Leiber creates works of art with dazzling, detailed handbag creations

• By ROBIN MILLER
• Arts writer
• Published: Jun 21, 2009

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

A recent episode of Law & Order comes to mind.

A new episode or a rerun? It doesn’t matter. It just aired on a Monday night, and police were investigating what looked to be the murder of an elderly woman killed during a robbery.

But something about the crime scene wasn’t quite right.

Let’s see, money was missing, as well as jewelry. But the Judith Leiber bag was untouched.

Which is how investigators knew it was a murder and not a robbery. If it had been a real robbery, the burglar would have known to take the Judith Leiber, as well.

Now, that’s not saying there’s a murder mystery going on at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum. The connection here is in the timing.

The television episode’s mystery hinged on Leiber’s work in the same week LASM is spotlighting it. But LASM’s show, Sparkle and Elegance: The Handbags of Judith Leiber, continues to Sept. 13.

The exhibit is running in conjunction with the larger show, The Purse and the Person: A Century of Women’s Purses. That show can be found in the museum’s main galleries upstairs and downstairs.

Sparkle and Elegance also is upstairs, just around the corner in the Soupcon Gallery.

To describe this small exhibit with the cliché “icing on the cake” would be understating it. This is more. Much more.

Maybe the bride and groom atop a wedding cake? Yes, that’s it. The stars of the show, the most expensive, yet irresistible dessert on the menu.

This is what the interior of Cinderella’s castle really looks like.

Everything here sparkles. The red of the watermelon, the blue of the fish, even the black face of the cat twinkles.