"Mr. Saint Laurent, something is broken!"
In 1982, photographer Marianne Haas was slipping through Yves Saint Laurent's Paris apartment with her camera when an alabaster goblet she had just picked up shattered into pieces.
The drink was tremendous: her job was to photograph the designer's collection of art and antiques for damage insurance.
Seeing what happened, the Saint Laurent
valet
hurried to notify his boss “with malicious joy”.
“Yves arrived in a flash and began to examine the glass.
Then, he realized that it was already broken from before.
Someone had glued the pieces together,” Haas writes in the foreword to
Yves Saint Laurent At Home
.
In the apartment on Solférino street in Paris, a portrait of Moujik, the Saint Laurent French bulldog painted by Andy Warhol, under an antique torso.Marianne HAAS
Published by Assouline, the book does not make it clear who broke the cup, but it does make it clear how graceful the photographer emerged from the mess.
On sale in December, the volume compiles the photographs that Saint Laurent commissioned him to take in the following years both in his Paris apartment and in the rest of his homes: from his magnificent castle in Normandy (Château Gabriel), to the Russian dacha which was made next door and his famous villa in Marrakech (Villa Oasis).
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The most expensive, the cheapest and the rarest of the auction of the collection of the widower of Yves Saint Laurent
Pierre Bergé's room in Château Gabriel, the Norman mansion that the couple decorated inspired by the work of Marcel Proust.
This room was dedicated to the Baron de Charlus.Marianne Haas
Jacques Grange, the interior designer who helped the designer create these spaces, explains in his texts for the book that his former client had a vision of decoration and architecture as novel as that of Ludwig II of Bavaria, whom he says he admired.
Thus, if the Mad King dedicated a castle to the Arthurian cycle, Saint Laurent turned his into a tribute to Proust.
The entrance to the Matisse salon in Villa Oasis, the home of Bergé and Saint Laurent in Marrakech.Marianne Haas
Saint Laurent had the full support of his partner and ex-partner, Pierre Bergé, in these projects, who tolerated whims so well that one day he decided to give his
valet
a tomb .
According to Haas, it was useless for the assistant to protest saying that he preferred to be buried in his family vault.
“I have bought you that tomb and that is where you will go!” Bergé said.
