Marina Schiano in evening gown.
Fall-Winter, 1970. Copyright: The estate of Jean Loup Sieff.
The trouble is that, as with all arts, most of what is made is way inferior to the best that is made. Many are called; few are chosen. We know who Salieri was, but we listen to Mozart. There were many playwrights in Elizabethan London whose names we’ve forgotten, but one such playwright was Wil Shakespeare. here was only one Beethoven, one Vermeer,and one Yves Saint Laurent. He was a serious artist who also had a profound esthetic commitment. After the famous 1976 “peasant” collection was shown in Paris, he remarked, “[these] clothes incorporated all my dreams, all my heroines in the novels, the operas, the paintings. It was my heart - everything I love that I gave to this collection.”
Yves Saint Laurent’s life was not without significant demons. Like many other artists of every persuasion, he was fearful, self-destructive, anxiety-ridden, and occasionally lost. Also like many such artists, those troubles seemed to go hand-in-hand with his exceptional talent and training, perhaps even energizing them. His heavy drug and alcohol use was often noted, even by himself. Upon his retirement, he said, “Every man needs aesthetic phantoms in order to exist. I have known fear and the terrors of solitude. I have known those fair-weather friends we call tranquilizers and drugs. I have known the prison of depression and the confinement of hospital. But one day, I was able to come through all of that, dazzled yet sober.”
The operative word there is “dazzled.” It is also one of the words I would use to describe my own reactions to this exhibition and to Yves Saint Laurent’s fine art.
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