René Gruau and the Line of Beauty

“….I was practically born holding a pen between my fingers, I started tracing shapes which recalled women’s legs at an age when female anatomy was not at all interesting to me. Probably I was not more than five or six years old. I think that it all came from the fact that when I was a child I loved to leaf through the Paris fashion magazines my mother left scattered around the house: of course they had illustrations of women sometimes wearing lingerie or see-through negligées (…) I was fascinated by shapes, lines, graphic signs which lured my observing and precocious eye…” Renè Gruau, 1994

Last year I promised that René Gruau would have got his own post at some point and I turned my promise into a proposition with yesterday’s post.

So this post dedicated to Gruau tries to fulfil at least one of my obligations for the year 2011 (I'm sure I will forget about my other propositions about behaving like a proper lady by the end of tomorrow…)

Currently there is an exhibition at London’s Somerset House (until 9th January) – entitled “Dior Illustrated: René Gruau and the Line of Beauty” that looks at the connections between the fashion designer and the illustrator.

I visited it a while back and I must say that I didn’t enjoy it that much since it looked as if it had been put together rather hastily, with not enough time or money.

The connection with Dior is a vital aspect of Gruau’s life, but the lack of biographical notes in the exhibition spaces made it look as if the collaboration with the French designer was the only important one in Gruau’s career.

So let’s have a brief look at Gruau’s life and try to discover further details about his work.

As mentioned in a previous post, Renato Zavagli Ricciarelli delle Caminate – better known as René Gruau – was born in Rimini in 1909 from count Alessandro and French noblewoman Marie de Gruau de la Chesnaie.

Like Dior’s mother, Renato’s mum was a very elegant and refined woman who used to spend her winters in Montecarlo and Paris and her summers in Rimini.

Though as a young boy he had a passion for architecture, in 1923 Renato decided to follow his mother to Milan where he started contributing to some early Italian fashion magazines with his illustrations.

In the mid-'20s he decided to adopt his mother’s name, signing his work as René Gruau. His real breakthrough arrived when he moved to Paris and began working for various magazines and also for a London based fashion house, while he became internationally successful after the Second World War.

Christian Dior launched in February 1947 the “New Look” and Gruau soon became his favourite illustrator, first and foremost because he shared with him the same ideal of femininity.

Some of Dior’s friends – among them Gruau – actually played an instrumental role in the presentation of Dior’s most iconic collection since they actually helped the designer stitching his famous collection together as most Parisian seamstresses were on strike.

From the Second World War, Gruau also collaborated with international fashion magazines, including the American edition of Harper’s Bazaar and Dutch International Textiles, while working on advertising campaigns for different companies, among them Dior, Fath, Balmain, Balenciaga and Elizabeth Arden.

Yet the friendship with Dior – that started in 1936 on the fashion desk of French newspaper Le Figaro – remained vitally important since it brought together two very similar kindred spirits.

As Gruau recalled in an interview: “…probably it was Christian Dior, always so fretful, the one I felt the closest to. He used to tell me his ideas, I would show him my drawings; it was a sort of extremely prolific rivalry, which I would never find again with anybody else after his death.”

When the French designer established the Christian Dior Parfums company, he turned to his friend, asking him to create the advertising campaigns for his products.

The collaboration lasted forty years, with Gruau creating 60 illustrations for adverts published in the most important magazines of those times.

Like Dior’s, Gruau’s vision was rather nostalgic: their women had narrow waists and fully-flared skirts and were based on a mix of femininity, rigour and elegance.

One of the first images Gruau created for Miss Dior – set to become one of the most iconic images for the perfume and cosmetics company – was a watercolour, gouache and ink sketch of a swan in profile on a light brown background wearing around his long neck a pearl necklace and a wide bow (“…it was inherently elegant,” the illustrator stated about it a few years later).

Focusing on a limited number of colours, mainly comprising black, white and red (“The colours I love the most are red and black; red is a powerful colour in poster design, but I just like it as a matter of taste in the décor,” he stated in an interview in 1999), on his technique of portraying presence through absence (in many ads the products weren’t even depicted), aiming at showing the evanescence of perfume by looking at details and inspired by Japanese’s woodcuts and calligraphy, Manet and Degas’ paintings, Marcello Dudovich’s drawings and Leonetto Cappiello’s posters, Gruau created timeless illustrations that entered the collective imagination.

Many fashion, design and advertising fans will probably remember the advert featuring the long evening gloves and tulle stole left lying on a chair (a famous image created for Dior’s Diorama in 1955) or the woman’s hand erotically lying on a leopard paw inspired to Gruau by Mitzah Bricard (the first advert created for Miss Dior, actually), Dior’s muse who used to wear leopard skin accessories.

Poetry, elegance and style mixed in Gruau’s illustrations and, as the years passed, the artist played with the illusion of spatial depths, adding doors, curtains and frames in his ads, using elements borrowed from cinematic techniques (despite he preferred theatre and ballet to cinema), such as light/shadows effects, close-ups and turned backs or simple yet effective silhouettes that could convey the idea of movement.

Even Galliano couldn’t resist being inspired by Gruau: as highlighted in a previous post, the white dress with a swirl of reddish pink fabric that formed a rose matched with an art palette-shaped headdress by Stephen Jones Dior’s Autumn/Winter 2007-2008 haute couture collection was indeed entitled “Gruau”, while the garden of delights headdresses that transformed models into flowers at Dior's catwalk show for the house's Autumn/Winter 2010 haute couture collection, seemed somehow borrowed from Gruau's ads for the Diorissimo perfume.

The Somerset House exhibition is divided in six themes: “Flower Woman”, exploring Dior’s passion for the scent, colours and symmetry of flowers via Gruau’s sketches for Diorissimo (1956), Diorling (1963), Miss Dior (1980) and Dior-Dior (1976 – a fragrance inspired by the Middle East and represented in Gruau’s vision by a woman enveloped in a billowing dress à la Loïe Fuller); “Gesture & Attitude”, focusing on the artist’s modern style and his skills at evoking a story by using simple lines; “L’Homme Gruau”, dedicated to the way the illustrator used irony and humour to subvert ordinary situations from conventional adverts (perfect examples are the 1966 and 1978 Eau Sauvage adverts with a man coming out of the shower or a man in his armchair holding a bottle of fragrance rather than a whisky glass); “A Shared Vision”, making parallelisms between Gruau and Dior’s friendship – also mentioning their mothers as influences in the creation of Dior’s ideal of woman and of Gruau’s images depicting desire, distinction and perfection; “Line & Silhouette”, including Gruau’s 1972 campaigns for Diorella with women in trousers evoking a free and modern lifestyle and his iconic 1971 campaign for Diormatic with a masked woman drawing attention to the eyes (View this photo), an image referencing Georges Chaulet’s Fantômette (a wonderful connection with the Diabolik comic/Satanik film iconography) but also evoking the masks of the Kabuki/Bunraku theatre.

The last section, “Inspired by Gruau”, features instead works by Erin Petson, Daisy Fletcher, Richard Kilroy, Sarah Arnett and Jasper Goodall and, despite the pieces features are interesting, this is probably the weakest part of the exhibition (blame it on the way the exhibition space is divided, or the way the pieces are displayed or to the fact that most artists looked at the most banal Gruau references – how come nobody looked at his influence on Andy Warhol?).

The exhibition also features bottles of perfumes, rare vintage magazines (quite interesting issues actually), beautiful Christmas cards (1965-1981) printed on fabric and embossed paper and selected Haute Couture pieces from red gowns from the Autumn/Winter 1948/49, 1950/51 collections (including the iconic “Ispahan” dress) and from the Autumn/Winter 1997/98, 2005/06, 2007/08, 2009/10 collections.

Though as a whole “René Gruau and the Line of Beauty” is not such a bad exhibition, the research behind it looks rather poor (there were very few quotes for example from Gruau’s interviews).

In many ways it feels that this event was put together with bits and pieces that were lying around in the Christian Dior Parfums archive.

Very little is said for example about Gruau’s muses that include, apart from his mother Marie, Chanel, Schiaparelli, Capucine, Geneviève Fath, and model Bettina; even less is highlighted about the main characteristic of Gruau’s illustrations, that is a strong immediacy.

In a 1955 interview, Gruau stated: “In the work for advertising the artist’s imagination knows no boundary; the more you move away from the expected and the traditional, the better it is.”

Through his style and taste, Gruau – a man with a fertile imagination who sketched an epoch and a society through his distinctive works – created a desirable vision of a newborn luxury and elegance.

Some say Dior was Gruau’s lucky star; over 60 years after their first collaboration it wouldn’t be wrong to say that René Gruau and his art were the lucky stars of the Christian Dior Parfums campaigns.

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