Smoke has descended on New York City again, and I feared that the museum would be more crowded than ever with people staying indoors, but it really wasn’t so bad. To access these special exhibits, visitors scan a QR code and are given a wait time. There was none for Lagerfeld and only 20 minutes for Van Gogh.

I honestly wasn’t that excited to see Lagerfeld’s dresses. I’m just not that into designer fashion, but this was fun. The exhibit is designed around the idea of a “line of beauty,” the aesthetics of an s-shaped, serpentine curve conceived by 18th century English painter, satirist, and writer William Hogarth. There are around 150 dresses on display organized by design motifs such as floral, geometric, male and female, and so on. Almost every dress or suit is paired with the sketch that preceded it, and in several cases, the artwork that inspired it. As you enter the exhibition, you are met with a large quotation of Lagerfeld’s: “Fashion does not belong in a museum.” Welp. Apparently it does.

Unfortunately, there are no individual links to the dresses, but you can scroll through here to see some of them and the sketches. One of my favorites was the best and most impractical dress for a kindergarten teacher. In black and white silk, it is emblazoned with large block alphabet letters and both arms are circled with numbers. From each wrist dangles a foot of black fringe. A simple black sheath dress is adorned on the back with a giant pearl and gold snake with blue gemstones for eyes. A hand-painted “Lassie and the Prince” gown was inspired by Kate Baylay’s illustration of the same name. 

Best known as head designer for Chanel for over three decades, Lagerfeld also designed for Fendi (many of my favorites were from that period) and under his own name. The exhibition pays tribute to the talented dressmakers who labored on all of these pieces, looping videos of them talking about their work. There is no doubt of his creative genius and ability to hire talented artisans to bring his visions to life.

Lagerfeld the person was more controversial. In fact, many organizations protested his posthumous honoring at the Met Gala this year as a reaction to his many extremely problematic public statements. I won’t give those airspace here, but here is an article that gets into all of that if you want to know more. He was a strange dude, and from what I can tell, and an extremely insecure one. He had body image issues for most of his life, lost 92 pounds, wrote a diet book then proceeded to spew the most hateful garbage about other people’s bodies. In the early 2000s he cultivated the famous Lagerfeld look, one he created and called “the puppet,” a caricature, wholly separate from himself, one for whom his task was “pull the strings.” The last items on display as you leave the exhibit are some of his personal clothing, including fingerless black gloves which he wore to hide his hands which he felt were ugly.

Fashion is at its core one of the most elite forms of art there is, obviously. Lagerfeld’s best friend was Anna Wintour, head of Vogue, chair of the Met Gala, model for Meryl Streep’s character Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada. (Side goss: in 2017 Streep ripped Lagerfeld after he lied that she wouldn’t wear his dress to an event because he wouldn’t pay her a high enough fee to do so. Meow!) Point being: it doesn’t matter who Lagerfeld was as a person, how much nonsense he spewed, or even that he hated museum career retrospectives. Money talks.

The Van Gogh Cypresses exhibit was exhilarating and sad and depressing and emotionally moving, all at the same time. There is nothing like a Van Gogh – it is like Talking Heads or Boston, no one sounds like them and no one should ever try. The installation covers the last two years of his life in Arles and a Maison Santé or sanatorium in Saint Rémy de Provence, a place near and dear to my heart and the location of a memorable family trip to Europe in 2008. Van Gogh is truly the poster child for “tortured artist,” and it is easy to romanticize it all: the tempestuous relationship with Paul Gaugin, an argument with him which led to the chopped off ear (actually he just sliced a bit off the lobe but as a child I envisioned an entire ear, mailed in a bloody envelope to his brother, but I guess he really brought the tiny lobe chunk, still bleeding from the wound, to his favorite prostitute), manic depression, possible epilepsy, death by suicide, and the worst part, not ever knowing he became, you know, Van Gogh. 

And did he ever. There were a lot of people, too many, crammed into three smallish galleries, almost everyone taking photos of the paintings with their phones. It was wild. Very few people were looking at the paintings with their actual eyes. Three layers deep of people snapping and selfie-ing The Starry Night, an ugly and surreal scene, and to think that 133 years ago, Van Gogh died “trying” to paint and perceiving himself as largely failing by most measures, interest in his work, money, comparison to successful artist friends. 

Van Gogh became enraptured with the beauty of Provence, and of the flame-shaped evergreens in particular in 1888. He did study after study, done with a reed pencil and graphite, and then many different paintings, the most famous of course being The Starry Night. Although after walking through these galleries, I believe the painting would most aptly be named, The Cypress Painting when the Night Happens to be Starry.The pencil drawings were so pretty, and this one could totally become a Lagerfeld dress! One of the earliest paintings, Orchard Bordered by Cypresses is just lovely – made my heart bloom with spring. Later that same year, he painted Garden at Arles, a more Impressionistic take. Wheat Field with Cypresses takes me right to Provence, those clouds! The one that moved me the most, actually made me tear up, is Farmhouse among Olive Trees. He gifted this one to a friend, and modeled the farmhouse after a residence at the asylum. The last painting in the exhibition, Country Road in Provence by Night, is the last one he painted before his death in July of 1890. His obituary described that his coffin “disappeared under branches of cypress trees and bouquets of large sunflowers.”