The Newport Art Museum Hosts a Pop Art Gala

The Newport Art Museum Hosts a Pop Art Gala

Art and fashion snuggled up to each other last night under a big white tent at the Newport Art Museum’s Pop Art–theme gala with a lot of help from guest artist Donald Robertson, DJ Mad Marj, and the sponsor Oscar de la Renta. The result? Everyone had nothing but fun. Nearly 500 guests including the fabulous Dede Wilsey with her 100-year-old mom Ruth Buchanan, various members of the Cushing tribe (Minnie and Jimmy Coleman, Caterine Milinaire, Lucia Cushing, and Monique Coleman) and garlands of Bright Young Things came, mingled, and danced under playful balloon chandeliers (think Murakami via Jeff Koons) by Float Installations alongside a Tom Wesselmann–inspired red-lip sofa. A marching band announced it was time to go into dinner, and food stations all around gave a relaxed nightclub atmosphere. “We did not want to have a sit-down rubber-chicken dinner,” Elizabeth Ann Kahane, the indefatigable cochair, said emphatically. “We wanted small dishes at food stations, making the event more fluid and less stagnant.”

Kahane wore a Cinderella full-skirted white tulle tea-length Oscar with the letters O-S-C-A-R in bright sequins, cochair Anne Baker in vintage Oscar, cochair Molly de Ramel in a black Veronica Beard, and Steven Richter, head to toe in everything blue, even his Chinese jacket.

Lots of guests took the “Pop Art color” dress code seriously: Artist Rupert Nesbitt appropriated a Roy Lichtenstein, painting it on his white suit and on his wife Rebecca’s white shirt. Andover student Harry Kahane found a vintage Gucci tie (yellow with blue flowers) to go with his Yves Klein blue shirt. And when it came to auctioning the bright yellow Moke doodled on by Donald Robertson, the buyer snapped it up for $28,000, and said, “Don’t tell the artist, but I’m going to repaint the Moke. I hate yellow.” That’s art and fashion for you.