Yves Saint Laurent in Paris: Is fashion art? – Culture

Two checks, black grid pattern, red and blue, yellow and green. Both works are made of fabric, one is art, the other a dress. The painting is by Piet Mondrian, the stiff, hasty dress was designed by Yves Saint Laurent. It looks like the head and legs are sticking out of the stretcher and canvas like the sandwich man on the billboard.

Dress and art meet in Paris exhibitions spread across six museums. And because the homage pays homage to the great couturier Yves Saint Laurent and the public enthusiastically rediscovers his cultural institutions along the exhibition route, the old question arises: is a dress like this just a dress? Or even art? Possibly even the greater art?

The tour is a great success, the whole of Paris seems to be constantly on the way to Yves Saint Laurent, this winter he is enlivening museums such as the Center Pompidou, the Musée d’Art Moderne or the Louvre, which are mainly the terrain of the are art. In the exhibition project, fashion is not presented as a competitor to art. Even the catalog shows glaring old photos from the glamorous nightlife of the 1970s, which unfolded in bars and on roof terraces between Marrakech, Paris and New York, in which Yves Saint Laurent posed with artists such as Andy Warhol or Salvador Dalí. The fact that the question of the relationship between art and fashion arises primarily means that there is something to be gained.

The pictures stay in the museum, the dress can march out

The fact that art is more, that the formula for escalation ranges from handicraft to arts and crafts to art, is not the fault of art itself. In the Renaissance, painters and sculptors did not shy away from grand gestures and symbols, until the idea of ​​genius also prevailed in their guilds. Anyone who worked with marble, canvas or bronze no longer had a workshop but a studio; Signature and name guaranteed the extraordinary, sometimes also the supernatural.

This separation of fine arts and crafts is now a good half a millennium old. The art is still there, but the traditional craft has changed. In fashion, with industrialization, tailors and weavers were replaced by specialists who, if they were very successful, also used their names to vouch for special quality, for originality and authenticity – even if they were mass-produced.

The first of these names – Coco Chanel – established itself in the 1920s, when art was still looking for the right relationship to the rapid developments in technology and industry. The epoch was shaped by the world war, the revolution and the factory and called for more than the artistic individual, the lonely genius. The technology-loving Italian Futurism was founded by a group, artists in the Soviet Union designed the party’s tribunes, lecterns and newspaper kiosks.

Open detailed view

The Bauhaus in Germany, meanwhile, explained that artists were probably better off in the Bauhütte of the Middle Ages than in the bourgeois salon. Walter Gropius understood the task of the artistic avant-garde, i.e. artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky or Oskar Schlemmer, to be, above all, to guide and inspire highly talented young people in the workshop. ​“Architects, sculptors, painters, we all need to get back to the craft!” This then developed into the profession of designer, who designs chairs, office tables, carpets, steel lamps or clothing fabrics for the machine age.

For the Bauhaus generation, the art museum was no longer the end or goal of their work. Nevertheless, the museums included their designs, sketches and prototypes in their collections – the basis for the design museums, in which fashion – from the first brightly colored sketch to the style-defining robe – is preserved, researched and exhibited.

Yves Saint Laurent liked to be photographed with his seamstresses

But the design museum is obviously not enough for the enormous self-confidence of the luxury industry, which sticks to proper names even if those who bear them have long since died. It is the aura of genius, of the lonely artist, that should radiate onto the label. And that’s only in the art museum. Such an extraordinary, highly talented designer as Yves Saint Laurent, despite all his arrogance, never claimed to be an artist during his lifetime. On the contrary: He was happy to be photographed surrounded by his seamstresses. And used his wealth and his exquisite taste to put together an extraordinary collection together with his partner Pierre Bergé. Yves Saint Laurent valued art and drew inspiration from it – resulting in the most beautiful visual punchlines in Paris now. Just like the double diamond.

But despite all the euphoria, one thing cannot be overlooked: Piet Mondrian’s reduced, blueprint-flat paintings, after almost a century in the museum, still stand in the way of their neighbors from Impressionism, Fauvism, Expressionism with simple coolness. They are a new design of seeing and feeling. Mondrian knew that if this reduction succeeds, the ratios will be reshuffled.

And the lines and color areas on the dress that are so similar are just a pattern after all. Made for shop windows, boulevards or restaurants to stand out, elegant, modern, slim. The genius of Yves Saint Laurent’s version of black, white and red is that when his dress has had enough of the museum, it can just walk out again.