Exhibitions of the Week: BEAUTY IS POWER at the Jewish Museum, DANCE & FASHION at the Fashion Institute Museum

Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power at the Jewish Museum (Until March 22)

Some biographies cloak their subjects in glory; others strip their subjects down to their rawest failings. As an exhibition that unfolds, more or less, as an eight-room biography, Helena Rubinstein: Beauty Is Power is decidedly of the first sort. To be fair, it's hard to imagine this exhibition otherwise: Rubinstein was one of the first female magnates in modern business, a woman who started out in small-town Poland and ended her 92-year life with an international cosmetics empire, half a dozen homes, and an enormous collection of African artifacts and modernist paintings. She accomplished all this by marketing health-conscious and case-specific beauty products under a banner of female mobility and empowerment. As curator Mason Klein argues in his catalog essay, the Rubinstein approach purposely shied away from the "conscious embrace of narcissism and decadence" that is rampant in today's beauty industry--avoided "media exploitation" and was all the better for it.

To his credit, Klein hasn't avoided Rubinstein's tics and shortcomings. The opening gallery presents the a small army of commissioned portraits of "Madame," as she was often called; a fair number of these, and many of the published photographs of Rubinstein, were manipulated to subtract years and sometimes decades from her appearance. Her tastes in modernism weren't always on-target; this could be the first time in museum history that Matisse has been this roundly outnumbered and overshadowed by Elie Nadelman. And her approach to women's identity--so with-the-times in 1905, and even in 1935--became problematic after World War II, as sexually-suggestive print and television ads began re-shaping the cosmetics market. Yet Beauty Is Power asks you to try this relatively unflattering information against Rubinstein's larger message: a version of feminism that has little time for identity politics and academic -isms, lots for ambition, dignity, and common sense. Really, there is no contest.

This doesn't mean that Rubinstein's version of beauty and achievement was uniformly stern, lacking in individuality. Quite the opposite: the jewel-encumbered Rubinstein dresses on display show her taste for extravagance, and the many Rubinstein portraits that Picasso tossed off are nervy and funny. (Picasso didn't even like the woman or want the assignment; he can be quite good when exasperated.) Then there are Rubinstein's miniature model rooms, painstaking reconstructions of a French Rococo salon, a Victorian parlor, a Montmartre artist's studio, an Austrian kitchen, and more. Positioned at the end of Beauty Is Power, these are both delightful and a bit anticlimactic--though from another perspective, they capture one of the most resounding lessons of this show. What is power worth, if it cannot create a world of such delights?

Dance & Fashion at the Fashion Institute of Technology (Until January 3)

As you walk through Dance & Fashion, your mind may begin to wander--not from boredom, but from the constant pull of recollection and association that this showcase exerts. Think back to the dance performances you have seen. How many of the great ones were enhanced by costumes that were expressive enough to add to the dancers' most inspired motions, or tactful enough never to distract from sublime sequences? How many of the awful ones dressed the dancers up like trick-or-treaters, or Epcot Center guides, or the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show? Costuming is so much of the essence of dance--how we connect to it, understand it, evaluate it--and the latest exhibition from FIT puts such costuming under pristine, clarifying focus.

Installed with a central in-the-round space flanked by mannequin upon mannequin, this showcase encourages you to browse and linger and, in your own fashion, pick up on the major connections and continuities that organizer Valerie Steele located. The 100 or so items in Dance & Fashion demonstrate how ballet clothing evolved from chaste 19th-century robes to the lingerie-inspired tutus of Tara Subkoff and the black, carapace-like garments of Iris van Herpen. Such contemporary designers dwell at the intersection of dance and other forms of creative endeavor, and they are not alone. Continuing to explore such cross-pollination, Steele has brought in quirky, nearly-unwearable footwear items that are part ballet flat, part high-heeled shoe--including a pair of gum-pink, eighteen-inch tall contrivances worn by Lady Gaga. Silly, yes, but not entirely in conflict with the other selections. Costumes that transport audiences to Asia, the Caribbean, sophisticated drawing rooms, and fantasy palaces all appear, reminding us that dance can be a form of higher-order playacting even at its aesthetic best.

Such diversity, though, is not a way around the largest dilemma that Dance & Fashion is forced to confront: how can a static exhibition accommodate dance? The video footage on display at FIT offers something of a way out and is enjoyable in its own right--Merce Cunningham's dancers leaping and bouncing, a well-coordinated look at the inner workings of the New York City Ballet. Yet the real way forward is to treat all of it--the exhibition, the videos, the stately catalog--as a gateway to live performance. With the costumes, Steele has assembled something like an array of rare, delicate, variegated insect specimens, each one carefully posed and preserved. Make your way to Lincoln Center, or 92Y, or anywhere else where dance resides, and you will see creatures of the same breed, in all their dynamic life.

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