C M Y K Nxxx,2012-05-11,C,023,Bs-4C,E1 N C23 FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2012 Futuristic Aerie With a Park View RICHARD PERRY/THE NEW YORK TIMES By CAROL VOGEL For the past 15 summers the Met’s “Tomás Saraceno on the Roof: about a dozen installers assembling his most spinning around from the perspec- roof garden has been the setting for tra- creation, which he described as “an in- N Tomás Saraceno’s imagination his Cloud City” opens Tuesday at the tive inside this giant futuristic construc- ditional sculptures by artists like Ells- ternational space station.” As pieces be- constellation of 16 joined modules Metropolitan Museum of Art. tion. worth Kelly, Jeff Koons and, last year, gan to be set in place, Mr. Saraceno under construction on the roof of Like many of Mr. Saraceno’s installa- Anthony Caro. It has also been a place sneaked a visitor inside and up a twisty tions “Cloud City” is his vision of float- I the Metropolitan Museum of Art to walk up a winding bamboo pathway gonal habitat of reflective stainless steel staircase about 20 feet above the roof ing or flying cities — places that defy will take off in a heavy puff of wind and that soared some 50 feet in an untradi- and acrylic. garden. Some of the floors were trans- float over Central Park. “The whole conventional notions of space, time and tional installation that invited visitor Called “Cloud City,” it is the largest of parent, and the walls were mirrored gravity. “You can have a feeling of thing will go into orbit,” Mr. Saraceno, participation. But perhaps the most un- Mr. Saraceno’s 10-year-old series, steel, acrylic or open to the air. Sudden- weightlessness that’s a bit disorient- the Argentine artist who made it, said expected environment of all is taking “Cloud Cities/Air Port City.” He was on ly buildings, people and trees were up- on a recent foggy morning. shape there now: a dizzying multipoly- the roof this week supervising a team of side down or sideways, sometimes al- Continued on Page 30 A Painter Stripped Bare According to many critics, Lucian Freud start- Lucian Freud Drawings The works on display ed making great paintings only after he let go of at Acquavella Galleries, including the 1948 drawing: abandoning flat, crisply outlined fig- self-portrait below, span eight decades ures for massively fleshy nudes KAREN nourished by a full brush. The qui- of this artist’s life. etly ravishing “Lucian Freud ROSENBERG Drawings,” at Acquavella Galler- flowed between his paintings and his works on ies, gives Freud’s works on paper paper. ART REVIEW a chance to speak for themselves, The exhibition comes to Acquavella from beginning with his childhood Blain/Southern in London, where it accompa- sketches and ending with the last etching plate nied a Freud retrospective at the National Por- he touched. trait Gallery. It has been organized by William What they tell us is that Freud (1922-2011) kept Feaver, the curator of Freud’s retrospectives at on drawing, and that, to the last, energy still Tate Britain (2002) and the Museo Correr in Venice (2005), who consulted closely with the artist until his death at 88 last July. It includes some small oil portraits and power- ful examples of Freud’s work in etching (which isn’t exactly drawing but is close enough to de- serve our scrutiny here, some five years after the Museum of Modern Art’s “Lucian Freud: The Painter’s Etchings” established his mastery of the medium.) “Lucian Freud Drawings” starts early, per- haps a little too early. The oldest work, “Birds in Tree,” dates from about 1930 and was, as Mr. RUTH FREMSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES Feaver notes, exhibited in a 1938 show of “child art” at Peggy Guggenheim’s London gallery. Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations A video of Miuccia Prada plays behind outfits she and More revealing than this precocious scribble Elsa Schiaparelli designed at this Costume Institute exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. of conté crayon, however, are bristly pen draw- ings from around 1940: twinned figures (“Two Boys Lying Down”) and family members (“The Painter’s Mother”). Here too are comparatively Speaking of Fashion tender animal studies: dead birds and monkeys, living horses. As is often remarked, Freud’s portraits of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art won’t have chosen subject is far from a dry one. to stay open till midnight to accommodate In the fashion field, as opposed to the field of Continued on Page 31 PRIVATE COLLECTION, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE crowds for “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible fine art, women have always been, are even ex- Conversations,” this year’s Costume Institute pected to be, alpha figures; protean creators, extravaganza, mainly because the show isn’t all consequential personalities, imperious com- Inside that extravagant, certainly not on the manders of craftsmanly troops. These two de- HOLLAND order of the Alexander McQueen ex- signers certainly fill the bill. hibition last year. Both were born in Italy, Schiaparelli (pro- ART REVIEW 28 COTTER It’s on the small side. It has a tight nounced SKYAP-a-relli) in Rome in 1890, Ms. thesis, comparing and contrasting Prada in Milan in 1949. Both were from old, con- Édouard Vuillard, from the avant-garde to the ART REVIEW work by two designers of different servative families, and both went rogue early haut-bourgeois. Ken Johnson reviews. generations. And it carries that idea on. As a young woman Schiaparelli shocked her through with the careful, even wonkish earnest- parents by writing sexy poems and taking a BOOK REVIEW 25 ness of an end-of-year term paper. nanny job in London. Ms. Prada, a child of the Aliens in the womb and other strange tales Still, that it takes its task seriously is refresh- 1960s, mounted the leftist political barriers with ing; you don’t always find this in fashion exhibi- her peers. from Anne Enright. Dwight Garner reviews. tion. And, with the designers under appraisal be- Both came to fashion almost by accident, and ing Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada, the Continued on Page 26 PRIVATE COLLECTION C M Y K Nxxx,2012-05-11,C,031,Bs-4C,E1 THE NEW YORK TIMES, FRIDAY, MAY 11, 2012 N C31 ABOVE AND BELOW LEFT: PRIVATE COLLECTION, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE; BELOW CENTER: MATTHEW MARKS GALLERY, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE; BELOW RIGHT: PRIVATE COLLECTION, STEPHEN ONGPIN FINE ART, LONDON, LUCIAN FREUD ARCHIVE The collection of Freud works at Acquavella Galleries includes vividly colored pieces in conté crayon like “Chicken on a Bamboo Table” (1944) and a few oil works like “Small Garden” (1997), above right. Below, from left, the drawings on display include a louche “Study of Francis Bacon” (1951), “The Painter’s Mother” (1940) and “Boy in a Red and Blue Jacket” (1945). A Painter Stripped Bare in Decades of Drawings From Weekend Page 23 ONLINE: LUCIAN FREUD mid-1940s bear some resemblance to More of the artist’s drawings on Neue Sachlichkeit works by George display at Acquavella: Grosz, Otto Dix and Christian Schad. nytimes.com/design Witness the icy, blue-eyed stare of “Boy on a Sofa,” or the spiky hair and aloof deep contours and webbed patches of a mien of “La Voisine (The Neighbour).” well-known 1993 etching of the bulging But other influences, notably Picasso cranium of Leigh Bowery, for instance, and Ingres, can be discerned in “Boy in find their way into quick sketches of a Red and Blue Jacket” and in a marvel- heads (Isaiah Berlin, John Richardson, ous pair of studies of Francis Bacon Balthus). strutting around with an open shirt and You can tell that Freud found etching trouser fly, from 1951. more exciting than drawing on paper. It was Bacon who transformed The uncertainty of the printing process Freud’s painting, persuading him to ex- appealed to him; as he said, “You can’t periment with thick hog-bristle brushes. tell how it will be.” We’ll never know He seems to have had an equally radical how his last plate, “Head of Jeremy impact on Freud’s drawing; in these King,” might have turned out, though it studies it’s as if Bacon’s swashbuckling, looks promising: a long, craggy face sexually aggressive presence forced that seems to sit right on the knot of a Freud to loosen up a little. We are a long stiff necktie. way from the tightly wound “Man at the 1970s and ’80s, skipping a decade or ished paintings: Turner’s “Sun Rising drawing, which faithfully records its But drawing, he knew, had its own Night: Self-Portrait” of 1947-8, with its so during which Freud focused almost Through Vapour,” or Freud’s own subject’s thinning hair and drooping risks of failure. As he told the writer tedious stippling. entirely on painting. When he returned “Large Interior WII (After Watteau).” head. At the same time, the shift from Martin Gayford in 2010: “Being able to At this point the show leaps ahead to to drawing, it was, as Mr. Feaver writes, The results can be awfully poignant, painting to the more intimate medium draw well is the hardest thing — far “both in the paintings and a reaction or as when a small painting of Freud’s de- of drawing restores a modicum of digni- harder than painting, as one can easily “Lucian Freud Drawings” continues counterpoint to them.” pressive mother from 1972 is paired ty. see from the fact that there are so few through June 9 at Acquavella Galleries, Soft strokes of charcoal lay the with a drawing of her from 1983.