In Paris, a 6-Museum Exhibition Puts Yves Saint Laurent’s Abiding Connection to Art in Focus

Yves Saint Laurent spent his entire career paying tribute to artists: Mondrian, Matisse, Picasso, Poliakoff, Warhol, Wesselman, Van Gogh, Vasarely—and there are several others. Now, six museums across Paris are paying tribute to him through a sprawling exhibition that showcases his art connoisseurship, creative genius, and imaginative savoir-faire.

Staged within the permanent collections of the Musée du Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Musée de l’Art Moderne, the Centre Pompidou, the Musée National Picasso-Paris, and the Musée Yves Saint Laurent Paris, this unparalleled project opened on January 29, 2022, precisely timed to the 60th anniversary of the late couturier’s first collection. He gave his fashion farewell 40 years later, symbolically, at the Centre Pompidou. If museums filled Saint Laurent’s mind with endless inspiration, modern art proved the creative soul within his body of work.

Those with an avidity for all things Saint Laurent will want to cover the six institutions, but the pleasure of this multi-stop exhibition, organized by and displaying the archives of the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, is that visitors need not follow any prescribed order. “The project was conceived like a constellation, a galaxy, an archipelago,” says Mouna Mekouar, who curated Saint Laurent aux Musées along with Stephan Janson and Madison Cox, president of the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent. She says that an open circuit rather than a linear program felt more faithful to the way Saint Laurent consumed art—a kind-of flânerie that was non-hierarchical and motivated by aspects of composition, color, form and, above all, admiration for the artists.

From one museum to the next, the fashion presentation is in dialogue with the surrounding art. Housed in vitrines in the Louvre’s sumptuous Galerie d’Apollon, fitted jackets festooned with a variety of gold filigree, rock crystal, and cabochons from 1979-81 appear nearly as exquisite as the Crown Jewels worn by French queens and empresses in the 19th century. But then, at the Musée d’Art Moderne, three fluid ensembles in saturated hues of absinthe green, sunflower, and fuchsia from 1992 are positioned in the center of La Fée Électricité, the cavernous space where Raoul Dufy’s vivid fresco depicts 108 (primarily male) scientists and their inventions. “He drew from these sources of inspiration that he would reinvent and elaborate anew to arrive at his own works,” says Mekouar. “He considered that all art belonged to the present time.”

Since today marks the start of Paris Fashion Week, there is no time like the present to find inspiration in these juxtapositions. “The idea is to try and understand the links that fashion weaves with art, the bridges that exist between art and fashion,” says Mekouar of her first curator project involving fashion. In the spirit of the six participating museums, here are six additional takeaways.

Emulation rather than imitation