Cartier Fondation pour l'Art Modern

The Fondation Cartier expresses Cartier´s commitment to the arts as a corporate patron. A pioneer in the field, Cartier invests on an unrivalled scale to promote the art of its time. From its inception in 1984, it has established a long-term commitment to artists of all nationalities. For Cartier, patronage is not just a one-time deal based on current trends and movements, but an enduring choice that is constantly reaffirmed. Cartier has developed a different kind of patronage through its exhibitions, its collection, and its production of artwork. Its keen interest in the arts is especially visible in its commissions policy: a key feature of patronage, commissions reflect a total commitment to artistic production, from the moment of conception to the finished work. The Fondation Cartier pour l´art contemporain enables Cartier to maintain its image as a company attuned to the latest creative innovations, providing a forum where freedom and originality can thrive.

Cinema Perfume Yves Saint Laurent - A Tribute

Lo stilista Yves Saint Laurent si è spento domenica 10 giugno,

la bellezza è là dove non si attende

all’età di 71 anni. Nato in Algeria nel 1936, Yves Saint Laurent è considerato, insieme a Gabrielle Chanel e a Christian Dior, come uno dei grandi maestri della moda del XX secolo. La sua carriera inizia molto presto : a 19 anni, Christian Dior lo assume come assistente. Nel 1957, la morte di Christian Dior proietta Yves Saint Laurent, a soli 21 anni, alla direzione della creazione della maison Dior. Di fronte al successo, decide, agli inizi degli anni ’60, di creare la propria casa di moda, in collaborazione con il suo mentore e compagno Pierre Bergé. Colui che rivoluzionò l’universo della moda (ricordiamo in particolare lo smoking per donna) lancerà anche svariati profumi. Il suo 1o profumo femminile, il cipriato Y, esce nel 1964, seguito da un primo maschile ‘Pour Homme’ nel 1971, per il quale lo stilista posò nudo. Un’idea che riprese il profumo M7, 31 anni dopo. Tra i suo più grandi successi olfattivi, Opium (1977, orientale speziato) e Paris (1983, bouquet fiorito rosa) sono i 2 best-sellers della profumeria. Yves Saint Laurent fece il suo addio alle scene dell’Alta Moda nel 2002. Il designer Tom Ford assunze la direzione della creazione nel 2004, oggi invece passata nelle mani di Stefano Pilati. Tra le ultime creazioni profumate della marca Yves Saint Laurent : Cinéma, L’Homme e Elle.

Julian Schnabel:the Genius of the art and the life

Julian Schnabel nasce a New York, USA, nel 1951. Si diploma alla University of Houston, Texas, nel 1973. Si specializza al Witney Museum of American Art nel 1973-74. Tiene la prima personale al Contemporary Arts Museum di Houston nel 1976. Espone il primo "plate painting" alla Mary Boone Gallery di New York nel 1979. Nel 1983 inizia a scolpire. Nel 1996 il film Basquiat, da lui diretto, viene presentato alla LIII Mostra Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica di Venezia . Nel 2007 vince il premio alla regia al festival di Cannes con il film “Le Scafandre et le papillon”. Nel febbraio del 1979, racconta Mary Jane Jacob accadde qualcosa che sconvolse il mondo dell’arte contemporanea: un giovane pittore ventinovenne, Julian Schnabel, tenne la sua prima personale alla Galleria di Mary Boone a Soho, New York e fu un successo istantaneo. Tutti i dipinti, prezzati da 2500 a 3000 dollari, vennero venduti, alcuni ancor prima dell’inaugurazione. Da quel momento in poi, dice la Jacob, diventò possibile, per un giovane artista, passare dal più completo anonimato alle vette della celebrità, chiedere prezzi altissimi per le proprie opere ed ottenere retrospettive o grandi mostre personali entro pochi anni dalla sua comparsa sulla scena.Il tipo di opere che provocò questa svolta economica nell’arte era principalmente pittura, un bene particolarmente adatto ad essere collezionato e che proprio per questo motivo riprese il sopravvento dopo una decade in cui avevano predominato la cerebralità e l’algidità dei lavori dell’Arte Concettuale e Minimale.

Il risultato è che Schnabel è un genio, alla maniera rinascimentale, della bellezza.
Julian Schnabel fa quadri e film bellissimi! E’ interior design rivoluzionario sublimando la bellezza degli spazi, vedi: Gramercy Park Hotel, N.Y.

Julian Schnabel è, oggi, l’artista più famoso al mondo! La première di una sua mostra è ambita come una consacrazione mondana. E’ accaduto a Roma a Palazzo Venezia, come a Milano, con tutti gli stilisti in pompa magna quasi prostrati ai suoi piedi, come a Venezia al Gucci Awards 2007 o a Cannes, al festival del cinema, vincitore della Palma d’oro 2007 per la regia e il film “ lo Scafandre e il Papillon”
Julian Schnabel è, anche, vincitore di due Goold Goble, gennaio 2008, come migliore film e regia, sempre per “ lo Scafandre e il Papillon”

A Tribute Coco Chanel

Gabrielle Chanel had the kind of body that we tend to stereotype as French (if only because of that annoying diet book French Women Don't Get Fat).

She was bone-thin, flat-chested, skinny-limbed, straight-backed, partly because she never ate much (she once said of the gourmandising Colette: 'She positively swaggers in gluttony!') and partly because she chain-smoked life-long. She was ahead of her time.

She came to womanhood at the height of the Belle Epoque, when fashionable beauties were Rubensesque and dressed to excess. This was the age of the deep-pillowed bosom, the swathed and bustled bottom, and What-The-Butler-Saw massive thighs. Only savage corseting restrained a woman's waist. Nothing restrained her finery: dresses were bedecked with plumes, flowers, feathers, furs, lace, ribbons, embroidery, flounces, trim.

Had they but known it, the fat French women of the Belle Epoque were eating and drinking in the last-chance saloon. Gabrielle Chanel, born in the 19th century as the half-orphan child of a peasant family in the Auvergne, would single-handedly force women's fashion into the 20th - and the house she founded is still recognisably hers (and richer than ever) in the 21st.

How on earth she did this was always a mystery to me, but in these extraordinary early pictures you can track her genius, her ambition, her bravery and - above all - her modernity. Naturally, she made all her own clothes (and hats), as every woman did except for the seriously rich. But her clothes were revolutionary.

At a time when fashion restricted, reshaped and exaggerated the femaleness of women, Chanel's clothes simply followed the natural shape of a woman's body. This is what men's clothes do. In a picture from 1906, you can see the very beginnings of Chanel's modernity. Her walking-suit in Prince of Wales check is narrow and skims the body. At a time when women's hats were the biggest in history, hers is no bigger than a man's panama.

Chanel took what she wanted from men's clothes because she moved among fashionable men. At 19 or 20 she'd tried working as a nightclub dancer in Pau - it was here she became known as Coco - but was picked up by a young French gallant, Etienne Balsan, the first of her many, many loves.

Balsan bred the best horses in France and went to the races non-stop. With him, she lived in that curious place called the demi-monde, the Parisian half world between society on the one hand and the great unwashed on the other. Balsan introduced her to château life, to horses, to racing and to his friends. By 1910 she was watching the races in a mannish boater, a shirt and tie (filched from Balsan) and a tailored overcoat (off the back of his friend Baron Foy).

For a night of amateur theatrics she dressed as a village groom in clothes she bought from the boys' department at a Paris department store. Gabrielle's short jacket, the Peter Pan collar, the black bow, the Breton straw hat are pure Chanel. Underneath the hat is her thick, piled, ratted mass of (pretty glorious) hair.

When it wouldn't fit under the man's bowler hat she wore to ride Balsan's horses, she raked it back and tucked into a (shocking) pigtail. It took her until 1917 to shear it right off her head - and every fashionable woman followed her lead.

In 1913, when she was 29, she became the petite amie of Balsan's best friend, a charismatic Englishman called Boy Capel. He backed her with a shop at 21 rue Cambon in Paris, only a few doors down from the mirrored glory of number 31 (the townhouse where she moved her business in 1928 - and where it remains today).

From being a kept woman, she was now a femme d'affaires and, when the First World War began, she relocated to Deauville. Here, her genius for knowing what women wanted to wear exploded. As she had borrowed stable-lads' jodhpurs to copy for herself, now she borrowed sailors' jerseys. No one had ever used tricot for anything except underwear before - it was a poor, soft, working-man's fabric, but what she was after was 'chic on the edge of poverty'.

She made a pull-on tunic with deep patch pockets to wear over a slim jersey skirt, or pleats. She hated fake detailing ('Never a button without a buttonhole!') and if she made pockets, you could thrust your hands in them. By 1917 she had raised her skirts, designed a 'swimming-costume' (as opposed to a burka-like 'bathing-dress') and started baring her face to the sun.

She saw what was coming before anyone else: in the postwar future, women - even very rich and fashionable women - would not be gliding along the promenade, dressed as a wedding-cake and holding a parasol. They would be jumping on and off planes, into taxi-cabs, on to subway trains, and their clothes needed to move with them.

'Fashion does not exist unless it goes down into the streets,' said Chanel. She ruthlessly stripped away all the built-in bling of the past century ('Make the dress first, not the embellishment'), aiming always for the straight line, and softening the jutting breasts and buttocks of the corseted era. Bling you could add later: 'It doesn't matter if it's real, so long as it looks like junk.'

Chanel democratised women's fashion, anticipating the mass market. Though each of her pieces was bespoke, she never minded being copied. Before Chanel, the most fashionable dress was a highly decorated number individually created for you by the most fashionable couturier, Paul Poiret - and woe betide him if you met a woman in something vaguely similar.

By 1926 Vogue's drawing of a scoop-necked, knee-length dress in black crêpe-de-chine, with long tight sleeves, was captioned, 'Here is a Ford, signed Chanel.' Any woman could buy a copy, and the universal little black dress was born.

She was now at the peak of her looks; she was making squillions out of Chanel No 5; she was the lover of the ludicrously wealthy Duke of Westminster and rode his horses and shot his game and sailed with him on Flying Cloud. She was coaxed to Hollywood by Cecil B deMille; she designed for a ballet by Cocteau.

Her war years were a bit iffy. When the Second World War was declared, Chanel closed her salon immediately, which was jolly patriotic, but she lived in the Ritz with a high-ranking Nazi, which was somewhat less so. After the liberation of Paris in 1944 she was arrested for collaboration.

This was at a time when suspect collabos were being tarred and feathered in the streets of Paris, but she was let go after a couple of hours and fled to Switzerland. It's always assumed that the Duke of Westminster asked Churchill to get her off, but there is no documentation.

She was still in self-imposed exile in the bitter February of 1947 when Christian Dior unleashed his first couture collection on a postwar world that was weary unto death of nearly a decade of austerity and rationing and uniforms and land-army overalls. His clothes, he said, were femme-femme (womanly woman), his fabrics were fine and lavishly used (50 metres of cloth in a dress) and his silhouette was wasp-waisted, sloping-shouldered and belled to mid-calf.

The clothes were heavily structured and boned, lined, interlined, petticoated, padded and stuffed. (One of the models said, 'I can't walk, eat or even sit down.') They were a sensation. The American press hailed the New Look, and war-weary women hurled themselves into Dior's corsets and ultra-femininity.

When Chanel reopened in 1954 she was 70. It was the on-going success of Dior that brought her back - partly because his perfumes (Miss Dior and Diorissimo) were damaging sales of Chanel No 5 in America and partly because 1950s fashion was the Belle Epoque all over again.

She hated clothes that restricted women. 'Some women want to be gripped inside their clothes. Never! When you step inside my dress, you are free.' She showed collarless, cardigan-style jackets and slightly flared skirts falling from a gentle waistband in soft jersey fabrics. Everyone at the show was wearing a 'waspie' (a particularly vicious 1950s waist-cincher) and most balanced with difficulty on the little gilt chairs.

One English fashionista noticed Chanel herself, crouched on a step at the top of the showroom stairs. She was wearing one of her own suits, and looking 'completely comfortable, a feat she could not have achieved in any other fashionable clothing of the time'. The French press slated her comeback, calling it retrograde. (One newspaper headlined the report, 'At Chanel it's 'fouilly-les-oies' - meaning 'hicksville'.) Some English papers were quite snotty, too, which upset the anglophile Chanel.

It didn't take long. By the time of her next collection in the autumn, she was suddenly a cult among young, hip Parisiennes - maybe because they were more forgiving of Nazi boyfriends than their mammas were. And in America the first collection had sold wildly from the off, delighting the buyers while bemusing the fashion press.

When the Beatles made Please Please Me in l963, even I was wearing Chanel, in the slow-moving very far north of Lancashire. A simple little jersey suit in french blue, banded with sky blue, with bobble-buttons all down the front. Loved it. Didn't know it was a Chanel, of course. The label said Wallis.

'The World of Coco Chanel' (Thames & Hudson, £29.95) by Edmonde Charles-Roux, published on 7 April, is available from Telegraph Books Direct (0870 155 7222) at £25.95 plus £2.25

The Met's Chanel exhibit brings out the A-list from Style.com

The Metropolitan Museum of Art was awash in camellias and couture Monday night as the Costume Institute celebrated its latest exhibit, an homage to the house of Chanel.


Selma Blair and Vanessa Paradis at the premiere

And in Vogue magazine:


Coco Chanel, 1928
Above all, Chanel respected the body in her work. Here, in an original dress from the end of the decade, the linear silhouette of her classic twenties clothes succumbs to a swirling asymmetry that presages the glamour of Hollywood's sliver-screen sirens. In 1931, Chanel would be summoned to Tinseltown by Sam Goldwyn himself to dress stars like Gloria Swanson. Courtesy of Mark Walsh Leslie Chin Vintage.


Coco Chanel, 1964
"You have to breathe and move and sit without being conscious of what you have on," Chanel told Vogue's mid-century fashion editor Bettina Ballard. Case in point: her iconic braid-trimmed suit, which first materialized after her 1954 comeback and was originally inspired by the Tyrolean jacket of her friend and photographer Horst P. Horst. Chanel delighted in mixing faux jewels with her own princely hoard; here, the brilliant fakes of Goossens. Clothing courtesy of Chanel, Paris.

Chanel 2.55

Chanel's 2.55 handbag reaches it's 50th birthday this month.The bag has hung from the famous arms of kate Moss,Renee Zellwegger, Heidi Klum , Sophie Dahl and many others.Originally launched in 1955 by Gabrielle "coco" Chanel, fifty years later this limited edition is sold for £860 and the UK is only going to have 100 available.

A limited edition fire-engine red and coral tweed version has been created to commemorate its anniversary.

Guggenheim Vilnius Museum

The luxury of the beauty by ministero della bellezza

Portrait di Scandalosa Architettura

Si dice:" se non ti sei aggiudicato un bel pensiero nella vita, la tua vita è stata gettata via", ministerodellabellezza

A Catanzaro, da molti anni, gli amministratori pubblici hanno preso un impegno; tutte le loro energie, ahimè, piccole energie a dire il vero perché le grandi energie sono in dono per gli individui baciati da nobili sentimenti, sono volte a questo impegno.

L’impegno è di imbruttire la loro città, la mia città.

Nel realizzare del vero brutto ci vuole molta energia, diceva Schopenhauer; questi amministratori, non di nobile e gentile aspetto, trasferiscono, tout court, il senso estetico del loro vivere nell’impegno di degrado della città; nessuno sforzo, quindi, per queste orride persone!

In questi giorni, la città di Catanzaro è stata invasa da panchine pubbliche di aspetto mortificante e di comodità simile a una bara mutilata dal legno e disposte in un ordine disordine che offende chiunque abbia il pur minimo senso estetico.

L’immaginifico Erté diceva che nessuno aveva il diritto di offendere lo sguardo altrui con delle brutture.

Questi amministratori, a causa delle loro iniziative, sono dei criminali: offendono lo sguardo altrui.

“Nessun crimine è volgare ma ogni volgarità è un crimine”, diceva il mio amico Oscar Wilde; ma questi amministratori conoscono Oscar Wilde?

Nell’anima degli amministratori di Catanzaro non abita la tensione per la Bellezza; gli abitanti di Catanzaro non hanno pietre di paragone e la loro anima, purtroppo, ora è simile a fiori maleodoranti.

A Catanzaro esisteranno pur degli architetti? D’accordo, non saranno come Zaha Hadid, Jean Nouvell, Philipp Stark o Massimiliano Fuksas ma una tensione, nella loro testa, per mettere fine a uno scempio dovrebbero pur averla? Silenzio, non svegliateli...! Il nulla abita, anche, nella loro testa.

Si racconta che l’unica protesta, per lo scempio delle panchine, sia avvenuta da un certo Domenico Tallini, consigliere regionale e comunale.

Domenico Tallini non è l’espressione dell’ésprit de finesse, la sua fisicità e il suo eloquio, sono quelle che fecero fuggire Giacomo Casanova dalla Calabria. Nelle Memories del famoso libertino: “Guardavo con meraviglia quel paese famoso per la sua fertilità, nel quale, però, nonostante la prodigalità della natura, vedevo soltanto miseria: vi mancavano, infatti, tutte quelle incantevoli cose che, per quanto superflue, contribuiscono a rendere bella la vita e gli stessi pochi abitanti in cui m’imbattevo mi facevano vergognare di appartenere al genere umano".

Niente è cambiato da allora? Si ! Niente è cambiato da allora: non c’è limite all’orrido e al cattivo gusto!

“C’è vita in Arte e nella Bellezza, rifugiatevi là"! Ma a Catanzaro questo non è possibile!

Je constate le fait, c’est tout!

La panchina in foto è di Zaha Hadid per una città i cui amministratori sono di nobile e gentile aspetto; scoprite la città...

A Tribute Ruslana Korshunova

Walking in Beauty from Luigi Lamannis
but the beauty isn't in Catanzaro

Catanzaro Preview Restyling

These models women so beautiful are deprived of hope because the architecture of Catanzaro is much ugly: the flower boxes are in horrible metal