Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé - Christie's

Yves Saint Laurent
Hunter of Spells
That which is quiet, that which is fleeting,
remains, like a jewel among the shadows. It is
elusive and, in the heady fragrance of lilies (lys in
French, an anagram of YSL) is the memory of a
man whose words were inscribed on a vast blank
page, reflected to infinity in the grey-blue Paris
sky. Yves Saint Laurent spoke of the ‘sparkling veil
of dead stars’. Under the grand crystal chandelier
of his couture house, and in the secrets of the rue
de Babylone, the lair where he stored the fruits of
his travels, ‘the child with nerves of steel’, as the
Japanese poet Mishima called him, revealed
himself through his passions.
‘I attempt to create all the people around me, to
create beauty while respecting the bodies I clothe,
so that all these women, even the least beautiful,
can be the most beautiful. There is always in me
both the love of women, and the impossibility of
loving them,’ he said. Beyond his demanding
standards, quick to transform a sketch into a
complex construction, there was the discipline that
made every Yves Saint Laurent garment a shield
against ennui; a barrier against what he feared
most in the world: ‘the emptiness of the void’.
Yves Saint Laurent’s strength lay in having dressed
not one era, but several, enchanting each one with
the whirl of his collections, written like chapters of
a story imbued with fire, dreams and melancholy.
A painter of feelings, Yves Saint Laurent could well
have belonged to the obsessive family of those
whose works he and Pierre Bergé collected, being
attracted by the strong passions that the works
themselves revealed. Through unusual magnetism,
By Laurence Benaïm
Yves Saint Laurent made those works what they
are, when others merely passed them by. Some
silently correspond with their demons while others
judge them.
In Yves Saint Laurent’s view, the past became
present, the model became an apparition, loaded
with a burning secret. Though he loved art too
much to try to reconstitute it through his fashion,
Yves Saint Laurent wanted to recount everything
he had seen. Matisse’s blinding light. Mondrian’s
colourful prisms. The vertiginous lines of Braque
and Picasso; Velazquez’s velvets and Van Dyck’s
crinkly taffetas. Manet’s pinks and Nicolas de
Staël’s skies, his seas shimmering with yellow
hues, blocks of green and violet breaking against a
red wave. Rothko’s flat planes in motion; Frans
Hals’ blacks. In his work, everything seemed
infused with the ‘immortal appetite for the
beautiful’ so dear to Baudelaire.
Like Gauguin, who continually painted orange
rivers and red dogs, like Bacon, whom he admired,
Yves Saint Laurent changed the perception of
fashion through visions. In those who no longer
believed in the future, he injected a poison capable
of causing folly and beauty, he was a dream weaver
for women to whom he declared his love, season
after season. Women he invited to recreate
themselves, reinvent themselves as best they might,
becoming androgynous yet siren-like, dreaming of
being the most beautiful, the most fragrant and the
most hated as everything quietly slipped away and
muses with masculine shoulders were eclipsed by a
storm of people in search of identity.
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