tour during Q’s and A’s, I asked how the gowns had been made to
fit on what seemed to be contemporary, standard department store manikins. They
made it appear as if each of these women had been six feet tall whereas in
reality most of them were very, very small. The curator agreed, reminding us
that Mae West hardly cleared four foot ten. (A pair of her high platform shoes
are in one of the virtrines.) As she had the actresses’ measurements all of the
manikins had had to be altered, some of them having to have their legs
shortened. Still, some of the manikins were on tip toe as if they had been
intended to have been shown in very high heels, and some of the hems were four
to six inches off the floor whereas on screen they might have “puddled” or been
lifted as one walked across the room.
And
I could see some of the alterations, trims and paddings that had been done.
Recently I watched all of the Jean Harlow films from Netflix …I had hardly ever
seen her in anything other than Dinner at Eight. What shocked me, having seen
her in so many bias cut form fitting satin gowns from the front, in Dinner and
in stills, was that seeing her in the round in various movies she was discovered
to have very large buttocks …unusually so, almost as if she wore a bustle. Sure
enough her manikin here had been padded out in just that area to make the dress
behave as designed. From my thirty years in the NYC film industry I know that
the camera never lies and so one has to be very, very careful about what is put
in front of it. On film cheap dime store jewelry will look like cheap dime
store jewelry…thus Gloria used the real thing. On the other hand the camera
cannot always be placed to erase a fact and Harlow’s “dairy air”, as they say
in Wisconsin ,
has been immortalized in celluloid.
Later
in the day as I was making my way out of the museum I passed by the gallery
again and seeing that it was empty I went inside for a moment of quite inspection.
Often
I think too much is made of Hollywood
…this one was Great! … that one was A Genuis! And much of that kind of talk is
in regard to forgettable films much like those referenced in this exhibition.
Yet there have been really fine contributions worthy of our further
consideration …designers, composers, cinematographers, still photographers
…other than Karsh. By digging through stacks of material, as has been done here,
things that perhaps we should not forget have been reclaimed.
However;
over my fifty years of museum going I have become increasingly aware of the
dumbing down of our cultural heritage, that lessened divide between high and
low art, fine art and pop art. Granted a museum might be expected to have a
collection of historically important costumes and to display those once in a
while. But when the Alexander McQueen fashion exhibition becomes the largest
audience drawing event in the history of the Metropolitan Museum, forcing (?)
them to stay open until midnight to accommodate the crowds, we might begin to
ask if this is fair to Goya downstairs, to Michelangelo, Titian, Rembrandt, or Degas
…or to us, the public. Doesn’t an extremely successful exhibition devoted to
what we wear to parties indicate that we are a rather more than shallow society?
The
danger is that we are a conformist society. And nothing shows this better than
our museums. From one coast to the other they all look alike, they all have
expansions by the same coterie of modern architects, they all show similar work
by the same 37 modern artists in exactly the same configurations…the Museum of Modern Art Boston .
(Karsh learned photography in Boston
and educated himself at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Public Library: his
inclusion here is appropriately regional.) That this exhibition, however, is in
Boston speaks,
I fear, to the times, the conformist times, in which we live.
This
is not to say that it is not a good exhibition. It’s just that somehow it
wasn’t “right”. I had the same response at LACMA when I saw an exhibition of American
furniture and it was all Philadelphia
and Boston Chippendale. What did the people of early Los Angeles sit on? Why not find out and show
that? In our museums we have to
rediscover our regional roots: without the regional we denigrate our history. Those should be the easy exhibitions. On
the other hand, it’s work: who said it had to be easy?
On
the museum web page there is a nice video about the exhibition and at the
bottom of the page there are five or so reviews that have additional material
regarding The Stars and many more photographs.
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