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New Met Exhibit Shows Relationship Between Impressionism and Fashion

By DNAinfo Staff on February 21, 2013 6:41am  | Updated on February 21, 2013 12:30pm

UPPER EAST SIDE — Parisian fashion doesn't just turn heads today — it also deeply inspired impressionist artists in the late 1800s.

And a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art now aims to show just how extensively high fashion influenced high art right when Paris "emerged as the style capital of the world,"  according to museum officials.

The show features 80 paintings from key impressionists such as Claude Monet, Edouard Manet and Auguste Renoir, as well as 16 costumes from the mid-1860s to mid-1880s, officials said.

Though the impressionists' brush tended not to be as detailed as that of famous portraitists, they wound up portraying their epoch's emotion by painting its sartorial style, officials said in a statement. 

These portraits include tissuey textiles on baby-faced maidens, as well as sharply dressed, suit-sporting gentlemen. They include belles-of-the-ball and reclining temptresses.

In addition, the portraits feature soft, varied palates as well as drastic blacks and extreme whites — both favorites of Manet.

Some top pieces in the show are Monet’s "Luncheon on the Grass"; Manet's "The Parisienne"; Frederic Bazille’s Family Reunion; Renoir’s Lise (Woman with Umbrella); and Edgar Degas’s "The Millinery Shop."

"Impressionism, Fashion, and Modernity," is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., from Feb. 26, 2013 until May 28, 2013. More information is available online at metmuseum.org.