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An invitation to be honored at the Couture Council of The Museum at FIT’s annual September luncheon got the wheels turning in Albert Kriemler’s head. Why not put on his Akris show in New York instead of Paris for a season? And why not approach the artist Carmen Herrera about using her paintings as a reference point? He had fallen in love with her 1959 painting Blanco y Verde at the new Whitney’s inaugural exhibition last year.

Kriemler’s Akris collections are often informed by art and architecture: The work of Kazimir Malevich, Thomas Ruff, Sou Fujimoto, and Roberto Burle Marx has been inspirational in the past. Kriemler met Herrera on May 31 of this year, on what happened to be her 101st birthday, and the encounter proved especially fruitful. This was a terrific Akris show, one in which the boldness of the graphic prints trumped the intricacy and precision of the house’s famous, but more subtle, St. Gallen lace. The colorful geometries of Herrera’s paintings made for eye-catching motifs on shifts and shirtdresses with breezy, away-from-the-body silhouettes that echoed those geometries. A more minimal work informed an excellent linearly draped black-and-white long dress, and the shorter version was good, too.

Kriemler listed seven paintings dating from 1948 through 2014 in his show notes, a gesture suggestive not only of the serious collector he is, but also of the precision approach he takes to everything he does. Sometimes that tendency leads to quite literal interpretations of an artist’s work. Herrera’s oeuvre seemed to free him. There was a nice sense of ease to the collection’s best pieces. In another bit of synchronicity, a solo exhibition of Herrera’s work opens at the Whitney later this month.