Arts & Entertainment

Saint Laurent’s designs join artworks that inspired them at Paris exhibition

Paris, Jan 29 (EFE).- Six Paris museums on Saturday joined forces to pay tribute to designer Yves Saint Laurent by exhibiting his designs alongside the art pieces that inspired him.

The exhibition was inaugurated on Saturday, marking the 60th anniversary of the first haute couture fashion show by the French creator, to offer a “dialogue” between the clothes and the painters or art movements that inspired him.

Saint Laurent (1936-2008) “had a true passion for art,” the general curator of the exhibition Mouna Mekouar told Efe.

“He was naturally inspired by the arts to create, but each of his inspirations was the fruit of long investigations,” she added.

The 1979 autumn-winter collection, for example, was a tribute to Pablo Picasso. The Frenchman discovered the sets and designs the Spaniard made for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes at the National Library of France.

“He copied his works just as a painter could copy his predecessors,” Mekouar said.

This created links between one artform and another “and perhaps broke the borders that could separate these two universes to make them coexist,” she added.

The resulting dress can be seen at the Centre Pompidou, where the designer offered his farewell show on 22 January 2002, which was attended by some 2,000 guests.

Alongside the Centre Pompidou, The Louvre Museum, the Orsay Museum, the Modern Art Museum in Paris, the Picasso Museum and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum co-host the exhibition.

Three artists were decisive in their collections: Picasso, whom he considered “a pure genius”; Henri Matisse, “who helped him understand color”, and Piet Mondrian, “probably because of his purity and his search for perfection”, Mekouar said.

The different materials, whether canvas or fabric, resulted in unique creations, such as his 2001 spring-summer organza blouse and skirt, inspired by Pierre Bonnard.

“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,” the curator at the Museum of Modern Art Charlotte Barat said. EFE

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