The Met’s exhibit Matisse: In Search of True Painting takes a close look at the painter’s process.  In the 1900’s, when he was still painting in ways that seem, now, amusingly conventional, he began making paintings in pairs, depicting the same subject (a still life, the view from a window, or a woman sitting in a chair) in two different styles.  By the 1910’s, when he was working in ways that are more recognizably his own, he often made paintings in series of three or more, depicting the same subject in shifted styles and perspectives.  Then, in the 1940’s, he began photographing a single painting at key stages in its development, as many as ten or twenty times, and examining these photographs as he finished the canvas.

In each of these methods, which are all illustrated at the show, Matisse began by drafting a scene from observation and then depicting it with more and more stylization; he moved from naturalism to symbolism.  And yet he remained primarily concerned with the brute physical presence of things: the rootedness of figures in a room, in the landscape, or on a table.  In each series of paintings in the exhibit the final depiction, which is achieved with the fewest number of elements (brushstrokes, colors, and shapes), communicates more swiftly and powerfully the presence of things.  In one series from 1918, of the inside of a room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage in Nice, the artist begins by depicting things in great detail, showing us pieces of furniture and the view through the window, and even the pattern on the rug and the scalloped edges of the curtain.   In a later painting from this series he narrows his focus to the scene around the window, showing figures sculpted in light and shadow, broken into brazen blocks of flat paint.  Matisse’s method emphasizes the irreducibility of the chair, the violin and the window, of the space inside the room and the space outside the window.  It makes a poetry of the concrete.

Henri Matisse, Interior with a Violin (Room at the Hôtel Beau-Rivage), 1918.  Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Pairing Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli, as the Met has for this year’s Costume Institute blockbuster, doesn’t serve either designer well.  Prada’s work, especially, would have benefited from a different context, perhaps that of the fabled brand’s history, which is also her family history.  Miuccia’s grandfather Mario started the company in in Milano in 1913, with a shop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II that sold handbags, suitcases and other small leather goods.  That store is still there, with its lovely Victorian trappings: a checkerboard stone floor, utilitarian steel racks, and P-R-A-D-A spelled out in gold foil on the glass.

It was Miuccia Prada who oversaw the brand’s (brilliant) expansion from accessories to shoes and then ready-to-wear in the 1980’s.  Prada never, however, entirely shook off its identity as an accessories brand.  The shoes and bags have become iconic, deeply desired by both those who know fashion and those who don’t.  On a deeper level, there’s a raw physicality to the brand’s products, even the clothing, that hearkens back to its workmanlike origins.  Most of the garments on display at the Met possess a heavy, hearty sense of fabrication.  There are simple A-line skirts (Is Miuccia Prada the Stradivarius of the A-line skirt?) layered with shards of mirrors, fake jewels, plastic baubles, leather cut-outs, rivets, rings, and paillettes.  These embellishments are all slightly oversized —they’re more than just ornaments — and fastened with visible stitching and hardware.  There’s in the pieces great inventiveness and freedom; they really do, as Miuccia says she intended, stretch the boundaries of good clothing.  But there’s also in them, embedded, the image of her grandfather leaning over his work bench, making things with his hands.

One thinks of Elsa Schiaparelli as a wit more than an artist.  What pops to mind first are the shoe hat, the lobster gown, and the seed packet dress, creations that are more like one-liners than clothes.  What becomes apparent when seeing her work up close, as it’s possible to at the Met’s new exhibit Impossible Conversations, is that she was, also, an impeccable seamstress.  The dinner jackets are fitted and fastened with armor-like severity, and the floor-length gowns are draped asymmetrically, on the bias, with a sumptuous, casual mastery.  Without wit — without any ideas at all — the finesse of Schiaparelli’s cutting and draping would assure her reputation.

The Met exhibit pairs Schiaparelli with another great Italian fashion designer, Miuccia Prada, and is framed as a series of dialogues between the two.  Throughout the galleries there are video monitors showing the two great ladies chatting with one another in a special film by Baz Luhrmann.  Prada portrays herself, admirably, and actress Judy Davis portrays Schiaparelli with campy excess.  The fineness of the garments on display show up Davis’ portrayal.  (They also, unhappily, show up most of the Prada garments.)  On a mannequin encased in a full-height vitrine, Schiaparelli’s silk lipstick-printed gown looks less like a piece of clothing than a delicate, palpitating, creature.  It’s as if it were born rather than made.  All the cerebral references — to surrealism, to popular culture, to women’s roles — are rendered irrelevant.  When it comes right down to it, Schiaparelli knew how to make a dress.

It’s hard work being modern, and it must have been especially so for the Steins.  Siblings Gertrude, Michael and Leo were middle-class Americans, heirs to a modest fortune, who moved to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century determined to find the future.  They attended exhibitions, held salons, and amassed an astounding collection of early modern paintings by Matisse, Picasso and their contemporaries that’s on view now at the Met.  Then, as a kind of coup de grace, the Steins commissioned what might be the most modern house ever, the Villa Garches by Le Corbusier.

Tucked deep inside the exhibit, in the corner of a small gallery, there’s a one-minute loop of vintage black and white film footage documenting the house.  The clips (like everybody’s home movies, they’re tilted, jittery and out-of-focus) show kids running around in the yard and adults parading about in their finery rather than the house itself, which looks like a big, white spaceship that just landed behind them.  The house still looks terrifically modern, a complex, idealized concoction of planes, ramps and ribbon windows.  In the film footage the Steins, wearing heavy wools, hose and hats, look like Victorians lost in a future that’s not their own.  Their foresight and fearlessness is remarkable.

Don’t fix what’s isn’t broken is my response to New York City’s plan to improve the plaza in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Philanthropist David H. Koch, who’s donating $60 million to finance the work, saw the refurbished fountains at Lincoln Center and then prodded the Met to do something about their “crummy” ones.  The new design, by Philadelphia-based landscape architects OLIN, replaces the long, low fountains at each side of the museum entrance with smaller square ones, and frames the two underused, street-level side entrances with stands of trees.  The plan of the project released to the Times has a hollow prettiness, filling the space with trees, cafe tables and umbrellas.  The amateurish quality of the drawing certainly doesn’t help.

The plaza, as it is, is a vibrant urban space.  On cold days, like today, there are groups of visitors gathered on the entrance steps, some waiting for others and some just sitting there.  On warm days it feels like a festival, the entire length of the plaza thick with artists, food vendors, tourist and park-goers.  On the final evening of the Alexander McQueen show last summer, just before midnight, lines of brilliantly turned-out scenesters and fashionistas snaked around the fountains for a final entry, a spectacle of crazy, urban glamor.  True, the fountains are dismal, and rarely offer anything beyond a burble.  But that only keeps the area clear for small children and dog walkers.  Why can’t the Met keep the plaza they’ve got, which works, and clean and light the fountain properly?  The two side entrances that the new plan highlights are awfully small.  To turn them into proper entrances will require significant architectural work (larger openings, windows, some interior replanning) and not just rows of flowering trees out front.  There’s something nice about leaving this monumental public plaza in this, the city’s toniest precinct, unadorned, rather than turning it into an open air food court.  The real magic, after all, happens after you step inside the building.