The Wall Street Journal - 11.09.2019

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL. Wednesday, September 11, 2019 |A

tried mightily (still tries) to charge

for access to patterns. It knew that

the buck stopped at copies.

At the same time there was

pushback against Paris. Puritan

impulses left Americans ambiva-

lent about the pleasure implicit in

couture creations worn by—gasp—

beautiful European courtesans.

Later, however, the innovative

American Claire McCardell, influ-

enced by the sensually fluid cut of

Madeleine Vionnet, took that fluid

freedom into American sportswear,

as shown in her ensemble for

Townley (1945-55). In 1973’s “Bat-

tle of Versailles,” a fashion fund-

raiser that saw five French coutu-

riers showing against five

American designers, the Americans

actually won. Their colorful spon-

taneity was a wake-up call for the

French, whose work had grown too

bourgeois, too stiff and safe. And

in the 1980s, the shocking nihilism

of Japanese designers Rei

Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto

presented an existential threat to

Parisian relevance, which was side-

stepped because these geniuses

OVER TWO LEAN YEARSin the
middle of the 1950s, the Swiss pho-
tographer Robert Frank, who died
on Monday in Nova Scotia at age
94, took several car trips around
the U.S., sometimes accompanied
by his wife and two small children,
to photograph, as he told the
Guggenheim Foundation in his suc-
cessful grant application of October
1954, “the things that are there,
anywhere and everywhere—easily
found, not easily selected and in-
terpreted.” He used a small 35mm
camera, and black-and-white film,
which made it possible to work
quickly, to shoot without a flash
and without attracting attention.
Published first in France in 1958
and the following year in New
York, “The Americans” was deemed
mean and depressing by critics in
the U.S. Popular Photography’s edi-
tors called it “a wart-covered pic-
ture of America by a joyless man.”
Reigning photography critic Minor
White found it “Utterly misleading!
A degradation of a nation!” The
book sold less than half the print
run of 2,500 copies; the rest were
remaindered. Within 10 years, the
critical tide had turned, and today
the book is considered one of the
most influential art publications of
the 20th century.
Especially lasting are his images
devoted to the subject of race. On
the cusp of the civil-rights move-
ment, this agile and—considering
the fury his photographs would

later arouse—unthreatening pres-

ence recorded the culture of Afri-

can-Americans “anywhere and ev-

erywhere” he found it. A black

funeral complete with open casket,

or an African-American baby in

clean white clothes crawling on a

scrubbed wooden cafe floor, was a

sight few ordinary white Americans

would have considered looking at.

Frank showed such images to be

rich subjects for art. A black nurse

with a white baby, or the human

racial spectrum as viewed through

the windows of a segregated street-

car—whites in front, blacks in the

back—were, before Mr. Frank, vir-

tually invisible.

Three years earlier, when LIFE

magazine photographer Gordon

Parks published “The Constraints,” a

color essay on segregated America,

he recorded a society as distant and

exotic as a Spanish village, visible

only to those able to travel there. But

Robert Frank’s America was every-

where, and anyone could see it once

they knew how to look. Mr. Frank

taught us to recognize the way in

which an “easily found” object—like

an American flag, a jukebox or a

lunch counter—can, through the use

of frame, light and focus, turn into a

metaphor. Today, if the lonely wait-

friendship without comment.

Following the great success of

“The Americans,” he claimed falsely

to have stopped making photo-

graphs in favor of films. In 1959 Mr.

Frank made “Pull My Daisy” with

Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and artist

Alfred Leslie, a 30-minute exercise

in whimsy, beatnik style, and a per-

petual cult favorite. His most fa-

mous film is almost never screened.

“Cocksucker Blues,” Mr. Frank’s

1972 documentary commissioned by

the Rolling Stones, alarmed the

subjects so thoroughly that its

showings remain severely re-

stricted. With his marriage to artist

June Leaf in 1971, Mr. Frank offi-

cially moved to Mabou, a remote

village in Nova Scotia whose part-

time residents then included Joan

Jonas and Richard Serra. Mr. Frank

devoted films to autobiography, and

his artwork combined old images in

new forms, including photographs

designed to fade and ultimately

vanish as they aged.

In 1994, Mr. Frank was one of the

very few photographers to receive a

major retrospective at the National

Gallery of Art in Washington. And

in 2009, on the 50th anniversary of

the publication of “The Americans,”

the National Gallery produced an

exhibition on its making, including

proof sheets, and images never in-

cluded in the original book, all re-

produced in a massive new publica-

tion, befitting a famous and

successful artist.

Yet “The Americans” remains

Robert Frank’s most important leg-

acy, a modest book with 83 photo-

graphs that changed the way we see

and photograph the world around us.

Ms. Panzer writes about

photography and American culture. ROBERT FRANK FROM THE AMERICANS, PACE/MACGILL

resses, flirtatious

drag queens and pa-

thetic advertising

signs look trite, it is

surely a mark of his

importance that we

cannot imagine see-

ing midcentury

America—or even to-

day’s America—any

other way.

Mr.Frank,asan

artist, also mastered

the ability to remain

in the public eye

even while his great-

est work remained

decades old. One re-

sult is that his story

continued to shift as

time progressed.

Born in Switzerland

in 1924, he came to

America in 1947, al-

ready a trained pho-

tographer. Several of his photo-

graphs appeared in the popular

“Family of Man” exhibition. He set-

tled in New York’s Greenwich Vil-

lage, and his work appeared in

fashion and general-interest maga-

zines, a chapter he later sought to

obscure, believing that commercial

success would soil his reputation as

an artist.

Among his early important pa-

trons was Helen Gee, whose Lime-

light Gallery on Sheridan Square was

one of the very first in New York to

show and sell photography as fine

art. After he appeared in her late-life

memoir as her lover, he severed their

‘Trolley—New Orleans’ (1955), by Robert Frank, the photographer who died on Monday.

BYMARYPANZER

APPRECIATION

Robert Frank Saw America Without Illusions

one is a couture origi-

nal and the other a

licensed copy made by Ohr-

bach’s department store. A video

slideshow leads us through the dif-

ferences, some visible (four pockets

versus two), many invisible (a

quilted lining, for instance, versus

one that’s unquilted and skimpy).

Grouped around the room is a series

of similar pairings, starting in the

1750s and working up to the pres-

ent, all illustrating how French de-

signs surfaced elsewhere at various

skill levels and price points. Paris

LIFE & ARTS

EXHIBITION REVIEW

Paris,Queen of

Fashion

THE MUSEUM AT FIT (5); LENT BY HAMISH BOWLES/THE MUSEUM AT FIT (LAGERFELD)

decided to show in Paris.

In the main gallery we see

why designers of all nation-

alities wish to show in

Paris, and why they’ve

been welcomed. The

first section, “The Rise

of the Haute Couture,”

introduces Charles

Frederick Worth, the

man who modernized

the Paris couture

house in 1858. He was

an Englishman, yet

from Paris he ruled, cre-

ating the era’s definitive sil-

houette, seen here in three tightly

corseted, gorgeously trimmed and

embellished gowns. Worth took

the small-scale artisanal craft of

French dressmaking and turned it

into a big business with class sta-

tus. To be dressed by Worth was

an electric measure of social

worth, as Mrs. Cornelius Vander-

bilt’s gold-emblazoned ballgown of

1883 symbolizes dazzlingly.

The section called “Paris = La

Parisienne = Fashion” displays the

visionary guild work, deeply gener-

ational, of French accessories and

trims. The cultural construction of

the fashionable Parisian, seriously

embraced by artists such as

Stéphane Mallarmé and Édouard

Manet, would not have existed

without the artisans who made

lace, buttons, gloves, hats, shoes,

parasols and fans.

Most sensational is the section

“From the Splendor of the Royal

Court to the Spectacle of the Haute

Couture.” Positioned in the center

of the gallery, it’s a dreamlike re-

creation of Versailles’s Hall of Mir-

rors. Within this hall are arche-

typal and iconographic

pieces, all winking at

one another in

echoes of pan-

niered refer-

ence and re-

fraction. A

1760s fashion

doll in gilt

brocade. A

black velvet

Adrian gown

from MGM’s 1938

film “Marie Antoi-

nette.” Elsa Schiapa-

relli’s Sun King cape of 1938-39, a

last burst of radiance before the

fall of France. John Galliano’s ebul-

lient Marie Antoinette dress for

Christian Dior (fall/winter

2000-2001), a beribboned history

lesson embroidered with guillo-

tines. Whenever Paris needs to re-

assert its reign over fashion, it

nods to the kings and queens who

made an art of it. And pulls rank.

Paris, Capital of Fashion

The Museum at FIT,

through Jan. 4, 2020

Ms. Jacobs is the Arts Intel

Report editor for the weekly

newsletter Air Mail.

New York
I’VE NEVER FORGOTTENthe off-
hand comment of a young press rep
who worked in Paris fashion, some-
thing between a confession and a
boast: “I’m Parisian. I hate every-
thing.” There it is. Critical distance.
Aesthetic elitism. Snobbery about
what is (and isn’t) sublime. If you
can’t hate, you can’t really love,
and when it comes to fashion, no
city, or its citizens, loves like Paris.
It was ever thus. “For all manner of
things that a woman can put / On
the crown of her head or the sole
of her foot... / For bonnets, mantil-
las, capes, collars, and shawls, /
Dresses for breakfasts and dinners
and balls.” These lines from 1857
are about the fashionable woman’s
required weeks in Paris, updating
her wardrobe. Any other city was
beside the point, because they all
followed Paris.
There is no one event or mo-
ment that put Paris on its pedestal,
we learn in “Paris, Capital of Fash-
ion,” the Museum at FIT’s fall exhi-
bition. But certainly that flinty
French nature—forever rejecting,
refining, reaching higher—had
much to do with it. We have a per-
fect template in the over-the-top
fashions of the French queen Marie
Antoinette (“the mother of the en-
tire fashion business,” according to
the English milliner Stephen
Jones). Her extravagant experi-
ments in style influenced aristo-
cratic women all over Europe. Val-
erie Steele, the show’s curator and
the director of FIT’s museum, in-
forms us that the Paris tra-
jectory begins in that
century, the 1700s,
with “royal splendor
at court,” in nearby
Versailles. By the
end of the 1700s,
six-month cycles of
spring and fall
fashions (new-
ness! novelty!)
had become a dynamic
that is with us to this day.
Ms. Steele also makes clear
that Paris itself was thought to be
a woman—a luxury-loving “she,”
just as London is a correctly ap-
pointed “he.” The title of this exhi-
bition could just as easily have
been “Paris, Queen of Fashion.”
The opening note of the show is
struck in the introductory gallery,
where a pair of classic Chanel suits
in a windowpane tweed (fall/winter
1966-67) stand in isolation. They ap-
pear to be identical but are not—

BYLAURAJACOBS

Dress by John

Galliano for

Christian Dior

(fall/winter 2000-

2001), left; Chanel

suit and licensed

copy (fall/winter

1966-67), right

Christian Dior

(Stephen Jones) top

hat (fall 2000), right;

Adrian film costume

worn by Gladys George

in ‘Marie Antoinette’

(1938), below left

Jacket by Karl

Lagerfeld for

Chanel (fall/winter

1996), above right

Perugia shoes

(1940), below