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Chanel is making an Italian statement: The fashion house has occupied a palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice for the seventh installation of an extensive project, called 'Culture Chanel,' deconstructing the life of Gabrielle Chanel, better known as Coco.
'La Donna Che Legge,' ('The Woman Who Reads'), will run until January 8 at the Ca' Pesaro, Venice's municipal modern art museum, offering an intimate glance at the designer's literary preferences and at how her relationship with books, and often their authors, influenced her creatively.
It leapfrogs among her dozens of books, letters, drawings and possessions, the theory being that without her vast network of friends, collaborators and lovers ” fictional and real ” Coco would not have become Chanel.
So there is a photograph of the 20-something Gabrielle, sleeping with a book in her hand, next to a handwritten copy of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, from the collections of the municipal library of Rouen, France, one of several public institutions and private individuals that lent objects and letters for the show.
The book is open to a page where Flaubert describes 15-year-old Emma devouring romantic novels in the library of the convent where she was raised. Chanel, too, was raised in a convent, after her father abandoned her upon her mother's death and, according to an audio guide, she found freedom in books and reading.
Nearby is a pencil drawing of a woman reading by Pablo Picasso dated circa 1916. Chanel and Picasso were friends and moved in the same artistic and intellectual circles that included other mavericks, such as Jean Cocteau and Igor Stravinsky, who helped to chart the sweeping changes that engulfed the arts in the early 20th century.
The exhibition underscores the intimacy of these relationships, glimpsed mostly through handwritten notes or letters and book dedications that reveal Chanel's connection to an all-star galaxy of poets, artists, thinkers and musicians, including the Polish pianist, arts patron and muse Misia Sert, one of her closest friends, as well as Guillaume Apollinaire, Paul 'c9luard, Alberto and Diego Giacometti, Pierre Reverdy, Salvador Dal'ed and Tristan Tzara, a founder of dadaism.
There are mementos of fantastical productions for Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, for which Chanel designed costumes, and Cocteau's 1927 operatic production of Antigone, with sets by Picasso, costumes by Chanel and music composed by Arthur Honegger.
Among the letters is one by Stravinsky, said to have been Chanel's lover, recollecting"the sweet memory of a kiss from the fiery coloured lips of Chanel also called Coco." Dal'ed wrote to"my pretty little Coco," while Cocteau, who incidentally penned what was described as a press kit to Chanel's 1932 jewellery collection Bijoux de Diamants, repeatedly vows his ardent friendship in scribbled notes ”"I love you with all my heart" he wrote on a business card from the St Regis Hotel in New York ” and longer letters.
The dedications in some of the books"are as much biographical statements about the great couturi'e8re as they are artistic, and henceforth, historical testimonies," Jean-Louis Froment, the curator of the exhibition, wrote in the introduction to the show's small catalogue.
Froment chose to exhibit the objects in outsize transparent cases without descriptive labels, so the catalogue functions as a necessary guide. Without its explanations, in Italian, French and English, it certainly would be hard to determine the relationships among a photograph of a young man reading a book ” Arthur Edward Capel, as it turns out, also known as Boy Capel, Chanel's great love and sponsor; one of his notebooks; and an illustrated copy of the The Song of Songs from Chanel's apartment in Paris, with a discreet"AC" stamped on its spine. All are displayed together in a small room dedicated to Capel.
Then, given pride of place in the first showcase, there is the tiny, much folded piece of paper that Chanel kept in her wallet. As to why, well ” on it, scribbled in her precise handwriting, is a maxim from The Sentimental Initiation by Jos`phin P`ladan:"The life we lead always amounts to so little, the life we dream of, that's the great existence because it will continue beyond death."
As a window into the designer's mind, and a clue about what drove her to create a global empire, it's worth a read.
