The Four Seasons

by Harold Koda, Richard Martin

Throughout The Metropolitan Museum of Art, works of art assure our perception of the the time of year. Universal are such callibrations as we witness spring flowers on a Momoyama sake vessel or the walkers though spring showers in Ukioye prints. Similarly, summer landscape gently unifies the scroll Summer Mountains attributed to Ch'u Ting (ca. 1023–56), and summer sun radiates from Joseph Mallord William Turner's The Grand Canal, Venice (1835). Autumn dark and stormy dim the scene in Jean Francois Millet's Autumn (1873–74), and the season's vivacious paintbox tinges the multicolored landscape in the Louis Comfort Tiffany window Autumn Landscape (1923). Winter's blasts chill Emmanuel Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware (1851) and Currier & Ives's Winter in the Country (1873), which appeared in American almanacs. Are these works of art, along with so many other examples, merely the descriptive accounts of a particular time, or are they touchstones to our sensibility, reckonings with the variable light, landscape, and emotions of the seasons, and records of the deep space the seasons in our psyches? “The Four Seasons” exhibition examines fashion’s intimate relation to the calendar not as an exact record but as an intellectual construct, even a set of hopes that governs time’s remorseless progression. The Four Seasons publication which commemorates the 1997 exhibition of the same by the The Costume Institute at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, is divided into sections for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and "All Seasons" with representative works of drawing, painting, stained glass, etc. juxtaposed and compared with costumes all chosen carefully from the Museum's holdings. [This book was originally published in 1997 and has gone out of print. This edition is a print-on-demand version of the original book.]

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press

16 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2013

About the author

Harold Koda (3 January 3, 1950) is an American fashion scholar, curator, and the former curator-in-chief of the Anna Wintour Costume Center at the Metropolitan Museum of Art