At the end of July and all through August, Parisians take their summer vacations and many of the smaller, lesser-known museums have less visitors. To take advantage of that this summer, there are two exhibitions we highly recommend you don’t miss.
Vegetal L’Ecole de Beauté by Chaumet
One of the most celebrated and venerated jewelers in Paris, Chaumet was started in 1780 by Marie-Étienne Nitot, who designed jewelry for Queen Marie Antoinette and, later on, for Napoleon Bonaparte, creating the jewelry for his marriage to his wife Empress Josephine. Chaumet has gone through many changes over the centuries and is currently owned by the LVMH group.
Chaumet has consistently been inspired by the plant and botany world in its designs, and has based a new exhibit at the Beaux-Arts de Paris, Vegetal L’Ecole de Beauté, on this theme. The exhibition cleverly mixes art and jewelry by interspersing paintings, drawings, photographs, sculptures, textiles, fashion design, objects and furniture with dazzling jewelry pieces, drawing from an in-house collection of hundreds of thousands of pieces from their extensive archives.
Curated on two floors, Vegetal L’Ecole de Beauté showcases 400 works, borrowed from over 70 international museums and art institutions; they are split up into a series of categories, including reeds, the forest, seaweed, hortus and flowers. Jewelry highlights of the exhibition include a broach with holly leaves adorned with tiny diamonds and pearls from 1890, a mockup of a tiara inspired by seaweed from 1900, and another tiara from 1811, based on wheat stalks, executed with gold, silver and diamonds.
Available until September 4, 2022. Visit beauxartsparis.fr/vegetal-lecole-de-la-beaute.
Shocking! The Surreal World of Schiaparelli
Elsa Schiaparelli, a groundbreaking fashion and accessory designer in Paris in the early to mid-1900s, is having a major and overdue retrospective. One of a handful of recognized female designers of the time, she was a contemporary and sometimes rival of the legendary Coco Chanel.
Born in to a noble and intellectual family in 1890 in Rome, she was drawn to artists at a young age, befriending Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp while living in New York in the early 1920s. After moving to Paris in 1922, she designed a small collection of sweaters adorned with trompe-l'œil neck ties and bows. The sweaters became the talk of the town and she opened her glamorous salon in 1935 on the tony Place Vendome, nearby the Ritz Hotel.
Embracing her relationships with her artist’s friends, Schiaparelli collaborated with Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau and designed a breakthrough collection of dresses and jewelry inspired by the Surrealism art movement. For the next 20 years, except for the closure of the salon from 1940 to 1945 due to World War II, when Schiaparelli moved back to New York, she created an exceptional body of work that was inspired by art and fantasy.
A comprehensive exhibit at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs of 520 works, including 272 silhouettes and fashion accessories, is crisply curated on two floors in chronological order. Not only does the exhibition encompass the world of Schiaparelli, but it also informs the viewer of the deep influence that art had on her designs, which are accompanied by a rich collection of paintings, sculptures, perfume bottles, ceramics, posters, and photographs.
Available through January 22, 2023. Visit madparis.fr/Shocking-Les-mondes-surrealistes-d-Elsa-Schiaparelli.
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