Rather than obsession, turning the crisis into an opportunity has been a mantra for many of us.
In the last few years, while some businesses were literally destroyed by the crisis, others prospered thanks to innovative ideas and new marketing strategies. Europe-wise, Italy is undeniably still suffering from the crisis: unemployment is rife and quite a few factories closed down or changed hands last year. Sadly, among the casualties there were many historical manufacturers.
Yet there seems to be a strong will to create a new future by rebuilding our past. I've been at a few press conferences during the Pitti trade fair that kicked off yesterday and the keywords were mainly craftsmanship, skills and traditions (albeit, in some cases, these words were abused by brands and journalists reporting about them...).
As I walked around the fair, I spotted for example this Bonotto installation about textiles - entitled "The Slow Factory" and curated by Patricia Urquiola - that made me think a lot about the Prato industry, about what Italy lost and about what it could regain.
Founded in 1912 by Luigi Bonotto and originally producing straw hats, the company is now led by Luigi's great-grandchildren Lorenzo and Giovanni (the latter also worked for a period of time in Nagoya with textile Japanese manufacturers) who collaborate with 200 artisans handmaking the textiles.
The company has set itself two main standards, manufacturing by hand and producing less. Indeed the installation is a sort of manifesto against industrial standardisation and low cost mass production.
The installation was presented with a table laid with slow food style "textile delicacies", including cashmere and mohair, but a section also featured stained containers and dies.
Is it possible to restore the Italian textile industry or turn the crisis into an opportunity (to produce fewer but better things...)? Maybe (naybe...), after all that happened, yes we can.
As a young girl Russian fashion designer Lisa Shahno used to make her dolls’ clothes under the watchful eye of her elder sister who explained her the principles of pattern making. When she grew up, unsure about her future career and still toying with the idea of becoming an artist rather than a designer, Shahno started wearing bizarre outfits she created herself, and eventually enrolled in the pattern making department of Moscow Mossovet College. Her lecturers mainly based their classes on their knowledge of Soviet factories, classical sewing technology and traditional pattern making, but Shahno was fascinated and, after getting her diploma, she moved onto the fashion department of the Moscow State University of Design and Technology.
In 2009 Shahno won the Createurope fashion design contest held by the Goethe Institute, then spent a year in Berlin where she interned at Andrea van Reimersdahl’s studio while preparing her new collection, “The Iteration”. The young designer applied the nodal points of the fractal cosmology theory to the garments from the new collection, coming up with designs that seem to incorporate in their structure a multitude of patterns, sharing the same features and similarities of our infinite cosmos.
Can you introduce us your latest collection? Lisa Shahno: I used a similar principle in it as in my first collection - “Squaring the Square”. In that case I took basic geometric shapes and then divided them with straight lines. This time, though, I used a simple grid made of squares divided with diagonals. This grid has different scales for each design - like a different scale of fractal, so you can say that the designs represent a variety of matter levels in the universe, according to the Fractal Cosmology theory that inspired me. I believe that, if a flat pattern looks beautiful, the three-dimensional object it generates will look beautiful as well. That's why I juxtaposed grid graphics to the photos of my designs on my website, after all, the grids themselves can be considered as independent art objects. I also tried to make this collection wearable so I didn't use plastic and looked at the designing process from more practical points of view.
Apart from fractal cosmology, the inspirations behind your collections include the universe, the hexaflexagon, geometry and science: what fascinates you about these themes? Lisa Shahno: There's a half-mystical modernism concept I appreciate about things - such as Dutch Neo Plasticism or Russian Suprematism - which we can't imagine or see with our limited perception, but can talk about using the visual language of geometrical shapes. “The Iteration” was inspired as I said by Fractal Cosmology, but then I read The Cosmos by Carl Sagan and browsed the web on the universe-related theme. I was spellbound by the idea of the infinity of worlds nested inside each other. I'm an artist, not a scientist so I express my comprehension not through words, but through the things I make.
Is there a Russian designer who particularly inspires you in your work? Lisa Shahno: I like the works Vera Mukhina and Nadejda Lamanova did for a publication called “The art in everyday life” (“Iskusstvo v bytu”). In these works they suggested the concept of clothes that are easy to make, supposed to be made using cheap materials - such as rectangular towels and square kerchiefs since after the October Revolution there was a very difficult time and industry just started to emerge, so there was a shortage of good materials and ready-to-wear clothes. I love textile design and the concept of prozodejda - from the Russian “proizvodstvennay odejda”, that is “clothes for the manufacture” - of Lyubov Popova and Varvara Stepanova.
When you beging working on a new collection, do you start from the fabrics/textiles or from a sketch? Lisa Shahno: I prefer to start with the fabrics. This way I can feel the material and therefore understand how it will behave later. I like drawing, but I rarely use sketches as a starting point. You can find some sketches for “The Iteration” on the web, but I drew them after I made the collection.
You often do installations as well, do you consider yourself more an artist or a fashion designer? Lisa Shahno: I'm more an artist than a fashion designer. I don't like the traditional way of presenting clothes. I'd like to explore a deeper interaction between presentations in galleries and fashion shows, wearable clothes, art objects and small scale production. I want people to ask more questions and to buy things not because a magazine or a blog told them that it is cool to do so, but because they understand and share the ideas that inspired the designer to create those things.
What’s the fashion scene like in Russia at the moment? Lisa Shahno: Russians are mainly interested in very expensive clothes that are supposed to show off how much money the wearer has, that’s a strong trend. It is also fashionable to follow the European and American trends. People in general do not trust local designers, preferring popular Western brands. Besides, people are often afraid of unusual designs, that’s why they choose classic rather than avant-garde or experimental styles. While there is no real industry and no national fashion market in Russia there are exceptions, such as design duo Nina Donis that I really like.
Is it difficult for a Russian designer to emerge? Lisa Shahno: I suppose it's pretty difficult everywhere, but in Russia it's much harder for quite a few reasons. As I said before, there's no real fashion industry in Russia, so there's a severe shortage of professionals in all fashion-related fields. The lack of professionalism is the worst problem, because in fashion you can't just do everything by yourself, you need to work with many different people and so, even if you have a great idea, the final 'product' may end up being second-rate because of the amateurs you work with. The other thing is the lack of interest: I do receive a lot of interest - both press and customers - from abroad, but when someone wants to borrow pieces for a shooting, it's very complicated because the Russian post is incredibly slow and unreliable. Last time, when I had such a request I had to pay 260 euros to ship the piece to Hamburg via DHL – it's simply crazy! Another time I had a problem with Russian customs when I received my first collection back from an exhibition in Belgium, so you often feel you’re isolated from the rest of the world.
Is it true that Lady Gaga wanted to borrow one of your designs? Lisa Shahno: Yes, it was at the beginning of last year year, when I just returned from Berlin. An employee of Brandon Maxwell, assistant to Nicola Formichetti, requested pieces for an upcoming video shoot for Lady Gaga. He said that the video was going to be shot pretty soon and it was going to be a big production with crazy and insane pieces. But at that time all my works were at an exhibition at the Modemuseum of Hasselt and I couldn’t provide anything.
Where can we buy your creations? Lisa Shahno: At the moment some pieces from “The Iteration” are available at the Teknopolice store in Osaka, Japan. But you can also contact me directly via email.
What are you working on at present? Lisa Shahno: I'm looking for the best way to produce pieces from my recent collection, because, as you may imagine, it's difficult to sew everything by myself.
Credits: Photographs: Valeria Mitelman Model: Mariana Bayon Postproduction: The Local Genius
Born in 1872 Romanian artist Frederic Storck studied sculpture under Ion Georgescu in Bucharest from 1888 to 1893 and under Wilhelm von Rümann at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in München from 1893 to 1897.
An admirer of Adolf von Hildebrand and Rodin, Storck also echoed in some of his sculptures Donatello’s works. The artist experimented with Art Deco stylisation in a series of nudes - among them also "Salome" - created between the '20s and '30s.
A professor of draughtsmanship at the Fine Arts School in Bucharest and a founder-member of Tinerimea Artistica (Artistic Youth), he decorated his house in Bucharest - later turned into a museum - with his wife, the artist Cecilia Cuţescu-Storck (1879-1969).
The Muzeul de Arta Frederic Storck si Cecilia Cutescu-Storck (Frederic and Cecilia Cuţescu-Storck Art Museum), designed by French architect Alexandre Clavel between 1911 and 1913 in a basic German Renaissance style, is definitely the best place in Bucharest where you can admire the artist's works together with those of his wife, his father Karl and brother Carol.
I saw Storck’s "Salome" at Bucharest’s Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României (National Museum of Art of Romania - MNAR)and was fascinated by its curvilinear form and smooth and elegant contours.
Its style made me think about the works of another Romanian sculptor, Constantin Brâncuşi (1876-1953), the pioneer of modernism, who grew up in the village of Hobiţa Romania, Gorj, near Târgu Jiu, close to Romania's Carpathian Mountains, an area known for its rich tradition of folk crafts and woodcarving in particular.
Since a personal research I carried out in Bucharest involved also Pier Paolo Pasolini, the Storck-Brâncuşi connection led me to think about a very stylish and elegant series of pictures taken by Eve Arnold in 1956 and portraying Silvana Mangano - one of Pasolini's favourite actresses - looking at Brâncuşi's works at New York's MOMA. If you're a fan of Eve Arnold's photographs you may be happy to hear that a new book about her, entitledAll About Eve, will be out soon, published by teNeues.
My research trip to Romania was made possible through a journalistic grant from the Institutul Cultural Român (ICR - Romanian Cultural Institute), Bucharest.
Once a glamorous residential area, Bucharest’s old historical city centre (Centrul Vechi or Istoric), can be a very fascinating place from an architectural point of view.
The local government may have been trying to turn the heart of Bucharest into an upscale neighbourhood, but this jumble of streets around the corner from Calea Victoriei, one of the main avenues of the city, remains a stratification of old and decaying buildings and regenerated spaces.
So, while at night the place turns into a lively entertainment district, walking around its cobbled streets on a quiet early morning will reveal it as a work-in-progress space with quite a few abandoned and derelict corners.
It is indeed very easy to find a decayed building next to a fashionable cafe, bar, pub or antique shop, and a store of a trendy brand next to an abandoned house or a tacky looking shop.
The contrast is absolutely striking, in fact it would be correct to say that at times it's almost shocking.
Indeed walking around these streets at different times of the day will definitely transmit different feelings.
The Teatrul de pe Lipscani may be renovated and offering dance and theatre shows, yet next door to it there is a tangible sense of decay.
Bucharest was founded around the 1300s and at the time of the first reign of Vlad Ţepeş (1459-1462) in the area currently defined as "Old Town" there was a palace and a court (Palatul Curtea Veche).
Originally traders of Romanian, Austrian, Greek, Bulgarian, Serbian, Armenian and Jewish origins opened their shops in this part of the city, turning it into a merchant district.
The area took the name of Lipscani, a term that came from the German merchants who came to sell their fabrics from "Lipsca", that is Leiptzig.
Other streets surrounding the city centre took instead the names of other craft communities and guilds: Blanari (furriers), Covaci (blacksmiths), Gabroveni (knife makers) and Cavafii Vechii (shoe-makers).
Different nationalities and guilds settled in the city centre and the architectural styles - including Baroque, Neoclassical and Art Nouveau - perfectly reflected this mix of cultures.
Until the end of World War II the area remained a merchant district. Then a new stage in the history of the district began as many house and business owners in these streets were arrested by the communist authorities.
In some cases the properties were confiscated, in others they were left to rot and, as the decades passed, the area became more and more neglected.
Roma gypsies eventually squatted in some of the empty buildings.These occupations were often illegal and triggered forced evictions and short notice relocations, followed in recent years by the requests of humanitarian associations (appealing to the civil rights included in European treaties) to stop the evictions, revise the housing law and grant adequate social housing.
Among the best touristic places around the area there are the Russian orthodox church of St. Nicholas with its onion-shaped domes and the Stavropoleos Monastery.
The Monastery (visited in a previous post) is located near the historic beer hall and restaurant Caru cu Bere, that, dating from 1875, is definitely the best restaurant in town.
Just around the corner from the restaurant you will instead find the headquarters of CEC, the national savings bank, and the National History Museum.
Pasajul Macca-Vilacrosse, Bucharest’s first shopping mall (named after the Catalan architect, Xavier Villacrosse, chief architect of Bucharest between 1840 and 1850, and Mihalache Macca, son-in-law of the building’s architect, Felix Xenopol) is also around the corner. Built in 1891 this arcade covered with a yellow glass roof leads from Calea Victoriei to the Old Town.
As stated at the beginning of this post, while this area is extremely facinating for its history and mix of architectures, the issues surrounding the Roma people living here still generate a state of inner conflict and confusion and at times you wish there was a genius such as Genndy Tartakovsky's Dexter (as spotted in one of the graffiti on the walls of a building in the Old Town...) to sort it out.
My research trip to Romania was made possible through a journalistic grant from the Institutul Cultural Român (ICR - Romanian Cultural Institute), Bucharest.
As a follow-up to yesterday's post about Fluxus, I'm embedding here today four short films by different artists from the anti-art collective: George Maciunas' "Artype" (1966), Joe Jones' "Smoking" (1966), Wolf Vostell's "Sun in Your Head (Television Decollage)" (1963) and Pieter Vanderbeck's "Five O'Clock in the Morning" (1966).
I hope they will inspire you from a visual and graphic point of view to create your own film or develop prints and ideas for collections and other projects. Enjoy.
Considered by some critics as a radical artistic movement, Fluxus was actually a collective of artists, writers and musicians with a passion for experimentation and performance and a playful, irreverent and cheeky approach to life.
Originated in the ‘60s, the scene found fertile ground in the German cities of Darmstadt, Duesseldorf, Cologne, Wuppertal, Wiesbaden and Berlin and the country ended up playing a crucial role in the growth of Fluxus.
The connection between Fluxus and Germany is analysed in an exhibition currently on at Bucharest’s Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană (Museum of Contemporary Art – MNAC).
Curated by René Block and organised by the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen Stuttgart with the support of the German Embassy in Bucharest and the Goethe Institute, “Fluxus in Germany 1962-1994: A Long Tale with Many Knots” occupies the two main galleries on the ground floor of the museum and the ground floor balcony.
Devised in 1961 by Lithuanian artist George Maciunas as the title for an “International Magazine of the Newest Art, Anti-Art, Anti-Music, Poetry, Anti-Poetry, etc”, Fluxus was inspired by different influences, from Futurist performances and silent films to Dada.
The word “fluxus”, a term that comes from the Latin root meaning “to flow”, was supposed to call to mind a fluid bowel discharge and had as main purpose, in Maciunas’ words, that of purging “the world of bourgeois sickness, 'intellectual', professional and commercialised culture, dead art, imitation, artificial art, abstract art, illusionistic art”, while promoting “a revolutionary flood and tide in art, (…) living art, anti-art, non-art reality to be grasped by all people, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals".
As various collaborators - George Brecht, Ben Vautier, Nam June Paik, Dick Higgins and Joseph Beuys - joined Maciunas, the Fluxus group started inspiring artists all over the world, prompting them to experiment in different media, from visual art to performance, music and poetry happenings.
In its role of international anti-art collective that challenged the distinctions between artistic genres and works and the notions of authorship and ownership, Fluxus tried to democratise art and spark up a cultural revolution.
Some of the materials exhibited in the main gallery of the museum, including posters, letters, graphic design and typography projects, objects, collages, illustrations and drawings, books, prints, music scores, kits and boxes - such as Gerhard Rühm's “Attempt of a Reconstruction”, Robert Rehfeldt's “Ohne Titel”, Daniel Spoerri’s "Napoleon" box and George Brecht's iconic “Water Yam” with typeset by Tomas Schmit - perfectly show how these pieces were supposed to transcend the main categories of art, mixing them all together.
One of the most famous pieces on display on this floor is Maciunas’s "Excreta Fluxorum" box, containing symbolical animal excrements that hint at Fluxus’ “purged" and not crafted art.
In 1962 the Fluxus Festival was held at the Städtisches Museum in Wiesbaden. The event comprised a series of concerts under the title “Fluxus + International Festival of Newest Music” and featured various artists appearing in action music pieces and happenings involving “concrete music”.
Music is naturally one of the strongest parts of this exhibition that features larger installations like Wolf Vostell's “Fluxus-Piano-Lituania, Hommage à Maciunas”, a composite piece formed by a piano, supermarket trolleys and suitcases, and Milan Knizak's "Destroyed Music", broken or melted records framed as if they were paintings.
Rare videos such as Joe Jones' "Fluxus-Home-Movies" and Manfred Leve's photographs of musical happenings documenting experimental Fluxus concerts featuring Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik complete this section.
The second gallery on the ground floor focuses mainly on three artists. Here visitors will be able to listen to more audio recordings and admire Nam June Paik’s “I believe in reincarnation”, a cross formed by television screens beaming assorted images in bright colours and his “Mini-Robot” sculpture, an assemblage of different objects including a camera, a record player and various records.
Joseph Beuys’s “Ja, ja, nee, nee” (Yes, yes, no, no, 1969), a 32 minute audiotape recording in a felt box and his “Bruno Cora-Tea” (1975), a Coca-Cola bottle containing herb tea, with lead seal and label in glass-fronted wooden box, and Henning Christiansen’s “Green Violin” and “Hammer Music”, used at Fluxus concerts and sometimes employed to play with Beuys during the group’s happenings, are also included in this section.
The music thread continues upstairs on the gallery balcony with John Cage's “Mozart Music” box, and Joe Jones’s musical instruments - wind chimes, a mandoline, a xylophon and two zithers that can be activated by the visitors using five little switches.
The works on display on the balcony perfectly show how the Fluxus artists mainly used mixed media to express themselves: Ben Patterson's “A Short History of Twentieth Century Art”, is a collage of toys, cheap objects and colourful plastic letters forming messages about the Fluxus collective, while Geoffrey Hendricks' dreamy “Suitcase of the Clouds” is a simple trunk-shaped case with a cloud-printed lining.
Irony and surrealism are instead tackled in Takako Saito's Fluxchesses, that is chess sets with liquor bottles, spices, mice traps or tiny models of eyes, and Dieter Roth's "Droppings Bunny” and “Duck Hunting”, with its knights and duck figures in a landscape of chocolate mould enclosed in wooden box.
"Art is everywhere; it's only seeing which stops now and then", John Cage once claimed.
This statement will definitely come to mind to the visitors walking around the galleries at the MNAC, making them realise that the iconoclastic spirit of Fluxus may have spread to other countries, reaching out to the rest of the world, but its goal - eliminating that fastidious boundary between art and life - still remains the same.
“Fluxus in Germany from 1962-1994, A Long Story with Many Knots” is at the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană, Bucharest, Romania, until 31st January 2012.
My research trip to Romania was made possible through a journalistic grant from the Institutul Cultural Român (ICR - Romanian Cultural Institute), Bucharest.
In the last two posts I've looked at Gobelinstapestry and at how this traditional art was reinvented in a modern key. Since there are fashion fans that may consider the topic as antiquate and boring, let's look at two examples of what could be defined as "kinky" tapestry.
The first picture shows Leigh Bowery in Farrell House (photography by Ole Christiansen) donning one of his outfits for the Michael Clark Company - comprising a wrestling mask and decorated with a tapestry-like 17th century embroidery - currently on display at the V&A exhibition "Postmodernism: Style and Subversion, 1970-1990" (until 15th January 2012).
The second image in which a model wearing a leotard with a tapestry-like floral motif seems to perfectly camouflage herself with the floral sofa she's leaning on and the wallpaper behind her, is instead part of a 1984 advertising campaign for Jourdan shoes shot by Guy Bourdin.
Bourdin worked for the company since the mid-'60s, interrupting the collaboration in 1981 and resuming it in the mid-'80s. His innovative and surreal pictures contributed at the time to renew the image of the brand. So, do you still think that tapestry-like motifs are boring?
Some friends contacted me to ask if I had further images of the tapestries mentioned in yesterday's post or close ups of the works on display at Bucharest's MNAC.
Yet some of the tapestries looked interesting even when admired from the back, so rather than posting mere close ups of these works, I'm posting here (second image) a detail of the back of Yves Oppenheim's tapestry.
If you look from a distance at this work you will manage to distinguish figures such as flowers, leaves, mushrooms and fish. From the back, the tapestry has got an intoxicatingly and dynamically intense energy and I hope you will find its mix of colours and threads as inspiring as I do.
Located in Paris, the tapestry factory of the Manufacture des Gobelins supplied throughout the centuries the court of Louis XIV and of many other monarchs all over Europe.
The factory still produces tapestries for French governmental institutions and for contemporary artists and, to celebrate its art, two exhibitions were recently launched in Bucharest.
Entitled “Les Manufactures des Gobelins: quatre siècles de création", the event is divided in two sections, one at the Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României (National Museum of Art of Romania - MNAR) and the other at the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană (Museum of Contemporary Art - MNAC), hosted in a wing of the People’s Palace, built in the 1980s by former communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.
The former displays royal tapestries created between 1600 and 1800; the latter features instead contemporary pieces from 1950 until today.
The main aim of this double event is to show how the role of tapestry has changed throughout the centuries, turning from a form of art that reflected the splendours of the royal courts to a way for some of the greatest artists of the 20th century to convey their vision through new techniques, forms and styles.
Nothing has substantially changed at the factory: in the past an artist sketched the design, a painter turned it into an oil work the same size as the tapestry and then highly skilled craftspeople wove the tapestries using silk, wool, and sometimes gold or silver threads.
Today the painter retouches a cardboard model made increasing the proportions of a photographic model, but it still takes an entire day to weave a surface about the size of the human hand and one year to produce one square metre of tapestry.
The 20 tapestries on display at the MNAR - woven on the models of famous artists such as Simon Vouet, Charles Le Brun, Pierre Mignard and Carle Van Loo - were made in the 17th and 18th centuries to decorate the sumptuous residence of French kings.
The main materials employed in these cases were wool and silk with gold and silver threads while the themes were mythological, biblical or historical.
Masterpieces such as “The Colossus of Rhodes”, “The Triumph of Alexander”, “Parnassus”, “L'Histoire du Roi” or “Triumph of Minerva” decorate the walls of the ground gallery with their colours and impressive trompe-l'oeil effects created by elaborate floral garlands, birds and picture-frame borders, showing the virtuosity of the craftspeople who made them.
As the decades passed a new brightness was added to the colours: in the 19th century, French chemist Michel Chevreul (1786-1889), the inventor of the colour circle, was hired by the factory to investigate the fading of their tapestry threads and discovered the effects created by simultaneous contrasts between adjacent coloured threads.
Colours started to constantly enrich the Gobelins tapestries becoming the main protagonists of the second part of the exhibition on display at the MNAC.
Here, in a spacious gallery on the second floor, contemporary tapestry reveals itself in all its glory, showing how, through a completely new approach, an old technique can create innovative effects while staying true to itself.
Designed by architects, painters and sculptors, the 35 tapestries (some of them by the Manufacture des Beauvais) included in this section curated by Marie-Hélène Massé-Bersani, display a wide range of forms and styles: from Op and Kinetic Art with Victor Vasarely and Alexander Calder to hyperrealism with Gérard Schlosser’s photographic montage on tapestry, to figurative artists like Erró and Eduardo Arroyo.
Henri Matisse’s “Polynésie: Le Ciel”, inspired by his trip to Tahiti and based on different shades of blues forming the background for stylised birds and aquatic plants, instills in the visitor a sense of calm; Joan Miró’s “Femme au miroir”, evokes instead a delirious yet playful world; Picasso’s “Femmes à leur toilette” perfectly shows the technical challenge behind contemporary tapestry with its tones of colours, textures and patterns swiftly changing from one figure to the next, while architect Le Corbusier, who started getting interested in tapestry in 1936, created a modern mural using basic shades and geometric lines.
Harmony and dissonance characterise Sonia Delaunay’s vibrantly graphic “Composition N. 2” that contrasts with “Estampille” by Romanian-born sculptor Etienne Hajdu who focused on the importance of the absence of colours.
Outbursts of fiery shades merge and combine in Yves Oppenheim’s piece that calls to mind the chaos and ebullience of urban graffiti; Antonio Ségui’s “El sol no sale para todos” seems instead to focus on the theatricality of cartoons while Philippe Cognée’s city landscape with cars has a special magic, producing the illusion you’re staring at a painting rather than at a tapestry, thanks to the clever use of different thicknesses of wool employed to perfectly reproduce he brush strokes.
These artworks aren't exhibited that often because it is hard to find an adequate space as some of them are huge. Yet Jean Dewasne’s "Coeur Cinabre” with its colourful polygons, probably the largest piece of tapestry in the world, managed to find a perfect place in the second room of the MNAC gallery, next to Serge Poliakoff’s vertical composition “Forme”, Emile Gilioli’s abstract tapestry “Jeunesse”, the rigorous geometric planes of Alberto Magnelli’s "Nature Satellique" and Yaacov Agam’s vivid “Petit secret”, with its bright combinations of colours creating unique effects.
Initially produced by French, Italian and Flemish artists, tapestry radically transformed itself, turning from an archaic technique into a modern form of art.
The Gobelins manufacture developed century after century, combining heritage with artistic creation, conceiving imaginary worlds through vibrantly kaleidoscopic threads and sparking up an innovative dialogue between the artist and the artisan.
“Les Manufactures des Gobelins: quatre siècles de création” is at the Muzeul Naţional de Artă al României and at the Muzeul Naţional de Artă Contemporană, Bucharest, Romania, until 26th February 2012.
My research trip to Romania was made possible through a journalistic grant from the Institutul Cultural Român (ICR - Romanian Cultural Institute), Bucharest.
In previous posts I often mentioned how items by specific brands and fashion houses are used as a clever exercise in product placement in modern films.
Yet the showbiz/fashion link always existed, even though in the past designer garments and accessories were mainly employed to create a character’s personality rather than to just sell something to the audience. Interestingly enough, you can find some early examples of the showbiz/fashion connection in vintage theatre programmes for Paris-based shows.
The adverts I’m using to illustrate this post - stating how actress Yvonne de Bray wore stockings by Marny, Gaby Morlay was dressed by Jean Patou and Alice Field by Jeanne Lanvin with hats by Suzanne Talbot - are indeed taken from two Parisian theatre show programmes, for “Le Venin”, a piece in 3 acts by playwright Henry Bernstein staged at the Théâtre du Gymnase (Bernstein was the theatre director at the time) for the 1926-27 season, and for the comedy "3 et une...” by Denys Amiel, staged at the Theatre Saint-Georges during the 1932-33 season.
The programmes also include the synopsis of the theatrical pieces, further information about the performers and further adverts of this type mentioning other famous French fashion houses and actors.
The most interesting of the two programmes remains the one for "Le Venin" since it features articles about different topics, including American films, fashion trends for the 1927 season, short stories and even a small dictionary of theatrical terms, turning in this way into a useful and stylish pocket magazine.
Funny coincidence between fashion and theatre: the Théâtre du Gymnase (the last picture in this post shows the theatre as it looks today) is next to door to Anne-Valérie Hash's showroom. Somehow, it sounds like another (new) connection between theatre and fashion.