Russell Lord (Photo: Eileen Travell)

The New Orleans Museum of Art has announced the hire of Russell Lord as its new curator of photographs. Mr. Lord previously served in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's department of photography as a Jane and Morgan Whitney fellow.

Mr. Lord took his graduate studies at the City University of New York's Graduate Center and previously worked as director at the the Upper East Side photography gallery Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Fine Photographs, which specializes in extremely early photographic works. The newly named curator has also worked as a curatorial assistant at the Yale University Art Gallery, in its department of prints, drawings and photographs.

An opera coat by Paul Poiret, 1912, in the Met's collection

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has canceled loans to the Moscow Kremlin Museum of works by French fashion designer Paul Poiret, “in response to” Russia’s art embargo, Met spokesman Harold Holzer told The Observer today.

"Paul Poiret – King of Fashion" is set to open at the Moscow museum on September 7 and was to consist of loans from the Met and from the Fashion Museum in Paris.

The “loans won’t be going forward,” Mr. Holzer said, “in response to” Russia’s embargo on lending art to U.S. museums.  “As long as the loan embargo is in place, the museum believes it can no longer lend” to Russian museums.  A “one sided” relationship would, he said, be “unfair.”

Russia instituted its art embargo after Chabad, a Brooklyn-based Jewish sect, obtained a default judgment against it in July 2010, saying it feared its art would be seized by Chabad to force it to comply.

Because of the embargo, the Met has already lost promised loans to two of its own shows – “Cezanne’s Card Players” and “Rooms with a View” – and “if the embargo is not lifted by September,” Mr. Holzer said, “the Met is on track to lose paintings for “’Master Paintings from India.’”  That show is set to open at the Met on September 28.

What they have all been waiting for, beyond the line. (Sølve Sundsbø / Art + Commerce, metmuseum.org)

Already 582,000 visitors have passed through the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met since it opened in early May, but as the show counts down to its final days, the otherworldly lines will most likely be longer than ever. The museum, however, would prefer that you think of it not as a wait, but as an experience.

Around 400 people are admitted to the exhibit every half hour, and last week a record 51,000 visitors stood in line to see the collection, meaning some waited for two and half hours. (Last Saturday alone saw over 10,000 visitors, marking the first day 10,000 was reached since the museum began controlling access three weeks into the show.) But the line was designed to take visitors on an eclectic art tour beginning with Japanese ceramic figures in the Great Hall balcony before entering the ancient Near East room, moving on to Cyprus and finally arriving to the hall of European paintings and sculptures.

“One man’s obstruction is another man’s inspiration!” said senior spokesman Harold Holzer.

Realizing wait times could grow long, the museum created a pamphlet – “McQueen Line Trek the Taming of the Queue” – in May to help entertain patrons, and also developed a corresponding SCVNGR app. As the line snakes among the exhibits, connections “on this tailor-made route” are drawn to fashion: the patient patron is encouraged to examine the “fabulous footwear!” of Mesopotamia and the “animal accessories” from the Near East.

After all, as the pamphlet reads, “At the Metropolitan, there is beauty even in the wait.”

“Look, we know it’s not ideal,” Mr. Holzer said. “We know that people are not going to have an ideal view [but] this kind of thing happens once every ten years and hopefully people who are in the line will see enough that they’ll come back.”

Despite the crowd-calming distraction of art, the line must be maintained. In addition to the full time staff, the museum hired and trained a team to monitor the McQueen crowds, shuttling museum-goers from one section of golden rope to the other and ensuring no one cuts in front (unless, of course, he or she is a museum member).

The Observer stopped by last Wednesday, just in time for the line’s 4:30 close, an hour before the museum itself shuts its doors Tuesday through Thursday. The woman at the desk informed us that the wait had been about 2 hours between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. that day, but had shortened to an hour and a half in the late afternoon.

Melissa Ward and her friend, who held up the back of the line Wednesday evening, seemed unfazed. They had arrived to the museum at 3, and browsed other exhibits before simply sauntering into the end of the line for a 20-minute wait, without ever being offered a scavenger hunt guide.

“It’s moving quickly!” they declared, as they were shuffled in by 4:55.

Those exiting the exhibit, though, did manage to find one last line in which to spend their remaining Met minutes: the one leading to the gift shop cash register.

In a decision issued Tuesday, the federal District Court in Washington, D.C. acknowledged that Russia’s fear that its art might be seized by Chabad, the Brooklyn-based Jewish Orthodox sect, is legitimate. The embargo, thus, is not without rationale.

Chabad is seeking to seize Russian property to satisfy a default judgment it obtained last year.

Russia has stated that if it sends art to the U.S. it fears it will be seized by Chabad to force it to comply with the judgment.  As a result, over the last year, Russia has cancelled loans to such institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and recalled other loans.

For the most part, legal experts and the press have denigrated Russia's fears.  Yet, in its just-issued opinion the federal court said otherwise.  The court’s statements were in its decision denying Chabad’s motion for sanctions as premature and granting its motion to begin enforcement proceedings on the judgment obtained when Russia refused to acknowledge U.S. jurisdiction.

The Court stated it “is unwilling to conclude that Russia’s concerns about the safety of its own cultural objects is entirely unfounded, given prior – albeit unsuccessful – attempts to attach such objects in at least one other case.”

In a stunning suggestion of diplomacy where the judicial branch of government tries to do what the State Department has not – cool things off – the Court said it hopes its decision “will help facilitate a return to business as usual in the sharing of artifacts and history between nations that is crucial to the promotion of cross-cultural understanding.”

But it also issued a warning: “While the Court is eager to provide whatever assurances to Moscow are necessary to encourage full future exchanges of art and artifacts between the United States and Russia, . . . the Court is not imbued with the authority to pre-judge any potential attachment that might occur.”

Gentile Bellini’s portrait of Catarina Cornaro.

Times may be tough for New York’s museums, but that isn’t stopping the Metropolitan Museum of Art from mounting a major loan exhibition later this year. On December 19, the museum opens “The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini,” a blockbuster that will include about 160 works from more than 40 museums around the world.

Just the other day, The Observer noticed, the Met quietly put one of those major loans on view: Gentile Bellini’s portrait of Catarina Cornaro, the queen of Cyprus, comes from the Szepmuveszeti Muzeum in Budapest.

Like many Renaissance paintings, this one, which has just been cleaned and restored by the Met in preparation for the show, tells the story of a powerful figure humbling herself before a genius artist. The inscription on Bellini’s portrait of the queen states: “The senate of Venice calls me daughter.  Cyprus, seat of nine kingdoms, is subject to me.  You see how important I am, yet greater still is the hand of Gentile Bellini, which has captured my image on such a small panel.”

The Bellini painting's current sneak preview will be brief. “The Renaissance Portrait” opens in Berlin at the end of August at the Bode Museum, so the painting will hang at the Met only until it’s whisked off to Germany and then return with the full show in December.

The Bode, which co-organized the show, announced in June that Leonardo da Vinci's painting Lady With an Ermine will make an appearance there as part of “The Renaissance Portrait” before that painting travels on to the Leonardo exhibition at London’s National Gallery.  Will the Leonardo then travel to New York before heading back home to Poland?  The Met curator of this show, Keith Christiansen, was unavailable for comment, but his office, reached today, said no.

Maybe that will change, what with the London papers reporting yesterday that the Leonardo painting’s owner now doubts that the National Gallery is secure enough to protect its painting from something like the recent spray paint attack on a Poussin painting there.  Can New York hope for the Met being substituted for the National Gallery?  Stay tuned.

In related news, The Met, according to its website, is still looking for a corporate sponsor for “The Renaissance Portrait.”  Price tag:  $1 million.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art recently raised its suggest ticket price for an adult from $20 to $25.

While the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent decision to raise its suggested ticket prices sparked a debate about the public's access to museums, the Met certainly seems to have no shortage of demand. Met administrators announced today that, during the fiscal year ending on June 30, 5.68 million had visited the museum, which is the largest total in 40 years and a 400,000-person increase over last year's number.

Met director Thomas P. Campbell said in a statement that the attendance was particularly remarkable given the "ongoing fiscal challenges faced by both the museum and the public." Indeed, the most popular exhibition, "Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum" (which drew 703,000 visitors), was seen by many critics as a product of that chastened environment, comprised solely of works from the museum's collection.

The Met's current retrospective of the late fashion designer Alexander McQueen has also been a major draw, welcoming more than 500,000 visitors since its May 4 opening. The exhibition runs through Aug. 7, and the Met has announced it will extend viewing hours for the show during its final four days.

The Met's 5.68-million-person figure puts it in third place in terms of international museum attendance, Hyperallergic magazine notes. Only the Louvre and the British Museum--with 8.5 million and 5.84 million guests in 2010, respectively--currently have higher visitor numbers on their books.

With 43 drawings and 28 sketchbooks tracing his work from the 1970s to the present, this is a drawing show where you don't need reading glasses. A few early works in the first room map in charcoal on paper something Serra drew, but soon giant oily shapes take over. Triangle affixes a 6-foot triangle to the wall. It's solid black, sculptural, smearily gestalt. The drawing is not about how your eye sees line, but how your body reacts to its massive shape. A number of pieces have been remade for the exhibition; the galleries smell like fresh oil paint, like newly cut hay to an art viewer. Black paintstick--an oil-based, oversize crayon--is Mr. Serra's medium of choice. This is the ideal art exhibit for someone who is color blind. Every piece is black.

Donald Judd wrote in 1965 that "half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture," and you get the sense that Mr. Serra got the memo. In the late '60s, he made up a list of verbs on a sketchbook page. which is on view: "to roll," "to crease," "to fold," "to time," "to laminate," "to scatter," "to grasp," "to knot," "to cut," "to curve," "to remove." "To draw," and "to paint" were not among them.

Mr. Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. A muscular man with an M.F.A. from Yale and two years of looking at art in Paris and Italy under his belt, he was 28 living in New York in a loft on Greenwich Street, supporting himself by moving furniture. He had just started to work in lead, fiberglass and rubber. At about this time Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt had been in the 1966 Primary Structures show at the Jewish Museum; their move to make impersonal, reconstructable work and use the gallery as an installation environment is evident. But Mr. Serra's real community is Robert Smithson, Eve Hesse, Yvonne Rainer and Bruce Nauman--people who politicized and eroticized Minimalism, who above all brought it back to the body. Mr. Serra's brother is the counterculture San Francisco trial lawyer Tony Serra ("More freedom for more people through law is a beautiful concept"), and both Messrs. Serras may err on the side of defiant anti-institutional idealism.

In Blank, two giant facing rectangles press on either side of the narrow walls of gallery. Walking through the show you realize Mr. Serra's work is not compositional. It doesn't have parts or bases. When you get close, you see his infinitely dense shapes are held in place with tiny black staples pushed directly into the wall. If the show is not about painting, or even drawing, it is about scale, mass and the way planes pull at you. It's like meditation: You start to notice how you stand on the balls of your feet, the way certain things attract you or repel you.

The 1970s drawings are also often funny, even endearing. In Institutionalized Abstract Art, a black circle with a 90-inch diameter has been paintsticked directly on the wall about 7 feet up. The black registers as absence, a hole in the white wall, and the piece looks like a giant cartoon mouse hole. Mr. Serra knows that black empties out the steel shapes in Forged Drawing, so that rather than massive, these paintsticked sculptures look hollow, like pipes. It wasn't clear to me that laughter would be a welcome response, though, and the glee the works elicited seemed a little out of place, so I stifled it.

It was the 1980s when Mr. Serra was at his best. Pittsburgh has slightly Guston-y radiant shapes, and time has haloed the paper with oil around the two barely touching paintstick squares. He was ticked off at the government the year he made No Mandatory Patriotism, two rectangles just touching at top with a wedge of white showing through their lower facing edges. (Tilted Arc, that 1981 debacle of site-specificity once installed at the Jacob K. Javits federal building, was removed in 1989 after much public debate; another drawing from the same year is titled The United States Government Destroys Art). This is the best room in the show, where Mr. Serra wields with delicacy the powerful relationships of form to form and artwork to viewer.

In the 1990s, the scale of the work grows smaller. These more picturelike drawings recap earlier breakthroughs. Their size and framing seems to retreat from the kind of engagement with the viewer and the walls that made the earlier rooms thrilling. In the late 1990s and 2000s, square-framed circles like Robert Frank and out-of-round X swirl paintstick into what looks like black radiant suns with a centrifugal velocity. They aren't resolved and seem on the verge of proposing a problem that other artists will have to solve.

The show's final room puts on display 28 of Serra's never-before-exhibited notebooks. Almost jarringly representational after the exhibition's insistence on pure form, these drawings are like postcards from places you'd want to see Mr. Serra sketching: the Giza Pyramids, the Guggenheim museum, the Le Corbusier Chapel in Ronchamp, Machu Picchu. Four videos, among them the literal Hand Catching Lead, round out the show's generous definition of drawing.

The artist is now 72 years old. He spent three weeks at the Met installing his retrospective, and the staff there seemed proud and almost proprietary of his presence, as if the artist himself were an artifact on loan. Mr. Serra at the opening pointed out that the Met was exhibiting his work simultaneous to Cézanne's Card Player series; Serra's One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) suggests another way to view the mass and weight of the planes of paint in Cézanne.

Speaking with Michelle White, associate curator at the Menil, I was told that the Met's galleries were remodeled to accommodate Mr. Serra: The continuous decorative molding along the base of the walls had been taken out to install his often floor-to-ceiling works. (You can spot the remains of wainscoting along one stubborn wall.) The museum's molding is gone for good, and this is fitting--if works in the Met have influenced Mr. Serra, this exhibition has in turn definitively made the Met more modern.

editorial@observer.com

The Whitney approved a $680 million expansion plan into the meatpacking district last spring, after years cramped in an overhanging Brutalist beast of a building on 75th Street. But there was a catch: Cosmetics heir Leonard Lauder apparently has a soft spot for concrete, and gave the art gallery $131 million only on the condition that it not sell its historic Marcel Breuer-designed home.

Rumors have abounded since last spring that the Met would rent the entire building. After more than a year of negotiations, the two parties are close to a deal, sources say.

Even though the Whitney's move is still a couple of years away, the two parties will need time to orchestrate the move, so there is some pressure to get the deal done early. Sources also said the building may become a museum-size exhibition space dedicated to post-1960s art or may house the Met's contemporary art collection. They note that a collection with a more contemporary edge would suit the building's Modernist design.

No brokers are currently involved in the transaction. Neither parties' press offices returned calls for comment.

lkusisto@observer.com

In the first of three rooms are several dozen etchings, engravings and paintings from the museum's prints and drawings and European paintings collections. While we may think of modern card players as gamblers-aleatory and ludic, rowdy or drunken-and smokers as just plain unhealthy, these compositions present smoking and card playing as philosophic activities. The curators display images of 17th-century Dutch and Flemish card players, and their 18th- and 19th-century French associates, as prototypes of a genre that focuses on the introspective nature of these pursuits. Perhaps the closest to Cézanne in tone are Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin's solitary card players.

In the second room are 15 Cézanne paintings and drawings of card players, single figures and groups of two and four. What is notable is what is not present. The large Barnes Collection Card Players (1890-92) is not on display. Neither is Cézanne's largest two-person card-player painting. (Life-size black-and-white photographs stand in for these.) Instead, seven paintings and oil studies and several drawings, which the scholarship behind this exhibition has established were made prior to the absent largest compositions, are on view. Because the payoff of the final composition is missing, the show becomes about the process.

The thinking that carries from painting to painting is methodological yet strangely illogical. Cézanne seems so intent on rendering symmetries that the logic of life often escapes him; the game the two men play in The Card Players (1892-96, Musée d'Orsay) becomes literal double solitaire, with no cards on the table. It brings to mind what Meyer Shapiro said of Cézanne's card players, that they are engaged in "a kind of collective solitaire."

Despite the tenuous fantasy of cafe, cards and smoking apparatuses, these are Cézanne's most trustworthy figures (as opposed to his wonderfully wonky Bathers, or his oddly unperceptive portraits of his wife). You see him registering each nuance of the sitter, from the facet of a brow or profile to the cut of a lapel, and even getting right the particular distance a painter's model takes from his task of posing.

In the last room are five individual portraits of figures, some smoking. Their mood fits squarely within the contemplative and melancholic premise of some of the Flemish smokers we met in prints in the exhibition's first room. These paintings surprise by being Cézanne's best portraits. They were executed between 1890 and 1896 in the South of France. The farm workers who posed as models were family employees, but they are also Cézanne's self-identified community.

In opposition to the chic and the anonymous faces of urban life, Cézanne found, in the country house where he grew up, the subjects for the kind of durable French art he had always longed to make. In Man with a Pipe, the subject emerges from his background in the same way that houses of that region emerge from the earth. The tone-on-tone of the man's brown suit and hat, hair and mustache in front of the brown wall speaks not just to a great technical ability but to a profound sense of belonging to a place.

Peasant models the subject's blue jacket and white shirt in subtle short strokes of pink and light blue against a pink and light blue wall. At ease and at leisure, smoking, dignified, these paintings' farm workers are not Courbet's laborers breaking stones under the sun; they are subjects at repose and at home. As Cézanne wrote, "I love above all else the appearance of people who have grown old without breaking with old customs."

In Man with a Blue Smock, Cézanne renders the modern sitter in front of an 18th-century wall mural. The difference between the real man's aged face and the blank round face of the painted woman in the mural behind him is deft without being showy. The peculiar tension of the painted sitter in front of the doubly painted background complicates the composition, pushes against the experience of making a painting itself, and what emerges as the ultimate subject is Cézanne's attention-to composition, to texture, to the experience of vision.

One reason we visit museums is to experience a heightened attention to looking. Making a good large painting for the artist, and untangling the sequence of a series of works for the curators, seem in this case similar tasks: They both required a huge amount of slow looking; neither project has a particularly conspicuous utility; and here both are being done very well. If the French verb essayer means to try, to test out, then this exhibition and these paintings feel like essays in the original sense of the word. Despite their lacunae, or perhaps because of their unfinished qualities, there is a particular pleasure to be gleaned from this small display of patient work.

editorial@observer.com

Jonathan and Elizabeth Tisch's donation to the Metropolitan Museum of Art will build more than a new Costume Institute Gallery-it could canonize a new set of fashion-design superstars.

Last week, the billionaire Tisches made a $10 million gift to the Met that will fund a 4,200-square-foot namesake gallery and state-of-the-art storage for the institute's 35,000-item archive, projects that have been little more than fund-raising fantasies for the Met for more than a decade. The couple's largesse, insiders said, could propel Lizzie Tisch onto the Met's tony board of trustees.

But, even more significantly, the reconfiguration of the Costume Institute will change which and how many fashion designers are given shows, said Costume Institute curator Harold Koda. Instead of having one big show, curators will be able to build walls for multiple small, "jewel-like" exhibitions-introducing visitors to the works of little-seen designers.

Who'll get the star treatment? "I'd love to have small shows about American designers-Bonnie Cashin, Giorgio di Sant'Angelo" or early-20th-century designer Jessie Franklin Turner. She is "known to costume historians, but no one on the street would know who she was," Mr. Koda said. "We haven't been able to do these capsule shows because it's always been a big space."

That could be a boon to the bottom line of fashion houses, said couture collector and Heritage Galleries head of business development Tiffany Dubin. Fashion "shows have been extraordinary moneymakers [for the museum], so now that'll translate to helping retail," said the founder of the Sotheby's couture department and author of Vintage Fashion. "The next step is for people to start thinking that when you buy a Jason Wu, you're buying a moment of history, and if it's in a museum, it adds a resale value." Fashion is "validated in a way," she said.

"This gift is truly transformative," the museum's director, Thomas P. Campbell, said in a statement. In the new gallery, "the possibilities for creative interpretations of the collection" will be "unlimited."

The Costume Institute plays an outsize role as a publicity and fund-raising vehicle for the Met. Its exhibitions and events, chief among them the annual Anna Wintour-chaired gala in May, bring in millions each year, plus celebrities (last year's gala drew Justin Timberlake, Hugh Jackman, Iman and Sarah Jessica Parker) and buzz.

The institute has had its roots in commerce since it launched in the 1940s with a collection of clothes from Bloomingdale's. But, for 40 years, the institution declined to showcase living designers, until saluting Yves Saint Laurent in 1983 with a show that "consecrated" the couturier, said Rogues' Gallery author Michael Gross, a gadfly critic of the institution.

On his blog, Mr. Gross wrote, "The subtext of a $10 million gift to the museum" is that "it typically buys a seat on the board." (Mr. Tisch's uncle, Laurence Tisch, once donated $10 million and served on the Met board.) It's not much of a stretch, then, to imagine Lizzie Tisch, who's routinely spotted at fashion shows-pink Birkin in hand-or on Vanity Fair's annual Best-Dressed List, slipping into a seat on the glamorous board.

"The board would be a good place for Lizzie," said high-society scribe David Patrick Columbia, in an email. "And the days of Condé Nast and Anna Wintour dominating the Costume Institute are numbered on simply actuarial terms."

But Mr. Koda said that advancing knowledge was the Tisches' motivation for the gift. "Lizzie is engaged by fashion, but she doesn't live for it." The gallery was always about "education-that was the point."

Mr. Tisch is a big donor, once giving $40 million to Tufts, and his wife heads the Friends of the Costume Institute-but the "magnitude" of their gift was a surprise, said Mr. Koda. The Tisch name is already emblazoned across two N.Y.U. buildings, at the entrance to a Central Park zoo and in the halls of the Met. The family runs the Loews hotel and cinema chains and has oil interests and a stake in the New York Giants.

As of now, the institute's U-shaped gallery of glass vitrines and roped-off platforms isn't ideal. "Every show looks like the one before it," Mr. Koda said. After the renovation, it will look like a traditional art gallery: an open rectangular space that allows visitors to walk around costumes.

But, why all this fuss about garments? Ms. Dubin said the Met's Costume Institute "encourages the young designer ... to think of their work in the context of our culture and history." The Tisch donation, fashion fans and museum insiders are hoping, will elevate designers' work one step closer to the realm of high art.