The Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum, the Modern Art Museum in Paris, the Picasso, the Pompidou Center and the Yves Saint Laurent participate in this joint exhibition.
Yves Saint Laurent confirmed that fashion was not an art but an artist was needed to make it. His designs paid homage to the work of Picasso or Mondrian and six Parisian museums brought the model and his source of inspiration face to face for the first time.
The inauguration, this Saturday, coincides with the 60th anniversary of the first haute couture show of the French creator of Algerian origin, on January 29, 1962, and offers a “dialogue” between clothes and painters or pictorial movements that he interpreted or took as a basis.
Saint Laurent (1936-2008) “had a true passion for art and was naturally inspired by the arts to create, but each of his inspirations were the fruit of long research”, The general curator of the exhibition, Mouna Mekouar, explains to EFE.
The 1979 autumn-winter collection, for example, was a tribute to Pablo Picasso from Malaga, whose sets and designs he made for Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes were discovered in the French National Library.
“He copied his works just as a painter could copy his predecessors”, adds the expert, for whom this work of translation on the canvas created links between one art and another “and perhaps broke the borders that could separate these two universes to make them coexist.”
The resulting dress, in crepe satin, can be seen at the Center Pompidou, the same one where the designer offered his farewell show on January 22, 2002, which was attended by some 2,000 guests.
Six museums in his honor
The Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum, the Modern Art Museum in Paris, the Picasso and the Yves Saint Laurent These are the other five institutions in the French capital that have placed creations by Saint Laurent alongside the works from its permanent catalog that illuminated the genius, such as the sculpture Polychrome Flower by Fernand Léger (1952).
Three artists were decisive in his collections: Picasso, whom he considered “a pure genius”; Matisse, “who helped him understand colour”, and Mondrian, “probably because of his purity and his search for perfection”, says Mekouar.
“Even when he did not pay an explicit homage to an artist, he always had it in his mind and in his repertoire,” adds the curator of the exhibition at the Center Pompidou, Marie Sarre.
One cannot speak of a literal transposition because the different supports, whether canvas or fabric, resulted in unique creations, such as her spring-summer 2001 organza blouse and skirt, inspired by Pierre Bonnard, considered the leader of the group of the Nabis.
“It is not about making a dress a painting, but about having the courage to try many different things and to propose these beautiful creations”, estimates in turn the curator at the Museum of Modern Art, Charlotte Barat.
The visitor is offered a circuit through these six museums of Paris with Saint Laurent as a thread. A thread that reinforces the link that the designer, with two homonymous museums in Paris and Marrakesh, had with those temples of culture.
The Metropolitan of New York, in 1983, The first exhibition dedicated to a living couturier was dedicated to him and brought together 640,000 visitors. Since then, others such as the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg (1987) or the Palace of Fine Arts in Beijing (1985) have welcomed his creations.
This latest artistic incursion by one of the most influential designers of the second half of the 20th century contributes to extolling the talent of someone who enjoyed art as a collector and as a spectator, and who through his creations enlarged the legend of his referents. (I)
Source: Eluniverso
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