Jacques Doucet, Yves Saint Laurent, Living For Art

Exhibition catalogue Jacques Doucet, Yves Saint Laurent, Living For Art, presented at the YSL-Pierre Berger Foundation, Paris (October 15 - February 14).

Both figures embodied the notion of “taste” for their era. Using a selection of masterpieces that were at one time collected by Jacques Doucet (1853-1929) and Yves Saint Laurent (1936-2008) as well as a few of which belonged to both of them, the exhibition imagines a unique space dedicated to the cult of beauty.

The visitor is at once in Jacques Doucet’s final home on the Rue Saint-James in Neuilly in 1928 and in the apartment owned by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé on the Rue de Babylone some fifty years later. The artistic spirit of these places forms the subject of this exhibition along with the underlying aesthetic stance, which can be summed up in a single phrase: the search for the perfect space. With a set and decor inspired by the atmosphere of these places, the exhibition proposes a hybrid space that leads the visitor from one salon to the author across a series of five rooms that mirror each other.