What Do Artists Wear? An Exhibition at the Louvre-Lens in France Provides Answers.

Style and artwork have lengthy danced a pas de deux, with artists evoking costume of their work and designers referencing artwork of their creations.

However not often are the 2 examined collectively by main artwork establishments, mentioned Annabelle Ténèze, the director of the Musée du Louvre-Lens, a satellite tv for pc in Lens, northern France, of the famed Musée du Louvre. “The intersection of artwork and vogue speaks to everybody. All of us costume on daily basis, which is an act of inventive expression, in its manner. I believed, ‘Why not take a look at the historical past of this relationship, and present the way it suits into our lives immediately?’”

Shortly after her appointment to the museum in 2022, Ténèze proposed the long-gestating topic to her colleague, Olivier Gabet, who leads the Louvre’s ornamental arts division in Paris, and steered they curate it collectively. “I believed it was a fierce and powerful concept,” Gabel mentioned in an interview final week, “as a result of it may be learn on so many alternative layers.”

The result’s “The Artwork of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist,” an exhibition of 200 artworks and vogue objects that explores how these two artistic worlds circle, intersect and encourage one another and, at occasions, meld into one. It opens on the Louvre-Lens on Wednesday and runs by July 21.

“The Artwork of Dressing” is the Louvre’s second exhibition that mixes vogue with artwork, after “Louvre Couture,” a present curated by Gabet that opened in January in Paris. For that present, Gabet set modern vogue and equipment among the many museum’s artwork and furnishings collections to disclose a dialogue between métiers and eras.

Ténèze and Gabet’s present on the Louvre-Lens goes deeper, addressing every part from the affect of Historical Greece on fashionable apparel to the expression of gender identification by garments. “It’s a pleasant change to have the standpoint about vogue from a museum that isn’t a vogue museum,” Gabet mentioned. “The angle is completely different.”

“The Artwork of Dressing” opens with a big shade {photograph} from 1998 of 5 fashions within the Yves Saint Laurent Room, an area within the Nationwide Gallery in London devoted to Rubens which was restored within the mid-Nineteen Nineties, partially by a 1 million pound donation from the style designer and his companion Pierre Bergé. Within the image, every lady is wearing a Saint Laurent outfit impressed by an artist, such because the Mondrian costume from 1965 and the Van Gogh “Sunflowers” jacket from 1988.

Additionally on show are three appears to be like by Saint Laurent that have been impressed by Georges Braque, the celebrated Cubist artist who painted a ceiling within the Louvre within the Fifties. “We wished to indicate that the couturier and the visible artist will be on the similar degree,” Ténèze mentioned throughout a tour of the exhibition final week. “What higher option to begin than with Yves Saint Laurent?”

The exhibition additionally considers the garments that artists wore and what their vogue decisions reveal about their place in society.

“Artists of the Nineteenth century determined to signify themselves in portray by carrying a black swimsuit, which was the completely most bourgeois outfit of that interval,” Gabet mentioned, stating self-portraits by Eugène Delacroix in 1837 and Edgar Degas in 1855. Earlier than then, because the exhibition exhibits, artists typically portrayed themselves as St. Luke, the patron saint of painters, carrying a collarless tunic.

In stark distinction, nevertheless, is how artists really costume after they work: typically in paint- and clay-spattered coveralls, just like the royal blue ones favored by the Twentieth-century Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely. His property nonetheless had a kind of clothes 34 years after his dying, and lent it to the curators for the present. (Linking again to the world of vogue, Tinguely’s coveralls are displayed close to a 1984 Saint Laurent jumpsuit impressed by the basic French employee’s jacket, the bleu de travail.)

It was surprising within the Nineteenth century when some ladies artists donned pants within the studio — as evidenced in Georges Achille-Fould’s 1893 portrait of her mentor, Rosa Bonheur, portray a panorama whereas wearing brown trousers and a blue smock. “Girls carrying pants was an act disallowed by society on the time,” Ténèze defined. And far later, too: Saint Laurent triggered social outcry within the Nineteen Sixties along with his tuxedo for girls, considered one of which, from 1995, is within the present. “As a result of these artists fought social norms, we are able to costume extra freely immediately,” Ténèze mentioned.

Desirous about androgyny led Ténèze and Gabet to have a look at gender identification and cross-dressing in artwork and vogue. Within the present, there are some anticipated icons, such because the Nineteenth-century French feminine author George Sand, who, like Bonheur, most well-liked to put on males’s clothes — she is depicted at her nattiest in a sepia-toned portrait by Delacroix from 1834 — and Andy Warhol, who, in a collection of Polaroid self-portraits, transforms from man to lady by adjustments of costume and wigs.

However there are just a few surprises too, akin to Louise Abbéma’s “Sur le Lac au Bois de Boulogne,” an 1883 panorama that includes herself, in a gents’s swimsuit, and her companion, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, in a pale pink robe, in a rowboat on a park lake. The curators mentioned they wished to highlight long-forgotten feminine artists, akin to Abbéma, to revive curiosity of their work.

The present’s many threads come collectively when the curators have a good time the collaborations of artists and vogue designers, akin to that of the French sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle and her nice good friend, Marc Bohan, the designer at Christian Dior from 1960 to 1989. Within the early Eighties, Saint Phalle created a namesake fragrance with a bottle that includes a sculpted snake; in flip, Bohan made for Saint Phalle a shimmering gold pantsuit and headpiece impressed by her serpent to put on for the fragrance’s launch occasion (which Warhol hosted). Each the swimsuit and the fragrance’s bottle and packaging are within the exhibition; the headpiece, sadly, is lengthy misplaced, Ténèze mentioned.

When museumgoers go away the exhibition, they go alongside a zigzag wall of full-length mirrors impressed by the décor from a vogue present by the British designer Alexander McQueen, defined the exhibition’s scenographer, Mathis Boucher.

“We wished guests to have a look at themselves within the mirrors and ask, ‘Why did I put this on immediately? What am I making an attempt to say with this outfit?’ Ténèze mentioned. “Just like the exhibition, it’s a mirrored image of ourselves, and our relationship with garments.”

The Artwork of Dressing: Dressing Like an Artist
March 26 by July 21 on the Louvre-Lens in Lens, France; louvrelens.fr.