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MEMORIES OF HOME THAT INSPIRED A MASTERProduced by
Balenciagaand Spain
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23Pacific Union International Collection
A Member of Real Living PacUnion.com
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Downtown301 Mission #17HEnjoy 5 star living at the spectacular Millennium Tower. This 1BR/1BA condo is perched on the 17th oor & has panoramic City views. Gourmet kitchen w/Sub-Zero & Bosch appliances.themillenniumtower17h.com$660,000
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Hosiery, Men’s Collection,
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Our gratitude to the following for their assistance with this project:
■ Hamish Bowles■ Oscar de la Renta■ Balenciaga, Paris■ Gael Mamine and the
Balenciaga Archive■ Agustín Medina Balenciaga
■ Sonsoles Diez de Rivera■ Irene Seco Serra and
Concha Herranz, Museo del Traje
■ Antonio Lopez Fuentes and Fermín Sastrería de Toreros
■ Museo Taurino, Madrid■ Escuela Taurina de Madrid■ Casa Patas, Madrid■ Auxi Fernandes■ Pasiones Flamencas■ Anton Küng and The Ritz Hotel, Madrid
■ The Queen Sofia Spanish Institute
■ Elena Diaz García■ Simon Butler-Madden ■ Abercrombie and Kent, Europe
■ The Spanish Tourist Office, LA
Thank you Cover: Cristóbal Balenciaga. Detail of evening dress of embroidered white satin with bronze taffeta sash, winter 1950. Collection of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photography by Craig McDean.
Page 4: Cristóbal Balenciaga. “Infanta” evening dress, 1939. Photograph by George Hoyningen-Huene. © R.J. Horst. Courtesy Staley/Wise Gallery, NYC. Inset: Diego Velazquez, Portrait of the Infanta Maria-Margarita daughter of Felipe IV, King of Spain. Louvre, Paris. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Page 5: (left) Cristóbal Balenciaga. Crimson silk velvet evening coat with double collar, 1950-1951. Collection of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by Craig McDean. (right) Cristóbal Balenciaga. Rear view of day dress of black silk bengaline and velvet, winter 1947. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Mrs. Eloise Heidland. Photo by Joe McDonald/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Page 6: (left) Cristóbal Balenciaga. Evening ensemble of black silk gazar and wool, ca. 1951. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Elise Haas. Photo by Joe McDonald/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. (right) Cristóbal Balenciaga. Black silk cocktail hat with silk rose. Collection of Hamish Bowles. Photo by Kenny Komer.
Page 9: (top left) Cristóbal Balenciaga. Coat of black silk ottoman, ca. 1939. Collection of Hamish Bowles. Photo by Joe McDonald/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. (top right) Cristóbal
Balenciaga. Scarlet silk ottoman evening coat with capelet collar, autumn/winter 1954-1955. Collection of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by Craig McDean. (bottom) Cristóbal Balenciaga. Bolero of garnet velvet and black jet embroidery, winter 1947. Collection of The Costume Institute of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photograph by Craig McDean.
Page 10: Portrait of Cristóbal Balenciaga (circa 1952). ©Bettmann/CORBIS.
Page 11: (clockwise from top left) House photograph of evening gown of turquoise silk gauze, summer 1958. Courtesy Balenciaga Archive. Studio drawing of ball gown of black tulle, silk-satin ribbons and silk fringe tassels, winter 1957. Courtesy Balenciaga Archives. Studio drawing of day dress of indigo linen, summer 1958. Courtesy Balenciaga Archives. Cocktail hat of ivory silk satin, 1953. Originally published in Vogue, October 15, 1953. Photo: John Rawlings. Sketch and house photograph courtesy Balenciaga Archives. Portrait of Balenciaga courtesy AP/File photo.
Page 15: Portrait of Hamish Bowles by Arthur Elgort.
Pages 16-17: Photos by Jill Lynch.
Page 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga. Detail of cocktail dress of rose peau de soie and black lace, winter 1948. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, gift of Mrs. C. H. Russell. Photo by Joe McDonald/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Photo credits
John P. Wilcox PublisherDeirdre Hussey Executive editorTerry Forte Design directorSteven Winn Writer
Longtime San Francisco journalist and critic Steven Winn wrote The Treasures of Tutankhamun supplement for the de Young Museum’s 2009 exhibition. He has contributed to ARTNews, Humani-ties, the New York Times and many other publications. His memoir, Come Back, Como: Winning the Heart of a Reluc-tant Dog (Harper), is out in paperback.
The San Francisco Examiner is published Sunday through Friday by the S.F. Newspaper Company, LLC. The Examiner is located at 71 Stevenson St., Second Floor; San Francisco, CA 94105
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The spirit of bull-fighting thrives in Spain’s capital city. Youths practice the art of the toreadors, above, hoping to perform it one day in, the city’s grand bullring, left.
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ring in 1947 — was intrinsic to Balenciaga’s bold aesthetic.
The forces that shaped Balenciaga live on in every neighborhood, in dress shops, flamenco dance studios and the cramped apartment of lacemaker Elena Díaz García. Seated at a din-ing room table, where she and her husband were creating a lace first-communion dress that would take months to make, Díaz García remarked on Balenciaga’s skill at incorporating lace into his designs.
“He took traditional lace and made it look modern,” she said, a swarm of wooden bobbins clicking gently as she spoke and worked.
Then she made a deeper connection, between the aspiration of her craft and his.
“What differentiates him from the other great couturiers,” said the lacemaker, “was the fineness of his stitching, the ability to hide the sewing and hide the seams and achieve the perfection others were not able to do.”
Bullfighting tailor Antonio Lopez Fuentes offered another perspective. As his male clients came and went from his shop, piled high with resplendent capes and trajes des luces (suits of light), Fermin emerged from the workroom with a tape measure around his neck. After speaking for a while about material that must be sturdy and bloodstain-resistant for the combat of the ring, the tailor imagined Balenciaga’s synthesizing point of view.
“When you think of cut and the narrow waist
of these costumes,” said Lopez Fuentes, “there is a certain feminine characteristic of the bullfighter.” Then the doorbell rang, and a Mexican matador came in to pick up his suit.
Almost 40 years after his death, Balenciaga is braided into the broad stream of Spanish cultural life. And for some, he’s etched into the mind’s eye of memory. Receiving guests at the Royal Suite of the Madrid Ritz, the designer’s grandnephew Agustín Medina Balenciaga described his famous relative as private, self-contained and “aware of his own talent” yet “not vulnerable to compliments.”
At heart, he went on, this artist who spent his life making women look gorgeous “was a mystic person. The work he did was always about a rigor-ous search for beauty.” — S.W.
Lacemakers and embroiderers still ply their traditional, intricate crafts in Madrid, creating materials that Balenciaga incorporated into his modern creations.
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Standing by a softly lit display of Balenciaga dresses at the Museo del Traje (Museum of Fashion and Costumes), curator Concha
Herranz admired the contours of a sleek black evening gown. It appeared to be made from a single piece of supple, molded fabric.
“Balenciaga cut in a way that used as few seams as possible,” Herranz explained through an interpreter. “See how he draws the dress out of the material? He was an architect of fashion.”
Another example of the master’s work caught the curator’s eye, for the play of stiff and pliable materials and decorative flourishes that recall a bullfighter’s costume. Still another dress — with a prettily scalloped scarlet neckline, primly gathered waist and a cascade of creamy folded silk that
reached the floor — looked “very theatrical, like a movie dress” to Herranz. It made her think of Holy Week. “You can just imagine someone car-rying candles,” she mused.
Balenciaga sets the imagination aloft. Here in the country’s largest city, where Balenciaga ran one of his three Spanish dressmaking shops before moving to Paris, a visitor can find many of the sights and cultural wellsprings that fed his vibrant, meticulous and quintessentially Spanish art.
Some of those influences are in plain view. Visit the Museo del Prado and there are the mag-nificently robed saints by Zurbarán that combine holiness and visual high drama. Balenciaga knew them well. At the choice Sorolla Museum, paint-
ings by the Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida brim over with sparkling light and depictions of the boldly colored native costumes the couturier often incorporated into his designs.
Inside Madrid’s grand bullfighting arena, which commands the Plaza Monumental de las Ventas, a museum displays splendid 19th- and 20th-century matador costumes, capes, caps and other items of ceremonial combat between man and beast. Balenciaga admired and emulated the lavish embroidery and lustrous gold braiding on exhibit here. And even though he disliked the spectacle of bullfighting itself, its high-stakes the-atricality — vividly preserved in the majestic bulls’ heads on the walls and the bloodied suit revered matador Manolete wore the day he died in the
Tailor to the matadors,
Antonio Lopez Fuentes creates
traje de luces in his Madrid atelier,
Sastrería Fermín.
MADRID
Cultural traditions have deep roots in Spain’s historic capitalmuse MadridThe that
is
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universe. As European editor at large for Vogue, he profiles the fashion cognoscenti and embarks upon experiential journeys, bringing his unique sense of style to surfing lessons or surviving in the woods.
In 2001, he curated the critically acclaimed exhibi-tion Jacqueline Kennedy: The White House Years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Bowles is also the author of books on Yves Saint Laurent and Carolina Herrera, as well as the catalogue to Balen-ciaga and Spain, among others. He’s justly deemed “the British style maharishi” by Interview.
Like Balenciaga, Bowles found his true calling early. As a child, he collected clothing from thrift stores around London. Today he owns more than 2,000 pieces.
A special light comes into the curator’s eyes when he talks about the Spanish master.
“What’s truly extraordinary about Balenciaga,” Bowles says, “is that from 1937 to his retirement in 1968 he was constantly pushing himself and hon-ing his design ideas. It’s an extraordinary and very unusual trajectory. On the eve of his retirement, when he was in his 70s, his clothes became as abstract and experimental as anything he had ever produced as a young man. Balenciaga was never satisfied with rest-ing on his laurels.” — S.W.
Style substance
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Lincoln Park, San Francisco34th Avenue and Clement Street��������������������������������
THROUGH JUN 5, 2011
Isabelle de Borchgrave uses the medium of
paper to form trompe l’oeil masterpieces
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pieces will be included from Renaissance
costumes and gowns worn by Elizabeth I and
Marie-Antoinette to the grand couture
creations of Dior, Chanel and Fortuny. The
�����������������������������������������
to host an overview of the artist’s work.
This exhibition is organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and sponsored by Lonna Wais. Additional support
is provided by Garry McGuire and Nathalie Delrue-McGuire, Jamie and Philip Bowles, and Elizabeth W. Vobach. Collection
Connections is made possible by The Annenberg Foundation.
Image: Isabelle de Borchgrave, Maria de’ Medici���������������������������������������������������
Alessandro Allori in the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
Photo: Andreas von Einsiedel
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11Publicity-shy to the point of reclusive, monastically devoted to his craft and boundlessly inventive in a realm that often rewards brash showmanship
and market-tuned imitation, the Spaniard Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895-1972) was an improbable figure to dominate the fiercely competitive world of 20th-century Parisian haute couture. But dominate he did for more than three decades, from 1937 to 1968, with designs of unequaled elegance, searching innovation, technical mastery and lyrical grace.
“Haute couture is like an orchestra, for which only Balenciaga is the conductor,” said Christian Dior, his most formidable rival. “The rest of us are just musicians, following the directions he gives us.” The English photographer and designer Cecil Beaton called him “fashion’s Picasso,” not-ing that “underneath all of his experiments with the modern, Balenciaga has a deep respect for tradition and a pure classic line.”
His impact and influence were immense, not only on other designers but on the broader fashion zeitgeist. “Almost every woman, directly or indirectly,” declared Harper’s Bazaar in 1940, “has worn a Balenciaga.”
He made his mark not by establishing a generic house style and then tweak-ing it from one collection to the next, as many designers did. Instead, Balenciaga kept pressing on to new modes of seeing clothing and flattering the female form. And yet no matter how far he roamed, his distinctive touch — what the writer Celia Bertin called “the continuity of his style” — endured.
Tapping the deep roots of his Spanish heritage, Balenciaga found inspiration in flamenco and Velázquez paintings, clerical vestments and bullfighters’ boleros. Later, in designs that re-envisioned the female silhou-ette with fluid and emphatic gestures that flouted the traditional waistline, he created his unfitted middy blouse and tunic dress, the barrel-line jacket and balloon dress.
Balenciaga continued to expand the envelope over the years, with designs that invoked Picasso and Miró or reimagined the baby-doll dress. In 1952, he devised the pillbox hat. Vogue described a buoyant 1957 mohair dress as “almost the equivalent of bubble bath in froth.” He worked in new materials and synthetics while still employ-ing his mastery of velvet and lace, damask and satin. His color sense was sublime throughout a long and multifaceted career.
By turns sumptuously sculptural, decep-tively simple and audaciously abstract, his dresses were at once striking works of art in various styles and consistently user-friendly. His clients — including Pauline de Roth-schild, Helena Rubinstein and the Duchess of Windsor — loved wearing Balenciaga’s superbly made clothes. They looked beauti-ful in them and felt pampered and at ease.
Interviewed in her Madrid apartment last fall, longtime Balenciaga client Son-soles Diez de Rivera recalled a yellow dress the designer made for her, a piece she still owns. “That dress has only the two seams
where you put it on,” she said. “It just clings to your body so perfectly, and it’s so com-fortable to wear. The dresses of Balenciaga are nearly more beautiful on the inside than the outside.”
It’s an astute and telling remark. A defining feature of Balenciaga’s work is its structural integrity, the soundness of the garments’ construction from the inside out. Whether he was capturing the flare of a flamenco dancer’s skirt in a stiff silk gauze or creating a tiny margin of air between a woman’s body and the dress for a floating and flowing effect, Balenciaga, who began his career as a tailor’s apprentice, was a peerless craftsman. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he continued to cut and personally make clothes throughout his career. Coco Chanel called Balenciaga “the only couturier.” All the others, she said, “are just draughtsmen.”
Balenciaga came to his calling early. Born to a family of very modest means in the Basque fishing town of Guetaria on Jan. 21, 1895, he made his first coat at age 6. His client was the family cat. At 11, he stopped an elegant woman of the town, the Marquesa de Casa Torres, and asked if he could make a copy of the Parisian suit she was wearing. He did, and well enough for her to wear it.
After his father’s death in 1906, which forced his mother to find work as a seam-stress, Cristóbal went to work for a local tailor at age 13. At 17, he made a wedding dress for his cousin. Two years later, he opened his first dressmaking shop, in San Sebastián. Soon thereafter he expanded to Barcelona and Madrid. With an eye on the fashion capital of Paris, he bought pieces by Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet and other French designers for inspiration. His clients included members of Spain’s royal family.
Political turmoil uprooted him. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Balenciaga fled first to London and then went to Paris. In 1937, at 10 Avenue Georges V, the House of Balenciaga opened for business. The place was serious, almost sepulchral in atmosphere. The work-rooms were hushed. Models were forbidden to show their teeth when they smiled. The business was extremely well — and pri-vately — run. By the late 1950s, the house was running a higher profit margin than Dior’s, which had six times the number of Balenciaga’s employees.
The house closed for a while during World War II. The 1948 death of a beloved friend and colleague, the Franco-Russian milliner Vladzio Zawrorowski d’Attainville, shook Balenciaga so badly that he consid-ered closing down again. In 1968, the year the student riots inflamed Paris, Balenciaga abruptly shuttered his business for good. He granted a single press interview in 1971 and died of a heart attack the following year, on March 23, 1972.
“The King is Dead,” mourned the trade journal Women’s Wear Daily. No one in the fashion world, and the wider universe of cultivated taste, would have thought that an overstatement. — S.W.
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Publicity-shy to the point of reclusive, monastically devoted to his craft and boundlessly inventive in a realm that often rewards brash showmanship
and market-tuned imitation, the Spaniard Cristóbal Balenciaga (1895-1972) was an improbable figure to dominate the fiercely competitive world of 20th-century Parisian haute couture. But dominate he did for more than three decades, from 1937 to 1968, with designs of unequaled elegance, searching innovation, technical mastery and lyrical grace.
“Haute couture is like an orchestra, for which only Balenciaga is the conductor,” said Christian Dior, his most formidable rival. “The rest of us are just musicians, following the directions he gives us.” The English photographer and designer Cecil Beaton called him “fashion’s Picasso,” not-ing that “underneath all of his experiments with the modern, Balenciaga has a deep respect for tradition and a pure classic line.”
His impact and influence were immense, not only on other designers but on the broader fashion zeitgeist. “Almost every woman, directly or indirectly,” declared Harper’s Bazaar in 1940, “has worn a Balenciaga.”
He made his mark not by establishing a generic house style and then tweak-ing it from one collection to the next, as many designers did. Instead, Balenciaga kept pressing on to new modes of seeing clothing and flattering the female form. And yet no matter how far he roamed, his distinctive touch — what the writer Celia Bertin called “the continuity of his style” — endured.
Tapping the deep roots of his Spanish heritage, Balenciaga found inspiration in flamenco and Velázquez paintings, clerical vestments and bullfighters’ boleros. Later, in designs that re-envisioned the female silhou-ette with fluid and emphatic gestures that flouted the traditional waistline, he created his unfitted middy blouse and tunic dress, the barrel-line jacket and balloon dress.
Balenciaga continued to expand the envelope over the years, with designs that invoked Picasso and Miró or reimagined the baby-doll dress. In 1952, he devised the pillbox hat. Vogue described a buoyant 1957 mohair dress as “almost the equivalent of bubble bath in froth.” He worked in new materials and synthetics while still employ-ing his mastery of velvet and lace, damask and satin. His color sense was sublime throughout a long and multifaceted career.
By turns sumptuously sculptural, decep-tively simple and audaciously abstract, his dresses were at once striking works of art in various styles and consistently user-friendly. His clients — including Pauline de Roth-schild, Helena Rubinstein and the Duchess of Windsor — loved wearing Balenciaga’s superbly made clothes. They looked beauti-ful in them and felt pampered and at ease.
Interviewed in her Madrid apartment last fall, longtime Balenciaga client Son-soles Diez de Rivera recalled a yellow dress the designer made for her, a piece she still owns. “That dress has only the two seams
where you put it on,” she said. “It just clings to your body so perfectly, and it’s so com-fortable to wear. The dresses of Balenciaga are nearly more beautiful on the inside than the outside.”
It’s an astute and telling remark. A defining feature of Balenciaga’s work is its structural integrity, the soundness of the garments’ construction from the inside out. Whether he was capturing the flare of a flamenco dancer’s skirt in a stiff silk gauze or creating a tiny margin of air between a woman’s body and the dress for a floating and flowing effect, Balenciaga, who began his career as a tailor’s apprentice, was a peerless craftsman. Almost alone among his contemporaries, he continued to cut and personally make clothes throughout his career. Coco Chanel called Balenciaga “the only couturier.” All the others, she said, “are just draughtsmen.”
Balenciaga came to his calling early. Born to a family of very modest means in the Basque fishing town of Guetaria on Jan. 21, 1895, he made his first coat at age 6. His client was the family cat. At 11, he stopped an elegant woman of the town, the Marquesa de Casa Torres, and asked if he could make a copy of the Parisian suit she was wearing. He did, and well enough for her to wear it.
After his father’s death in 1906, which forced his mother to find work as a seam-stress, Cristóbal went to work for a local tailor at age 13. At 17, he made a wedding dress for his cousin. Two years later, he opened his first dressmaking shop, in San Sebastián. Soon thereafter he expanded to Barcelona and Madrid. With an eye on the fashion capital of Paris, he bought pieces by Chanel, Madeleine Vionnet and other French designers for inspiration. His clients included members of Spain’s royal family.
Political turmoil uprooted him. With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Balenciaga fled first to London and then went to Paris. In 1937, at 10 Avenue Georges V, the House of Balenciaga opened for business. The place was serious, almost sepulchral in atmosphere. The work-rooms were hushed. Models were forbidden to show their teeth when they smiled. The business was extremely well — and pri-vately — run. By the late 1950s, the house was running a higher profit margin than Dior’s, which had six times the number of Balenciaga’s employees.
The house closed for a while during World War II. The 1948 death of a beloved friend and colleague, the Franco-Russian milliner Vladzio Zawrorowski d’Attainville, shook Balenciaga so badly that he consid-ered closing down again. In 1968, the year the student riots inflamed Paris, Balenciaga abruptly shuttered his business for good. He granted a single press interview in 1971 and died of a heart attack the following year, on March 23, 1972.
“The King is Dead,” mourned the trade journal Women’s Wear Daily. No one in the fashion world, and the wider universe of cultivated taste, would have thought that an overstatement. — S.W.
A lifetailor-made
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BullfightingBalenciaga himself detested bullfighting and rarely visited the bullrings. But the glamour and sleek lines of the costumes were irresistible. As early as 1939, his collections featured overt reworkings of the matadors’ traje de luces (suit of lights), that glittering focal point of confrontation between man and bull. The taut bolero jacket, with its braid trimming and borlones (pom-pom tassels), turned up again and again in his work.
In later years, Balenciaga scattered bullfighting allusions widely, using a row of pom-poms on an evening gown, adding a dramatic cape or playfully expanding and contracting the dimension of the matadors’ headwear — the black montera or knotted silk headwrap.
Bullfighting remained an integral force in Balenciaga’s thinking. When Adolf Hitler considered moving the couture houses to Germany during the occupation of Paris, the designer remarked that he “might just as well take all the bulls to Berlin and try to train bullfighters there.”
Religious lifeTo an outsider, the sober, cloaklike drama of some Balenciaga designs conveys a sculptural purity. “Ecclesiastical and clerical clothing based on simple shapes and austere styles lent itself to modernist interpretation outside Spain,” Lesley Ellis Miller writes in Balenciaga (2005). But for the designer himself, religious belief and inspiration were powerfully internalized. He once thought he would become a priest, he attended Mass faithfully and he displayed crucifixes and religious statuary at home.
For Bowles, “the dress of the clergy and of devotional Madonna figures has extraordinary resonance” in Balenciaga’s work. The use of rich capes, simple cassocks, nuns’ sculpted wimples, monastic hoods and embroidered chasubles captures what Bowles calls “the dual nature of Spanish Catholicism, characterized by the extreme contrasts of severe austerity and extravagant luxury.”
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DanceIf Balenciaga and Spain visitors can’t hear the infectious pounding rhythms and seductive songs of flamenco, they’re just not listening closely enough with their eyes. It’s all there in the notelike flurries of lunares (polka dots), the melodic sweep of a curved and ruffled hemline and the fluttering grace notes of flounced skirts.
Characteristically, Balenciaga found his own tunes to play from the traditional ruffled-train bata de cola dress — using a single flounce here, a wild explosion of lunares there, a voluptuous long train somewhere else. No detail escaped him. He borrowed from the male flamenco dancer’s garb in wittily reworked hats and torso-hugging forms. Balenciaga utilized the foliate embroidery pattern from a flamenco dancer’s shawl in one dress and a red-carnation print in another.
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Jeffrey Thomas, music directorJeffrey Thomas, music director
BACH and SFBACH and SF
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Bacccch and Lotti: Bacccch and Lotti:aa WWWWest-Coast Premiere!aa WWWWest-Coast Premiere!Beelvvvvedere May 6 | Berkeley May 7Beelvvvvedere May 6 | Berkeley May 7SSaannn Francisco May 8 | Davis May 9SSaannn Francisco May 8 | Davis May 9
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Regional dressFrom his extensive travels in Spain, Balen-ciaga had direct and intimate knowledge of his homeland’s regional dress. He never forgot it, working native forms, materials and embellishments into his own designs throughout his career.
Fashion historian Colin McDowell described Balenciaga as “a man homesick for his own land to whom visual memories keep returning.” From his own seaside town of Guetaria, he could summon up the loose-fit-ting blouses worn by fishermen. In Navarra, he found the shepherds’ garb he would later rework into expansive mohair pelt coats. The velvet bands he recalled from Santander nursemaids turned up in a 1949 strapless evening gown.
Bonnets, fringed shawls and other acces-sories all had their origins in some Spanish province. Balenciaga always kept his distance from the press, but he might well have rel-ished Le Figaro’s account of the “bunched-up effect, washerwoman style” of his 1941 sum-mer skirts.
The royal courtIn lavish wedding dresses, ornate theatrical costumes, evening dresses and infanta gowns, Balenciaga drew on five centuries of Spanish royalty to fuel his imagination. For a 1960 wedding dress, the designer worked in bands of white mink to invoke the 15th-century Queen Isabella’s love of ermine. The deep, pure blacks in some of Balenciaga’s work summon the 16th-century piety of King Philip II.
And then there were his costumes for a 1942 production of a Don Juan drama. Called on by the lead actress to create an “orgy of colors” in a “riot of fabrics,” Balenciaga turned to 16th- and 17th-century court portraits for a visual vocabulary of velvets, satins, silk failles and ermine tails. Plumed hats, blooming hooped petticoats (known as farthingales), armorlike embroidery and ruff collars all found a place in Balenciaga’s royally inflected artistry.
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Cristóbal Balenciaga spent most of his career where he belonged, as an acknowledged master in the
haute couture world capital of Paris. But his Spanish homeland was the ever-pres-ent lifeblood of his work, nourishing every phase and aspect of his art.
“The impact of Spain remained extraordinarily potent in his work,” says Hamish Bowles, the curator of the de Young Museum’s Balenciaga and Spain exhibition. In his sustained and richly varied acts of transformation, the Basque-born couturier turned what Bowles calls an “aching nostalgia” for his native turf and culture into an act of perpetual refrac-tion and reinvention.
“Balenciaga’s inspirations came from the bullrings, the flamenco dancers, the loose blouses the fishermen wear, the cool of the cloisters,” wrote the fashion writer and editor Diana Vreeland, who mounted the first major Balenciaga show, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973.
The current exhibition, which features 120 pieces from both museum and pri-vate collections, sets out to document the impact of the Spanish culture and aesthetic on the designer’s work. As such, it is full of echoes, harmonies and layered chords. Here are some of the major notes in this richly chromatic composition.
Spanish artAmong the abundant riches of Madrid’s Prado Museum are several galleries of Velázquez paint-ings. A number of them, including the enthralling “Las Meninas” (detail, right), depict the royal infantas, or crown princesses, in their exquisite dresses with tight bodices of jewel-like embroi-dery and trimmings. Not only did Balenciaga fashion his own infanta dresses, but he also appro-priated the lacework from one Velázquez portrait for a 1938 day suit in this show.
“Goya, whether Balenciaga is aware of it or not, is always looking over his shoulder,” Vogue editor Bettina Ballard said. Black lace, mantil-las, silk tassels and other details evoke works such as “The Duchess of Alba” by that Spanish master. In the transfixing treatment of drapery by the 17th-century painter Zurbarán, Balenciaga found a touchstone for the luscious gathers, bunching and folds in some of his more opulent dresses.
By Steven Winn
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asianart.org/bali | 415-581-3500 | 200 Larkin Street | San Francisco
Art, Ritual,PerformanceFeb 25 – Sep 11 Asian Art Museum
In Bali, art lives in unexpected places and beauty dwells in the everyday. Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance is the fi rst major exhibition of the arts of Bali in the U.S. Visit and experience for yourself the vitality and magic of this unique Indonesian island.
In addition to the exhibition, the museum will present performances, artist demonstrations, and other programs that provide an experience as enchanting as Bali itself.
For details, visit asianart.org/bali.
This exhibition was organized by the Asian Art Museum. Presentation at the Asian Art Museum is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities; United Airlines; Margaret and Al Njoo; the Koret Foundation; the Henry Luce Foundation; the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation; the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund supported by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the James Irvine Foundation; the Walter and Elise Haas Fund; the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation; the Mary Van Voorhees Fund; and Pacifi c Gas & Electric; with additional support from the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund. Photo by Gustavo Thomas.
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