Savage Beauty

When I was a student at Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, I took an art history course with Philip Gould, a disciple of the great Asian-art expert Sherman Lee. Gould liked to open a semester with a question that has always stymied museum-goers: What exactly is art?

Ultimately, Gould told us, art is whatever the artist says it is, which is both a fitting answer and a copout. But it has led me to think from time to time about what art includes. One thing art definitely does is to create its own world, its own integrity. The characters in Emily Brontë’s “Wuthering Heights,” for instance, aren’t like most people, at least not like anyone I know. But they sustain a certain logic within their own environment. They are true to themselves, and they say something true about human nature.

I was reminded of this as I drank in “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty,” the knockout tribute to the late fashion designer that creates and sustains a world of macabre theatricality that has been attracting 200,000 visitors a day since it opened at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan May 4. So popular is the show – the  lines stretch from the entrance of the exhibit down the promenade of the 19th Century European paintings and sculpture galleries all the way to the Islamic wing – that The Met has extended its run through Aug. 7 and has established “Met Mondays With McQueen,” in which eager patrons can purchase timed tickets ($50) to see the exhibit between 9:30 a.m. and 2:30 p.m. on the day that The Met is generally closed. The last time I remember such a phenonmenon was when The Met did its Jackie exhibit in 2001.

“Savage Beauty” is really two shows. One is the exhibit on McQueen’s creations, which meld pleasure and pain, East and West, the theatrical and the everyday, strict construction and the softest, most diaphanous of fabrics. (A Savile Row tailor, McQueen said he learned about softness from Givenchy, where he was once head designer.) The overwhelming impression of ghoulish splendor is supported by the exhibit’s look – smoky, mirrored galleries, dark walls made of textured wood, soft lighting, dolorous baroque music.  It’s “Phantom of the Opera”-tic outrageous, creepy and marvelous. (Most of the time. The video with the Kate Moss hologram, set to the score of “Schindler’s List,” sent my mind reeling back to The Jewish Museum’s idiotic “Mirroring Evil” show, with its Prada death camps and pretend-you-are-Eva Braun installations. Fashion and the Holocaust simply do not mix.)

But that is really the only false note. The  Empire inspirations from McQueen’s “Girl Who Lived In  A Tree Collection” (2008-09) -- with their swaths of fluted white and draped red and gold brocade fabric --are not only stunning, they look wearable. The gold duck-feather coat with its long, cream-colored fluted skirt, part of the “Angels and Demons Collection” he was working on when he died in 2010, is one of several ensembles that evoke Matthew Bourne’s all-male “Swan Lake.” (It also evokes Björk, but then, sometimes the mind does ping like a pinball machine.) And though the tough jacket with the hunky Renaissance St. Sebastian gives off an appropriate homoerotic vibe, the hourglass suits, Lady Gaga jellyfish boots, geisha straitjacket coat, ’60s-style floral-print hot pants and lavender thigh-high boots celebrate woman as muse.

Clearly, lots of people in the packed galleries were there for the fashion. But some were there for the headline value. McQueen committed suicide in Feb. 10, 2011 in his London apartment at age 40. He was succeeded by Sarah Burton, who designed Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge’s triumphant wedding gown. Burton herself was the living star of The Met’s recent Costume Institute gala.

So, then, among the art lovers and fashionistas were the curiosity-seekers, who had to be wondering, Why?
That is the question in this our summer of discontent. Why do brilliantly successful people – all right, we’re talking about men here – self-destruct? McQueen was really coming into his own. The fact that the spot-on Duchess of Cambridge chose the House of McQueen for her wedding dress proves he was the designer of the moment.

So what went wrong? There was talk of drugs, depression and his mother’s death, which seems to have been a catalyst. He was said to be painfully shy. Over lunch at the museum, my friends and I considered a report that he once rode 75 blocks with the engaging actress/fashionista Sarah Jessica Parker – without exchanging a word.

Of course, this leads to explorations of the relationship between madness and creativity, success and unhappiness. In the end, though, what it really comes down to is  the individual’s makeup.
You have to wonder if McQueen had a premonition of what was to come. The last collection he actually presented, “Plato’s Atlantis” (spring 2010), was all about the decomposition of nature. As he observed:
[This collection predicted a future in which] the ice cap would melt . . . the waters would rise and . . . life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish. Humanity [would] go back to the place from whence it came.”

“Savage Beauty” brings McQueen and us full circle.

Met hours are 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tues-Thurs. and holiday Mon., including July 4; 9:30 a.m.-9 p.m. Fri. and Sat. While visiting, I recommend the quiet, contemplative pleasures of “Rooms With a View: The Open Window in the 19th Century” (through July 4) and the monochromatic minimalism of “Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective” (through Aug. 28), each in its own way a palate-cleansing antidote to the baroque riches of “Savage Beauty.”

Admission is $20;  $15.00 for senior citizens age 65 and over, $10 for students. Children under age 12 accompanied by an adult are admitted free. Express admission may be purchased in advance at metmuseum.org/visit. For more information, call  (212) 535-7710.