January 2021. Museums have been confined for months and there is no hope of reopening yet. The projects, however, continue to hatch in the greatest secrecy. At the start of the year, curator Mouna Mekouar is going to the Center Pompidou to scout an unprecedented event launched by the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation: the celebration of the 60and anniversary of the first show of the couturier who died in 2008 by exploring his links with the art of his time. Not a retrospective-river like the one organized in 2010 at the Petit Palais, but a multitude of punctuations whose kickoff is now imminent: it will be given on January 29 in six Parisian museums, including the Louvre and Orsay.
In Beaubourg, Mouna Mekouar and the curators Christian Briend and Marie Sarrey were spoiled for choice as Yves Saint Laurent contemplated the great masters of modernity. They also had a few obligations, such as bringing the 1965 Mondrian dress closer to the painting that inspired it. But the collections of the Center Pompidou also encourage sidesteps, which the curator allows herself by highlighting a lesser-known aspect of the couturier: his interest in the arts of Africa.
Apart from Oran, in Algeria, where he was born in 1936, and Morocco, where he regularly took refuge from the 1960s, Yves Saint Laurent has never traveled to the African continent. However, he admires the shapes as well as the silhouettes that he will parade on his catwalks. The first object purchased with his companion Pierre Bergé (shareholder of Le Monde Group from 2010 to his death in 2017) will also be a Senoufo bird from Côte d’Ivoire, a symbol of fertility. Even today, this sculpture welcomes visitors to the Yves Saint Laurent museum in Marrakech. Africa also invites itself into the creator’s work. Thus the so-called “Bambara” collection, which Yves Saint Laurent signed in 1967, a year after the World Festival of Negro Arts launched by Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor, first in Dakar and then at the Grand Palais in Paris.
Alberto Giacometti and André Breton
But what is this locker room up against? Mouna Mekouar herself has little desire for literal face-offs. In Beaubourg, she installs a black dress embroidered with Rhodoïd in the middle of the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, in particular of theunpleasant object, with phallic contours. Why Giacometti, whose couturier did not own works, but pieces of furniture? “Both shared the same interest in the writings of Georges Bataille, replies Mouna Mekouar. Giacometti also looked at the arts of Africa, the forms of which he simplified to the extreme. »
A few rooms further on, there is a red raffia coat, reminiscent of Dogon ritual clothes, which dialogues with André Breton’s “wall”, bringing together more than 200 curiosities as they were arranged in the Parisian workshop of the writer, rue Fontaine. Pierre Bergé had visited Breton’s lair several times and bought, years later, the autograph manuscript of his novel Nadja.
More Proustian, Yves Saint Laurent had never been passionate about the surrealist adventure. “The idea is not to say that Yves Saint Laurent and Breton belong to the same world, explicit Mouna Mekouar, but rather how everyone appropriates sources of inspiration and translates them into their own creation. » Like an invisible thread between two men, certainly different, but driven by the same eclecticism.
“Yves Saint Laurent at the museum”, at the Center Pompidou, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, at the Louvre, at Orsay, at the Picasso-Paris National Museum and at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, from January 29 to May 15.