>> I've just come out of a LOOOONG sleepy stupor since landing in Stockholm from New York (with a wee stopover in London) so much so that New York, where I was yesterday seems like a really long time ago. I almost forgot that I did in fact visit the Balenciaga exhibition at the Queen Sofia Spanish institute which has opened to much fanfare. I'm hoping to go to the De Young museum in San Francisco where the exhibition will end up next year, extended and in a much larger space but it's good to see the starting exhibition here where the emphasis is of course on Blaneciaga as a truly Spanish couturier, influenced by Spain in more ways than one thinks because his way with minimal/abstracted lines in the 60s probably became his best known work (well to my generation anyhow…) even though he had technically been working as a designer from the twenties in Spain and opened his couture house in Paris on Avenue George V in 1937.
The exhibition is extremely well curated by Hamish Bowles with an even better introduction written into the catalogue which accompanies the book, running through the history of a man who had a pious-like devotion to his craft. The influence of Spanish art, iconography and history from as far back as the 14th century was presented as a direct link-up with the 70+ dresses on exhibit. The positive thing to take away from my perspective was that in many instances, the original Spanish influence such as a painting by Goya or Valazquez never dominated the resulting dresses and that as much as Balenciaga was rooted in his homeland, innovation was always key to his work and that I was still mainly awed by form, cutting and colour judgement and in some cases embroidery and embellishment, despite the presented link-up between country and couturier. I loved Bowles' quote about the pieces that Balenciaga's forward-thinking can't be underestimated… "I think some of them are even too extreme for our contemporary life."
I can't review piece by piece as photographs weren't allowed but this is a mini-urger for New Yorkers and visitors to take a walk uptown for an experience that is rarified in a good way…
(The level of restraint blows my mind in these two 1939 Balenciaga adverts above)
