Henri MATISSE – Yves SAINT LAURENT Beauty, fashion and happiness

Office :

Serena Bucalo-Mussely, curator, exhibition curator, and Aymeric Jeudy, director of the Matisse Nice Museum, associate researcher at the Centre de la Méditerranée moderne et contemporaine (Université Nice Côte d’Azur).

The Museum Matisse Nice and theYves Saint Laurent ParisDedicate a major exhibition to two major creators who have been constantly rethinking the twentieth century, exploring its sources, transgressing them, to abolish the boundaries established between fine arts and applied arts.

If a single common feature had to link Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008), it would undoubtedly be their desire to cross the boundaries established between the "artistics" and the "applied arts". For Matisse, the decorative prints, their dynamism, become a means of creating a pictorial space that "beyond the limits of tangible (1)"; for Yves Saint Laurent, the painting offers the possibility to move from plan to volume, to design the garment as a mobile that deploys in space, an art in motion. Coudre and painting are gestures that contribute to “the same experimentation of the line, the same accuracy in the handling of contrasts, between materials and volume (2)”, and although Henri Matisse and Yves Saint Laurent have never met, the dialogue between them is evident today.

The exhibition proposes to highlight these correspondences and to make the works of the two artists dialogue. It relies on the rich collections of the Matisse Nice Museum and the Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, complemented by prestigious loans, French and international.

Reuniting 160 works – haute couture clothing, popular traditions, paintings, drawings, textiles, accessories and archival documents –, the Matisse Nice Museum offers an unprecedented journey highlighting the deep unity of the links that the couturier – one of the greatest innovators of French fashion – has woven with Henri Matisse, one of the greatest artists of his time.

(1) Kathleen Brunner, Ann Dumas, Jack Flam, et al., Matisse et la couleur des Fabrics, Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Musée départemental Matisse, London, Royal academy of arts, New York, Metropolitan museum of arts, 2004-2005/Paris, Gallimard, 2004.

(2) Dominique Païni, “Le peintre de la femme moderne”, in Yves Saint Laurent, Dialogue avec l’art, 2002. With other designer couturiers – Jacques Doucet, for example – some gestures, such as painting and sewing, find the same experimentation of the lines and the same attention to contrasts between materials and volumes.