Tag Archives: Pierre Bergé

THE LIBRARY OF PIERRE BERGÉ

Michel de Montaigne’s Essais from 1580, Marcel Proust’s Du côté de chez Swann from 1913, Oscar Wilde’s Salomé from 1893—inscribed by its author to his “cher ami” André Gide—and Gide’s Corydon (1911) and Nourritures terrestres (1897, inscribed to Paul Valéry) will be up for auction by Sotheby’s Paris as part of the fourth in a series of sales devoted to the library of Pierre Bergé.

Also included are first editions by Jean Cocteau and Jean Genet, letters from Édouard Manet to his friend Émile Zola, and the Chroniques de France by Monstrelet printed on vellum.

 

LA BIBLIOTHÈQUE DE PIERRE BERGÉ

Friday, December 14, at 3 pm.

Hôtel Drouot, 9 rue Drouot, 9th, Paris.

Top: Oscar Wilde, Salomé, inscribed to André Gide.

Above: Page from Pompes funèbres by Jean Genet.

Below: André Gide, Corydon.

EDMUND WHITE ON JEAN GIONO

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“Recently I wrote a note to accompany Paul Eprile’s translation of Jean Giono’s MELVILLE, which quickly evolved into a novel that has nothing to do with the historical neurasthenic and queer-leaning Herman Melville and everything to do with Giono himself.

“Giono was deeply influenced by American writers… [He] first discovered Walt Whitman in French [and] later studied the ‘American Homer’ in English. He loved Whitman’s all-embracing egalitarianism and his pantheism, and the first part of Giono’s œuvre obviously owes a debt to this passionate revolutionary figure. In Hill, his first novel, Giono tried to illustrate two very Whitmanesque truths:

‘The first of these truths is that there are people, simple and nude; the other is that this earth fleeced [entoisonnée] with woods… this living earth, exists without literature.’

“Cutting down on metaphor and simile (he could never altogether forego them) must have been painful for Giono, so naturally gifted with that kind of eloquence. As Aristotle suggest in The Rhetoric, metaphor is one of the greatest ornaments of writing but also the one no one can learn.” — Edmund White, The Unpunished Vice

White’s blend of memoir and literary criticism is out now.

 

EDMUND WHITE, THE UNPUNISHED VICE: A LIFE OF READING (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018).

Top image credit: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Above: Edmund White and Zadie Smith at a writers’ festival in Florence, 2017. Image credit: Édouard Louis‘ Twitter.

Below, from left: Bernard Buffet, Jean Giono, and Pierre Bergé in Manosque, June 16, 1950. Image credit: Musée Yves Saint Laurent, Paris.

OLIVIER MEYROU’S CÉLÉBRATION

Documentarian Olivier Meyrou was imbedded within the house of Yves Saint Laurent from 1998 to 2001, the designer’s last years at the maison he founded with Pierre Bergé. Unsurprisingly, neither of the principals was in top form during these years of final decline, and—displeased with the results—Bergé suppressed the commercial release of the footage.

Since his death all legal barriers have been cleared, and the paradoxically titled CÉLÉBRATION opened this week in Paris.

CÉLÉBRATION

Through November 20.

MK2 Beaubourg

50 rue Rambuteau, 3rd, Paris.

MK2 Parnasse

11 rue Jules Chaplain, 6th, Paris.

Q & A’s with Olivier Meyrou at Beaubourg on November 15 and 20.

Stills from Célébration. Image credit: Hold Up Films.

GARDEN OF MEMORY

Curated by Mouna Mekouar, GARDEN OF MEMORY is an “ongoing conversation” exploring “bodily communication and intimacy” between the poet and painter Etel Adnan, the sculptor and collagist Simone Fattal, and the theater artist Robert Wilson.

Music by Michael Galasso—played under Wilson’s reading of Adnan’s poem “Conversation with My Soul (III)”—provides an additional element to the exhibition.

GARDEN OF MEMORY

Through September 16.

Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech

Rue Yves Saint Laurent Majorelle, Marrakech.

Robert Wilson on Pierre Bergé.

Top and below: Garden of Memory installation views, Musée Yves Saint Laurent Marrakech. Images courtesy the museum.

Above: Simone Fattal, YSL, 2015, collage. Image courtesy of the artist and Balice Hertling.

LOULOU DE LA FALAISE

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“This book is an oral biography of Paris fashion between the glittering years when Loulou was the light between all the characters.” — André Leon Talley

Christopher Petkanis LOULOU & YVES: THE UNTOLD STORY OF LOULOU DE LA FALAISE AND THE HOUSE OF SAINT LAURENT is a massive oral history centered around the life and times of YSL muse and employee Loulou de la Falaise.

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Among the voices heard from in the book are those of Cecil Beaton, Diana Vreeland, Thadée Klossowski, Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton, Hubert de Givenchy, Manolo Blahnik, Maxime de la Falaise, Diane von Furstenberg, Marianne Faithfull, Nicky Haslam, Elsa Peretti, Betty Catroux, John Richardson, Kenneth Jay Lane, Alber Elbaz, Christian Louboutin, Grace Coddington, Ben Brantley, Jane Ormsby Gore, Bruce Chatwin, Amy Fine Collins, Patrick Bauchau, Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Pierre Bergé, Talley, and Loulou herself.

See: us.macmillan.com/book

Top: Marina Schiano, Loulou de la Falaise, Yves Saint Laurent, and Steve Rubell at the Opium launch party, New York City, 1978.

Above: Thadée Klossowski, Paloma Picasso, and YSL. Polaroid by Andy Warhol.

Below: YSL and de la Falaise.

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