Yves Saint Laurent: from one canvas to another

Je suis un artiste raté, disait Yves Saint Laurent en2000 au Journal du Dimanche. Je n’ai eu pour moi que l’amour fou de la peinture et du théâtre. Mais tout cela n’est qu’intuition. J’ignore leurs règles. Je me suis contenté de piller les œuvres de Braque, Matisse, Picasso, Andy Warhol, Wesselmann.»»»» Coup de blues d’un couturier vieillissant ou posture d’un génie qui ne pouvait l’ignorer? «Il était trop pudique pour se qualifier d’artiste et préférait se présenter comme un artisan, certes doué»»»», répond Stephan Janson, l’un des trois commissaires de l’exposition «Yves Saint Laurent aux musées»»»».

LIRE AUSSI:Madison Cox: «Yves Saint Laurent était un amateur silencieux qui entretenait un dialogue continu avec les artistes»»»»

This Frenchman living in Milan owes his vocation to "Yves": "We were in 1965, I was 8 years old and I lived in Provence when I came across the cover of Vogue with the Mondrian dress.I asked my grandmother why not all women dressed like that!She then explained to me what haute couture was.I wanted to be a pastry chef, I decided to do this job that I had just discovered: Couturier."Having become a Parisian in adolescence, he will have the chance to meet Saint Laurent and attend salons all his life ... without ever working with him.But his sensitivity to the universe of the designer encouraged Madison Cox to entrust him with the curation of haute couture parts."This unprecedented format of exhibitions in such prestigious museums was a wonderful idea of Mouna (Mekouar, art historian and exhibition commissioner, editor's note) ... which seemed to us a dreamy," he continues.But as Pierre Bergé said: “Starts by dreaming to hope that your dreams come true." That's what happened.All these institutions agreed to play the game with an enthusiasm that we did not expect! ”

Enthusiasm commensurate with the fervor of Yves Saint Laurent for art."For him, art were shocks and favorites that penetrate deep into him and that he digit.He started that these emotions had aroused to transcribe them in his creations.He will be the first big designer to maintain a long -term dialogue with the artists, from the series of dresses homage to Piet Mondrian in 1965, to his quotes from Tom Wesselmann, of Henri Matisse, by Georges Braque, by Pierre Bonnard, deFernand Léger, by Vincent Van Gogh, Pablo Picasso…

À chaque fois ou presque, il opère une translation de tableaux en une nouvelle œuvre en trois dimensions et met l’art «en mouvement»»»». «Parce qu’il aimait trop l’art pour chercher à le reconstituer à travers des robes, Yves Saint Laurent a donné à entendre ce qu’il avait reçu, écrivait Laurence Benaïm dans sa biographie Yves Saint Laurent en1993. Les éblouissements de la lumière chez Matisse, les prismes colorés de Mondrian, le vertige des lignes chez Braque et Picasso, les velours de Vélasquez, les taffetas craquants de Van Dyck, les roses de Manet, les ciels de Nicolas de Staël (…), les aplats mouvants de Rothko, les noirs de Frans Hals. Tout semblait chez lui aspiré par cet immortel appétit du beau cher à Baudelaire. Comme Gauguin continuant à peindre des fleurs orange et des chiens rouges, comme Francis Bacon qu’il admirait, Yves Saint Laurent a modifié la perception de la mode avec des visions.»»»»

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— Pascal_Landert Wed May 09 22:22:35 +0000 2012

Saint Laurent and Art

The veneration that the designer brings to these great figures does not prevent him from observing with his sharp eye the drifts of the art market."The creation of these magnificent jackets in homage to Van Gogh corresponds to the boom of the works of the painter on the art market.(…), Analyzed Laurent Le Bon during an exciting conference given at the Saint Laurent Museum in 2018 (the podcast is available online).In this choice - since unless I am mistaken, these clothes required a phenomenal working time - there was a kind of response from Yves Saint Laurent, as a humorous wink, this madness of speculation."His" Van Gogh "actually called for the virtuosity of the crafts -" their embroidery, true technical prowess, were very popular with the great clients of haute couture, who saw it as it saw there, "said Stephan Janson.

Conversely, the legendary Mondrian dress was flirting rather with the Ready-Made."Besides, she was copied for decades!Add the curator.I myself committed this fault in the 1980s when I worked at Diane von Furstenberg.I was very inspired for a wallet dress that was crazy - because women already knew her more or less consciously.When I called Pierre Bergé to admit, he replied: "Everyone copied him, then as much as you do it and well."" "

Drunk of art, Saint Laurent hardly tasted museums."This is a question of generation.When I was a kid, we crossed the Louvre just for pleasure and in peace since there was no one.Yves liked the young museums, then, this crowd in shorts and this false democratization of culture interested it less ... ".Unlike his best enemy Karl Lagerfeld who declined any attempted retrospective about him, he lent himself to the game of the Met in 1983."Because it was impossible to refuse anything in Diana Vreeland (the great figure of American fashion then at work at the Institut du Costume du Met).Basically, he was very happy with this exhibition and he said he preferred to see this during his lifetime, knowing that anyway, he would have been entitled to it after his death.This monograph, which has remained in the Annals, paved the way for the "heritage" of the seam and then the ready-to-wear.And laid the basics of "fashion in the museum", an always delicate exercise for the conservatives who still wonder about how to present a moving without body garment."Fashion is not an art but the ambiguity of history is that an artist must be revealed to make fashion," said Pierre Bergé.As it is not an art, we do not buy it to hang it on a wall.»»»»

Before accepting the exhibition police station, Stephanjanson imposed the condition of showing the outfits without accessories - "What Pierre Bergé had never authorized as he wanted to preserve the work of Yves as it had beenthought by him.These jewelry, these bags, these knots on the shoe are very pretty but they weaken the strength of a dress or a jacket.However, these pieces had to hold the shock against such powerful works.»»"This purity work does justice to the modernity of Saint Laurent.Witness the reaction of the conservatives of the Center Pompidou when they installed, alongside Black White by Ellsworth Kelly (1988), an evening dress in black silk pancake from winter 1965.They couldn't believe that she was almost 60 years old!

Another moment of emotion, this time at the Saint Laurent museum on avenue Marceau, when Stephan Janson opened boxes not yet inventoried and discovered canvases of dresses enriched with pastel embroidery drawings ... "We did not think we find these wonders.There was this winged dress of dress tribute to Georges Braque worn by Katoucha during the spring-summer 1988 parade.In my eyes, the canvas is even more beautiful than the finished dress.Saint Laurent refused that these very theatrical and unlikely pieces are sold, because he wanted to make the lives of women and not that they find themselves in an evening having to wear the two doves on the side.»»»»

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