Alexander McQueen and The Cone Sisters

Now there's an odd trio for you - two elderly Victorian ladies and a contemporary avant garde designer - but all three were actually quite ahead of their time.

Ever so long ago, in mid-July, this was the way we spent our Saturday in New York - visiting the McQueen show at the Metropolitan Museum and the Cone Sisters exhibition at the Jewish Museum. I have to hand it to myself for having the persistence to continue with posting about this trip because I've dragged it out so long. Nevertheless, I'm determined to finish. (click pix to enlarge)

Metropolitan Museum
We (Binnie Birstein, Greg Wright and I) started off the day with an early train to NYC from Connecticut. When the cab dropped us off in front of the Met, there was a long line waiting to get into the museum. We raced upstairs to the McQueen line as soon as we entered, but the crowd behind the ropes waiting to get in was already in the hundreds. Greg and I were dismayed (to put it politely) and would have given it up, but the Binster was determined.

Crowd waiting for entry to McQueen show (image from the internet)

She decided that she would wait in line while Greg and I looked at exhibits downstairs and she would call us when she reached the doorway. Although we didn't really agree, she was not to be moved, so Greg and I went about our business.

Greg with the Ancient Greek krater showing a painter applying encaustic to a statue
of Herakles

The first stop, but of course, was the krater of the encaustic painter that Greg had not seen in person before. He was so happy to be there. You can see that he is beaming.

Greg with the Fayumn portrait of the boy  Eutyches

In this photo, Greg seems to have turned into a Fayum portrait himself

Anyway, we happily visited several galleries in the antiquities wing for an hour or so while Binnie waited upstairs in line. Then we went to an information desk to ask where the exhibition of Richard Serra drawings was located. While we were standing there waiting, I noticed a sign that said if you joined the museum, you and all the members of your party could be admitted to the McQueen exhibit without waiting. I was incredulous and made sure that I was reading it correctly. Why hadn't we known about this before? Membership was $70 and Greg and I agreed to split the cost. We stood in another longish line to get a membership and with our temporary pass, we texted Binnie. She met us upstairs and we went into the exhibition with the membership pass.


Alexander McQueen, "Savage Beauty"
“You’ve got to know the rules to break them. That’s what I’m here for, to demolish the rules but to keep the tradition.”  - Alexander McQueen

Was it worth the wait and the $70 is probably what you're wondering? Overall, I would say yes, it was. I am certainly no fashionista and Project Runway is the closest I come to being concerned with fashion, however, I do think that McQueen was an artist who was closer to a sculptor than a designer. His mastery of tailoring was superb, but more than that, his imaginative innovation in conception and use of materials was quite incredible. Following are some examples.

Dress made from shellacked razor clam shells he first found on a beach.

Dress made from medical slides stained to look like blood on top and
dyed ostrich feathers feathers on the bottom

Coiled corset made from aluminum 1999-2000

Dress of woven leather, neckpiece of pheasant feathers with resin vulture skulls

Leather shaped corset with horsehair skirt

Spine corset made of cast silver

Here is an 8-minute video narrated by Andrew Bolton of The Costume Institute, curator of the exhibition. This will show you the exhibition gallery by gallery. (For more photos of each gallery and info on the designs, here's the link to the Met's blog on the exhibition.)




Seeing the exhibition was not a great experience in that it was so crowded that it was hard to get close to the pieces and see the detail. It was also much darker than in the video and I found the soundtrack annoying. But despite all that, I am glad I saw it. I had no idea of who he was or what he had accomplished in his short, rather sad life.

Isabella Blow with Alexander McQueen early in the fashion game

One blog (which apparently is stronger on fashion than punctuation) gives his story as follows: "Son of a taxi cab driver he dropped out of school at age 16 and went to work on Savile Row as a cutter and tailor at : Anderson & Sheppar, Gieves & Hakes and then Romeo Gigli. McQueen finished his education and graduated in 1994 with a Master’s degree in fashion design from London’s Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Isabella Blow legendary fashion guru discovered Alexander and purchased his entire graduating collection, which helped him make industry connections."

By 2006, he had markedly changed his appearance and was dressing and
hobnobbing with fashion icon Sarah Jessica at a Met gala

When I saw the shoes and hair from his spring 2010 collection (image below), I couldn't believe it and actually wrote a blog post about how horrifying I found it. However, seeing everything in context makes me understand it better, even though I still think those shoes are pretty devastating.

Spring 2010 collection on the runway. The lobster claw shoes horrified me.

Greg and I went through the exhibition together and looked pretty closely at things. We noticed that the first dress in the shot above was called the "bee dress" and I found an image of it by itself (this gallery was about the influence of Nature on McQueen).

The gold-colored hexagons on the hips are separate paillettes 

Alexander McQueen committed suicide at age 40 on February 11, 2010, shortly after the death of his mother. R.I. P.

Read the NY Times story about the final few hours of the show here.

“Fashion should be a form of escapism, and not a form of imprisonment, I wasn’t born to give you a twin set and pearls.” - Alexander McQueen

Claribel, the eldest and one of the first female doctors, and Etta Cone

The Cone Sisters at the Jewish Museum: Collecting Matisse and Modern Masters

After a visit to the sculpture show on the Met's roof (underwhelming), a brief rest and then an incredibly expensive but tiny lunch in the Met's restaurant, we hiked it up to the Jewish Museum to see an exhibition about the Cone sisters' collection.

Etta bought the first five paintings in 1898 to decorate their apartment, but after the sisters met Gertrude and Leo Stein, they discovered Matisse in Paris in 1905, began collecting his work, and eventually owned 500 of his works, making theirs the largest and most comprehensive collection of Matisse's works in the world. On their death, the collection was donated to the Baltimore Museum and that museum has put together the loan of 50 pieces for the show at the Jewish Museum.

Matisse: Interior, Flowers and Parakeets, 1924, part of the Cone collection

Matisse: Large Reclining Nude, 1935

The Cones also collected about 100 works by Picasso and had extensive collections of lace, textiles and jewelry. This was another very crowded exhibition and it was difficult to see the works. The most interesting part to me was not the paintings but the jewelry and the handwritten letters between the sisters and with Matisse and Picasso. There was also a short film about the sisters, their relationship with Matisse and their collection. This show runs until September 25th so there is still time to see it. Here's another good link.

The Cone sisters' apartment showing their extensive collection of art

Maira Kalman
After looking around the rather compact Cone exhibition and seeing the film, we went upstairs to an exhibition of works by Maira Kalman. I like her witty drawings and ironic commentary but I have to say that I was about done in by the time I got there.

Maira and Pete by Maira Kalman

Maira has done many covers for The New Yorker and writes a blog for the magazine

Viewing her work and the collection of objects she put together required some intimate looking, ironic interpretation and a lot more attention than I was capable of giving, so I'm afraid I really couldn't do it justice, but if you are a fan of Maira's, you probably would have loved it because there are many small works to look at. Unfortunately, it ended July 31st.

And so, dragging ourselves slowly and reluctantly in the heat, we made our way to a coffee shop where Greg and I told Binnie we wanted to cut our plans short and go home to Connecticut. We are just not the troopers that the Binster is, and that's all there is to it. Luckily, we revived enough after the train ride to have dinner in Binnie's favorite Chinese restaurant before we called it a day.

The Studio as Classroom

A big shout-out to the Smith College class that came to my studio Tuesday and today to experiment first-hand with encaustic in their Historic Methods and Materials class. Ten students participated along with instructor David Dempsey plus Sarah Belchetz-Swenson and Phoebe Weil, two other artists who teach some of the materials.

Studio set up before class arrived

I put together a Power Point presentation for them on Tuesday at the Smith College Museum and then we adjourned to my studio. I gave a brief overview of some techniques and spent a longer time showing them in more detail how the Fayum portraits were probably painted. Each of the students and instructors got to try their hand at painting with the four-color palette of red and yellow ochres, black and white. We used the newly-streamlined horn tool from R&F on the woodburning tool set-up with the regulator.

Fayum portrait set-up today. You can see at the back of the table the portrait of me that we worked on Tuesday along with the black and white photo we modeled it from.

The revamped Fayum portrait I painted for show and tell

Once they got their hands on the materials, everyone was very interested and industrious. They worked very hard at their projects but seemed to have fun at it too. None had worked with encaustic previously.

Here are some examples of student work:

This one was painted by David based on the book cover of Ancient Faces

A good time was had by all - and now on to the next thing.

Tuesday at the Conference

On Tuesday I attended Homage to Fayum, an all-day workshop taught by Francisco Benitez at the Fourth Annual Encaustic Conference. This was terrific and Francisco a/k/a Paco is a great teacher.

Those Fayum portraits are so compelling that they are admired throughout the world and leave many people wondering how they were made. Paco has spent a lot of time researching them and other ancient works in Greece and Italy, and in this class he explained that the portraits were painted with just four earth (mineral) colors: red ochre, yellow ochre, black (from ash) and white (powdered gypsum or powdered calcium carbonate). Francisco was a visiting artist at R & F and demonstrated the process there. The R & F colors that we used in our workshop were Mars Red, Mars Yellow Light, Mars Black and a mixture of Titanium White and Neutral White.

Above: One of the original portraits found in the Fayum district of Egypt (now in The Metropolitan Museum, NY) 125-50 A.D., encaustic on wood, 14 5/8” x 7 7/8”


Right: A mummy portrait in place on a mummy (This mummy and portrait are dated to 80-100 A.D. from the Fayum district of Egypt. The portrait is encaustic on limewood.) The portraits were painted to depict deceased people. Whether they were done earlier in life when the person was still youthful or made as idealized portrayals after death is unknown.

I'm reviewing this information for you so that you will have the context in mind for the work that Paco has been able to analyze and the process he has recreated.

It has been difficult to discover exactly how the ancients worked because so few tools and no real treatises have been found about it. One of the few finds of artist's tools was made in northern France with the discovery of the tools of a Greek woman artist.

These are ancient spatula-type tools called "cauderia" in Latin. The ancient process was to work vertically and apply the melted wax with a brush or spatula and fuse it by bringing near a cage containing hot coals mounted on the end of a stick. (This so reminds me of Jasper Johns' method of a hot plate on a stick for fusing.)

There are three processes that Paco uses in his contemporary work: a brush in one hand and a heat gun in the other, a heated tool connected to electric power, a non-electric cold tool that can be used alone or with a heat gun or even a hair dryer.

He begins his works by preparing a cradled panel with rabbitskin glue pigmented to a dark greenish black. He lets this dry overnight. and the next day he makes a sketch on the panel with charcoal or conte. He applies a coat of encaustic medium to preserve the sketch and seal in the rabbitskin glue.

The beginning colors are a cool dark, mixed from black and yellow ochre, and a warm dark, mixed from black and red ochre. A sketch is made on the greenish black ground with the warm dark (reddish) so that it is visible.

Francisco Benitez did this sketch of an eye in our workshop. The greenish black in the center is the rabbitskin glue ground. The darkest color is the reddish black mixed with black and red ochre. The red color that will underlay flesh tones is mixed with red and yellow ochres.

Francisco Benitez blending colors and fusing paint with an electric tool.

Working on the sketch with a brush and heat gun.

The process is to work from dark to light. (A procedure known as tenebrism.) All the skin tones are underlaid with a red mixed from red ochre, yellow ochre and black. The whites and light yellows are laid on only at the end of the process as the volume of the figure emerges from darkness. Note that the tools or blending brushes both blend the colors together to give volume in the portrait and at the same time fuse the encaustic with heat.

Hot tools are cast tips that are attached to handles with temperature-controlling regulators. They are the type of tools used for woodburning and only the heads are different. R & F Paint is working with Sculpture House to manufacture the specialized heads, which will be available in August.

Cold tools - Many of these tools are used in sculpture and are currently available from Sculpture House.

This is an unfinished portrait that Paco painted in his demo class earlier in the conference.

Here is a closeup of the portrait showing the modeling and marks made from the heated tools.

This is our model Arielle (I hope I have the spelling correctly.) who sat for us all day long. She was also the sitter for Paco's sketch above.

Here is my portrait completed in the workshop. I haven't painted a portrait in 20 years so my modelling leaves a lot to be desired, but I had a lot of fun mixing color with just the four hues. It's amazing how much variety you can get with such a limited palette. My color does not follow the standard of the Greek painters who used much more yellowish skin tones. I think I'll keep working on this portrait and see if I can push back that Jay Leno chin in my painting.

And just to show the wonderful results that can be achieved by a master of this technique and a beautiful painter, here is one of Francisco Benitez's finished portraits from his website.

Epithimia, encaustic on panel, 24" x 20"

I enjoyed this workshop a lot even though, or maybe because, it was so different from my way of working and the works that I usually produce. Sometimes it's really beneficial to make an extreme redirection to appreciate what you already have.

Post Post-Conference
Julie Shaw Lutts, a conferee (and a member of New England Wax, I might add) graciously invited post-conferees to a barbecue at her home in Salem on Tuesday evening. She has a gorgeous Architectural Digest-type home located on a marsh in the next town over from Beverly.

The setting looking out from Julie's yard.

The food was absolutely delicious and the deserts were to die for. Many of them were intensely chocolate, including the birthday cake that Julie made for Sarah Bartlett, her friend and one of the conferees.

Sitting on the lawn in Julie's yard. (Thea Haubrich in the foreground.) Through the trees in the distance is one of the coves on the waters of the Atlantic Ocean in Salem.

This was quite an end to the conference for me. All the chocolate that I consumed was enough to keep me wide awake for the two-hour drive back home to western Massachusetts, and I barely had to sing to keep my eyes open. I was mighty glad to see my little homestead and to sleep in my own bed last night, but I sure did have fun at the conference.

Monday at the Conference

My orb panel - the final product in today's post-conference workshop, Off the Wall: Encaustic in Three Dimensions, with Miles Conrad.


Miles put on his usual wonderful workshop. I really loved playing in wax all day with different materials and seeing the unexpectedly beautiful products we made.

Our class orb installation

Each of us made about 10 orbs from various materials that Miles provided. After our first few experiments, we each chose one piece and then we hung them in a grid and arranged them into an installation. The point was to get us to see how well these pieces work as multiples and also to notice how color, shape and volume play off each other in these pieces.

I had a wonderful time in the class chatting with friends and experimenting. I could tell you lots more about it and show you pictures, but I've been burning the candle at both ends and I'm nearly extinguished, so I'm calling it a day. Tomorrow I'm taking my final workshop with Francisco Benitez, Homage to Fayum, in which he demonstrates the encaustic painting techniques used in the ancient Fayum portraits, and we learn how to make contemporary paintings using those techniques and paint colors. I know it will be fabulous. Tomorrow I will not have a chance to post because I am driving back home right after the workshop so you will have to wait until Wednesday to get the final report.

Meanwhile I am leaving you with a fabulous image of Miles Conrad and a friend of his.