Yves Saint Laurent and art, it’s a long story… And a surprising exhibition that runs until May 15: instead of gathering all the works that inspired the designer in one place, it is the dresses, silhouettes and toilets of the designer that move to where their models are exposed.
If we have to measure the talent of an artist and the immensity of his art by the number of museums that exhibit his work, then Yves Saint Laurent is a very big one. We knew he was a great couturier. The general public is perhaps less aware that he was a great art lover and that various painters, sculptors, artists and currents nourished and inspired him. From January 29 to May 15, 2022, six major Parisian establishments will each highlight an aspect of the designer’s personality and universe. The format is unique. The exhibition forms a journey of several chapters and episodes in the couturier’s life, as is often the case with monographs.
The originality lies in the fact that these chapters are themselves distributed in several first-class museums in the fashion capital. “Yves Saint Laurent at the Museums” allows the couturier’s work to unfold in not one, not two, not three, but six high places of culture.
At the Musée d’Orsay, the impressionist dresses respond to the paintings of Monet, Manet. The Picasso Museum serves as a setting for the pink period and the YSL cubist toilets, while the Museum of Modern Art and the Center Pompidou pose face to face modernist and contemporary paintings, sculptures and works, including the famous Mondrian dress, the one that will make the young designer known to the whole world in 1966. The traveling exhibition continues at the Louvre and of course, at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, which is appropriately celebrating the 60th anniversary of the designer’s very first fashion show.
Isabelle Manzoni
