Two weeks ago, a very special reunion took place at the Fondation Pierre Berge – Yves Saint Laurent in Paris.
Jacques Doucet – Yves Saint Laurent, Vivre pour l'Art brings together 120 masterpieces from the former collections of two of France's greatest couturiers and art collectors.
Yves Saint Laurent died in 2008 but is still a household name while the other, Doucet, has entered the annals of art history as the man who lived with Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon in his hallway.
In the case of Saint Laurent's collection, this meant reacquainting works by masters such as Leger, Goya, Picasso, de Chirico and Gericault, as well as two pieces that now belong to the permanent collection of the Louvre Abu Dhabi, a beechwood stool by the French Art Deco designer Pierre Legrain and Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black, a 1922 painting by the Dutch Modernist Piet Mondrian.
These objects are some of the first examples of loans that have been made from the Louvre Abu Dhabi collection rather than to it, along with the museum's Game of Bezique (1881) by the French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, which recently appeared on loan at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, but the loans are possible only because the Louvre Abu Dhabi is still a work in progress.
“Once the Louvre Abu Dhabi is open, every artwork will have to stay in the museum for the first two to three years because of the museography,” says Najla Obaid Busit, a researcher with the Abu Dhabi Tourism and Culture Authority (TCA) and part of the Louvre Abu Dhabi team.
“This includes every artwork, and if a museum wanted to borrow the Mondrian or the Caillebotte once the museum is open, we don’t know if we would be able to do it.”
If the Mondrian and Legrain are key exhibits in Paris, they are also landmark acquisitions in the history of Abu Dhabi’s new museum as the first two works acquired.
“The Mondrian is not just an important artwork in the history of art, it’s also important for the history of collecting and the history of fashion,” says Ms Obaid Busit, who is part of the collection management team.
“We were really pushed by our curators to loan the piece back to the Yves Saint Laurent foundation because we got the piece from them in the first place, and we want to be able to lend it back so that it could displayed alongside the other artworks that were acquired by Yves Saint Laurent.”
Before the loan was agreed, the TCA commissioned a conservator to assess the painting, establish its conservation requirements and determine whether it was able to travel.
A year’s worth of data was also required on the suitability of the environment in the gallery where the painting was going to be displayed.
“Our priority is the longevity of the artwork, so we try to establish a safe environment around the artwork,” says Ms Obaid Busit.
A study was done using a low-level light source to reveal the condition of the painting’s surface in great detail, the results of which not only provided a baseline against which any future changes can be measured but also revealed details of Mondrian’s painting technique.
“We could see all of the details of the painting’s surface, the cracks and the brushstrokes,” Ms Obaid Busit says.
“The research not only allowed us to understand how better to transport the artwork in the most secure way possible, but also to understand the techniques and the materials that the artist was using.
“This is research that we can now make available to somebody from another museum who might be studying Mondrian.”
One of three paintings owned by Saint Laurent that are credited with inspiring his famous Mondrian collection, Composition with Blue, Red, Yellow and Black set a record for the artist when it was bought by the Louvre Abu Dhabi for €21.5 million (Dh87.2m) at the 2009 Christie's auction of the art collection of Saint Laurent and Pierre Berge.
Held over three days at the Grand Palais in Paris the 733-piece “sale of the century” raised €373.9m (Dh1.5 billion), a record for a single owner collection at the time.
It attracted a 1,200-strong audience that included the Russian billionaire and Chelsea football club owner Roman Abramovich and the art dealer Larry Gagosian. Another 35,000 visitors queued for hours to see the pre-sale show.
That public response to the collection comes as no surprise to Jerome Neutres, the curator of Jacques Doucet – Yves Saint Laurent, Vivre pour l'Art, who understands Yves Saint Laurent's place in the French cultural consciousness and believes that such collections display an understanding of art that is missing from many contemporary galleries and museums.
“Museums now look like hospitals or classrooms. There’s too much light, too much explanation, too many audio guides. It’s boring and that’s why we have so few young people visiting them,” the curator says.
“What I want to show by recreating part of the interiors of Jacques Doucet and Yves Saint Laurent is that those collectors were the best museum curators in the world.”
Mr Neutres did not try to reconstruct the interiors of Doucet’s Neuilly-sur-Seine home on the rue Saint-James and Saint Laurent’s two-floor, nine-room Parisian apartment on the Rue du Babylone.
Instead, he used five rooms at the Fondation Pierre Berge – Yves Saint Laurent to recreate relationships between paintings, sculpture and furniture, many of which are being recombined for the first time since Doucet’s collection was sold at auction in 1972.
Doucet famously combined paintings such as Henri Rousseau’s dreamlike Snake Charmer with portraits by Modigliani and furniture by designers such as Legrain, Marcel Coard and Eileen Gray, many of which can be seen in Mr Neutres’s show.
“In those rooms, one can feel how an art collector can be seen as an artist. It wasn’t just a collection, they were making art installations,” he says. “Doucet mixed Cubism with African art, which was very meaningful because we know that Cubism was inspired by African art.”
The effects of these combinations create a sense of dialogue between objects that is reminiscent of many of the recent comments made by figures, such as Jean Francois Charnier, the curatorial director of Agence France-Museums, whose desire to build a global, cross-cultural history of art have helped to inform Louvre Abu Dhabi’s approach to museography in exhibitions such as last year’s Birth of a Museum at the Musee du Louvre in Paris.
“Our point of view at Louvre Abu Dhabi is that we want to show that civilisations and societies share common roots, and we believe it is possible to show this through art,” Mr Charnier said recently. “Putting artwork from different cultures together in a permanent collection is to talk about the way cultures and civilisations build their identities, and art can show how societies want to be different but also what they share.”
But one of the main differences between Doucet and Saint Laurent’s approach and that of the Louvre Abu Dhabi is in the collector’s willingness to create a dialogue between artworks from different historical periods, as well as cultures.
“The decors that Yves Saint Laurent and Doucet made in their homes were like installations, but they weren’t like museums, they were like art installations,” Mr Neutres says.
“They were creating new dialogues that revealed connections between art movements and civilisations. That can be seen in the way Yves Saint Laurent mixed Andy Warhol with Goya, Mondrian and Lalane, old Buddha sculptures and African masks.
“Doucet combined antique Asian art with modern art and we know that Brancusi was inspired by what he had seen at the Musee Guimet, the national museum of Asian art. This creates strong dialogues that any school student can see.”
For Mr Neutres, who started working on Vivre pour l’Art in 2012, the process of reassembling the 120 works involved a mixture of luck, detective work and the full persuasive powers of Pierre Berge and the staff at his foundation.
“There are still some works that belonged to Doucet that we do not know where they are, and in some cases, there were works that were impossible to loan,” the curator explains.
“At the end of the day, we got very lucky because I think the show was relevant enough and convincing enough to make the museum curators enthusiastic.”
Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Mondrian and Legrain stool will be on display until February next year, when they will leave as they arrived, in custom-made, vibration-proof cases under the watchful eye of a member of museum’s collection management team.
“Artworks like these cannot travel by themselves. They always have to travel with a courier,” Ms Obaid Busit says. “We handle the logistics, where artworks are stored and how they are moved. We are like their babysitters.”
nleech@thenational.ae