Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé - Christie's

126
Edward Burne-Jones
In the early 1970s, when Yves Saint Laurent acquired Burne-Jones’s monumental
five-panelled window cartoon, Paradise, with the Worship of the Holy Lamb,
Pre-Raphaelite art in France was yet to re-emerge from the total obscurity to
which it had been banished by critics over 50 years earlier. Yet by 1980, in
addition to a pencil drawing by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Yves Saint Laurent and
Pierre Bergé owned works by Burne-Jones in painting, crayon and tapestry,
reflecting the eclectic nature of both artist and collector.
Saint Laurent’s interest in this English Symbolist movement was stoked
by his close friendship with Marie-Laure de Noailles, whose taste, elegantly
displayed in her hôtel particulier on the Place des Etats-Unis, so strongly influenced
the décor of the apartment in the rue de Babylone. Since 1932, the Noailles
family had owned Burne-Jones’s masterpiece, The Wheel of Fortune, today in
the Musée d’Orsay, which Saint Laurent always remembered for having left
upon him such an indelible impression.
Like Franz von Stuck’s Amazone, a bold composition which recalls the artist’s
sculptures of the same subject, Burne-Jones’s huge tapestry, The Adoration of the
Magi, woven in the workshop of the father of the Arts and Crafts Movement,
William Morris, is a fitting testament to Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s
interest in both the visual and decorative arts and is remarkable for its rich,
unfaded colour, encapsulating the ‘force and purity’, which Morris considered to
be of primary importance in the design of tapestry, and which so characterise the
objects – in all categories – of the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection.
SIR EDWARD COLEY BURNE-JONES, BT, A.R.A., R.W.S. (1833–1898)
Paradise, with the Worship of the Holy Lamb, wax crayon over pencil, touched with gold, on paper laid on canvas
five panels, each 134 × 21 in. (340.3 × 53.3 cm.). Executed 1875–80. Estimate: 3500,000–700,000
S.G.