EXTREME CLOTHING
Costume Art (Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute)
The Costume Institute at the Met Museum has new space on the main floor. It’s spacious and easy to locate and a real plus for visitors; the old space was so tucked away it almost required crumbs to navigate to and from. Costume Art is the inaugural exhibition and focuses on the interplay between clothing and the human body.
Overall, I found the exhibit a mix of weird, wonderful, grotesque, and fascinating. Each costume is paired with a piece of art from the museum’s collection, sometimes a small pen and ink sketch. It’s easy to overlook the accompanying art, and only occasionally did I really pay attention to it.
In some dresses, you see how the body’s organs and circulatory system have been studied and designed on clothing over the years. There are also examples of what the bustle on a women’s dress did to enhance the buttocks, along with numerous styles of maternity garments.
A few of the gowns are beautiful, but this exhibit focuses more on aspects of design, construction, unusual materials and techniques than on sheer beauty. The exhibit is so large that trying to seeing everything is overwhelming. I didn’t love it, but I’m glad we saw it.
PRIVATE ART—AN UNEXPECTED TREAT
Sotheby’s New York
Several years ago, the Chief Penguin and I visited Christie’s auction house in Rockefeller Center to see art from private collections that was going to be sold at auction. Last week, our son suggested we visit Sotheby’s to view some outstanding works before their upcoming auction sales. Sotheby’s now owns the Breuer building on Madison Avenue, former home of the Whitney Museum, and for several years the temporary site of the Frick Museum. This grand space has been divided up into many smaller galleries. During public hours, anyone can walk in and wander the rooms, quietly oh-ing and aah-ing over previously unseen works.
Nearly everything is part of a private collection, and each has a description and an estimated auction price. Being close to works that may command bids in the tens and twenties of millions might provoke a gasp or two. In fact, the stunning Mark Rothko painting below (8 feet in height) this week topped that auction sale at $85.8 million.
We toured all five floors and saw works by Georgia O’Keeffe, Andy Warhol, Modigliani, Renoir, John Singer Sargent, Gustav Klimt, Magritte, and others. I especially liked the man with his pipe and the gorgeous Klimt portrait too.
Plus a small Edward Hopper painting of the lighthouse on Monhegan Island, Maine, a scene spot we’ve visited.
WATCHING: GOLD AND GREED
The Gold (Masterpiece Theater)
The largest heist of gold ever took place in November 1983. Gold worth about 26 million pounds was stolen from a warehouse near Heathrow Airport, London, in what became known as the Brink’s-Mat robbery. First aired on BBC in 2023, and then offered on PBS in 2025, The Gold is a series about this astonishing feat and the detectives assigned to find out where the gold went and who had it.
This semi-documentary is not action-packed, but rather portrays a dogged, diligent process of following up questionable leads, finding trails that have grown cold, arresting slippery characters, and then not always having enough solid evidence yet to charge them. It’s also a study of the criminal lowlife of some south London and Kent neighborhoods, of bent cops who provide protection, and of a lawyer and others sucked in by the chance of making easy money with little effort. There are lots of characters involved and many strands that aren’t initially tied together.
Hugh Bonneville of Lord Grantham fame in Downton Abbey plays Brian Boyce, the tenacious overall head of the investigation. We watched all six episodes, thinking everything would be resolved, only to discover that Season 2 won’t be available here until later this year. I found the series fascinating despite its low production quality.
Note: All photos by JWFarrington (some rights reserved.)
