PARIS — Rarely has a designer drawn inspiration from artists like Yves Saint Laurent, so it makes sense that the new director of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Paris comes with an art-world pedigree.
Since taking on the job last year, Elsa Janssen has strengthened the links between the museum and artists with initiatives like its current exhibition, “Yves Saint Laurent — Shapes & Forms,” which juxtaposes the late designer’s archives with specially commissioned works by contemporary artist Claudia Wieser.
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“We’re a monographic museum, after all, and I think it’s in our best interest not to navel-gaze, but to invite other talents to come and have a dialogue with him, also because it allows us to engage with the contemporary scene and to show that his genius is timeless,” she told WWD in an interview.
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As she gears up for the first major Saint Laurent retrospective in Japan since 1984, Janssen is also working to bring his creations to leading art museums worldwide, building on an initiative launched last year by Madison Cox, president of the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, to mark the house’s 60th anniversary.
“Yves Saint Laurent Aux Musées” (“Yves Saint Laurent at the Museums”) saw the couturier’s designs displayed at the Centre Pompidou, the Louvre Museum, the Musée d’Orsay, the Paris Museum of Modern Art and the Picasso Museum alongside some of the artworks that inspired them.
The designer and his partner Pierre Bergé were also prolific collectors, amassing works by the likes of Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse and Fernand Léger. The bulk of their collection was sold at Christie’s in 2009 for more than 370 million euros, in what was dubbed the sale of the century.
“We would really like to continue this conversation with the presentation of between 10 and 20 textile pieces within the permanent collections of museums abroad. We’re in the process of identifying collections that interest us and that resonate with the work of Yves Saint Laurent,” Janssen said.
“It’s a great idea because everyone stands to gain from it. Not only does it look wonderful, but all the Paris museums told us it really boosted their visitor numbers. Fashion draws in people in a way that art probably doesn’t,” she added.
Janssen previously spent 10 years as director of cultural events at Galeries Lafayette, and has brought a wealth of connections. One of her key hires was Serena Bucalo-Mussely, curator and head of collections at the Yves Saint Laurent Museum, who previously was a curator at the Giacometti Foundation.
“She’s an art historian and a researcher, so she’s learning every day about fashion techniques and textiles, but in my opinion, to have it looked at by people who also know the history of art is much more relevant,” Janssen said. “I’m not suggesting that we should no longer work with fashion historians. Both are important.”
For the catalog of the “Shapes & Forms” exhibition, she asked Julien Fronsacq, chief curator at the MAMCO contemporary art museum in Geneva, to write a text about how Saint Laurent’s black-and-white designs fed off artists like Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich.
And for the second part of “Yves Saint Laurent: Transparencies,” an exhibition co-produced with the Museum for Lace and Fashion in Calais, France, she’s teaming up with Anne Dressen, a curator at the Paris Museum of Modern Art, and architect Pauline Marchetti.
The first leg opened in Calais on June 24, and the Paris show is scheduled for February. “Here, the idea is really to explore how you show transparent pieces without a body,” Janssen said. “You have to work on absence, empty space and light. We’re also talking with Anne about potentially inviting one or two artists.”
The first exhibition that Janssen curated at the museum, “Gold: Les Ors d’Yves Saint Laurent,” was a success, drawing 132,000 visitors over the course of its seven-month run, which ended in May. That number is high considering the venue only has 4,850 square feet of show space.
“It’s very gratifying. On Saturdays and Sundays, we had between 800 and 1,000 visitors a day, with people queuing outside,” said Janssen, who’s in talks to bring the exhibition to other museums.
But before that, there’s the opening of “Yves Saint Laurent, Across the Style,” which is scheduled to run at the National Art Center in Tokyo from Sept. 20 to Dec. 11. It will feature 110 pieces of clothing, and the same amount of drawings and photographs, and has been in the works for four years, Janssen said.
Going forward, she hopes to organize shows that won’t feature any clothes at all, focusing instead on photography and drawings, though not just fashion sketches. “It’s pretty fabulous to see all the drawings he made for the performing arts. He designed costumes and sets, and he also did a lot of erotic drawings, so there are truly many things to explore,” she said.