Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé - Christie's

122
Pre-Raphaelite
There seems, at first glance, an extraordinary
dissonance between the Pre-Raphaelite works in
Yves Saint Laurent’s apartment on the rue de
Babylone, and their context. Edward Burne-Jones’s
tapestry and window cartoon, by their sheer
monumentality, impose on a setting which is
otherwise completely domestic in scale; moreover,
as Laurence des Cars writes, ‘The radical
aesthetics of Pre-Raphaelitism advanced the
idea of a specifically English contemporary art that
had no direct link with painting on the Continent.’
Yet, as any visitor can attest, these English works
have a strong symbiosis with their environment.
Their vision is poetic, but expressed in a crystalline
pictorial idiom, dominated by flat planes of colour,
form and line as are the 20th-century abstract
works by de Chirico, Mondrian and Léger that also
filled the rue de Babylone.
Burne-Jones was not only a painter, but like Yves
Saint Laurent, he was a man of wide-ranging and
eclectic tastes and a designer. Both men shared a
passion for drapery, and were obsessed by the
linear rhythms of its folds. Yves Saint Laurent
was not, however, the first French supporter of the
Pre-Raphaelites, although he was one of the first to
rediscover the movement after its brief fin-de-siècle
heyday, which followed the Exposition Universelle
of 1889, when Burne-Jones was fêted by Symbolist
contemporaries such as Gustave Moreau and
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.
Indeed, it can be no coincidence that all three of
Burne-Jones’s works in Yves Saint Laurent and
Pierre Bergé’s collection formerly belonged to the
Symbiosis
most sophisticated art patrons of their day – both
French and English – whose interests, like those of
these two collectors, stretched into all areas of the
decorative and visual arts.
The tapestry, The Adoration of the Magi, a subject
which the artist had already treated many times in
both paintings and stained glass, was executed for
Guillaume Mallet in 1904, as part of the
furnishings for Le Bois des Moutiers, the only
house in France designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens,
and furnished in the Arts and Crafts style. The
window cartoon, Paradise, was bought in 1899 by
Lord Plymouth, a leading member of The Souls,
the aristocratic English clique who prided
themselves on their devotion to intellectual
pursuits and artistic patronage.
And finally Luna, the ethereal painting, by
Burne-Jones, was first acquired by Alexander
Alecco, who transformed his conventional
Victorian mansion into one of the great Aesthetic
houses of the day. Against an Arts and Crafts
background designed by William Morris and
Walter Crane, he assembled an eclectic collection
of bronzes, Tanagra statuettes and Chinese
ceramics; while the walls were hung with
paintings by Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Whistler,
Fantin-Latour and others.
In a comment as applicable today to the rue de
Babylone, home of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre
Bergé, as it was originally to that of Alecco, a
contemporary critic described the whole ensemble
as ‘the harmony of complexity’.
S.G.