Hasta La Ideas

It all began in 1937 with the Museum of Costume Art, a wee institution that, within less than a decade, would be incorporated and renamed as the Costume Institute and become part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Between then and now, the place has been transformed by forces including Diana Vreeland, the Brooklyn Museum (which transferred its costume collection to the institute in 2009), a little exhibition about Alexander McQueen, the generosity of Lizzie and Jonathan Tisch, and of course, Anna Wintour. The Vogue editor-in-chief–and longtime Met trustee–will get her due when the space occupied by the Costume Institute reopens in May as the Anna Wintour Costume Center (with the Campbell-Bolton-Wintour Brit trifecta, just be grateful that they didn’t go with “Centre”). The Anna Wintour Costume Center will house the department’s exhibition galleries, library, conservation laboratory, research areas, and offices. Meanwhile, the curatorial department itself will continue to be called the Costume Institute.
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What is like to be on the front lines, armed with only a camera and surging adrenaline? Ron Haviv has 23 years worth of answers. The photojournalist’s work across 18 countries unfurls in “Testimony,” an exhibition on view through January 31 at New York’s Anastasia Photo gallery. “I believe and have dedicated my life to witnessing history in an attempt to create a body of evidence that holds people accountable,” Haviv has said. In this video, the first in a new series produced by the gallery, Haviv is joined by Sebastian Junger for a discussion about war, stories, pictures, emotions, and what happens when those things collide.

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Bill Cunningham’s photo of Editta Sherman on the subway dates to around 1968-1976.

With the first snow flurries behind us and the deep freeze still ahead, we turn our thoughts briefly to spring, a season inevitably heralded by a selection of pastel-hued or floral-dappled ensembles captured by Bill Cunningham. This March the beloved New York Times photographer gets a spotlight of his own as the New York Historical Society mounts “Façades,” an exhibition that will explore Cunningham’s eight-year project documenting the architectural riches and fashion history of New York City. The photos, taken between 1968 and 1976, pair models in period costumes with historic settings such as St. Paul’s Chapel and Rockefeller Center. Fellow photographer Editta Sherman, captured in profile in front of Grand Central Station crowned in an elaborate hat (recall Cunningham’s early career as a milliner), manages to give Jules-Félix Coutan‘s mythological statues a run for their money.

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Kitsch Kringle is coming to town. ‘Tis the season for John Waters to regale audiences with tales of twisted traditions and real-life holiday horror stories. The filmmaker, author, and hitchhiker is on the road with “A John Waters Christmas,” his one-man show of yuletide lunacy. This week Waters’ sleigh alights in New Orleans, Nashville, and Atlanta, before two weekend dates in New York City (at Stage 48). “There’s no way you can really avoid the steamroller of Christmas. But I do have advice for every kind of way it’s coming at you,” he told The New York Times recently. “I get into everything in the show, from Christmas music to Christmas movies to what you should give to how to deal with parents who are abusive at Christmas. I also tell the audience what I want.” Spoiler alert: A Myron Stout drawing, Visconti’s ascot, and Brigid Berlin‘s prescription bottle of Obetrol, the diet pills of Andy Warhol. We’re asking for a galley of Carsick, Waters’ upcoming book, slated for publication in June by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

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Ursula von Rydingsvard in front of Ona, her 19-foot-high cast-bronze sculpture at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. (Photo: Piotr Redlinski/The New York Times)

On a crisp October Monday in the year 2000, a persistent ringing shattered the predawn silence at the New York home that the scientist Paul Greengard shares with his wife, the sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard. “Paul muttered something like, ‘What jerk is calling at five in the morning?’” recalls von Rydingsvard with a gleam in her eye. Their daughter, staying in an adjoining bedroom, picked up the phone to drowsily greet a stranger with a Swedish accent—calling from the Nobel Prize Committee. Greengard was soon wide awake.

Later that day, the couple’s young grandson clutched a bouquet of yellow tulips and led a family procession through the gates of the Rockefeller University, where Greengard has been Vincent Astor Professor and headed the laboratory of molecular and cellular neuroscience since 1983, and onto a hastily planned university-wide celebration. It was during this happy walk to Caspari Hall that Greengard told von Rydingsvard of his idea to use his Nobel winnings—approximately $400,000—to create another prize, one that would recognize the accomplishments of women in science and be named in honor of his mother, Pearl Meister Greengard.
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