Raoul Dufy in Madrid at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

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Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Raoul Dufy

MADRID – Between 17 February and 17 May 2015 the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be holding the first major retrospective on Raoul Dufy in Madrid since the one presented at the Casa de las Alhajas in 1989. The exhibition, which is benefiting from the collaboration of the Comunidad de Madrid, will offer a comprehensive survey of the entire career of this French artist through 93 works loaned from private collections and museums, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate, London, and an exceptional loan of 36 works from the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Although principally featuring oil paintings, the exhibition will also include drawings and watercolours in addition to textiles and ceramics designed by Dufy during the course of his long and prolific career of more than half a century.

Raoul Dufy’s work possesses a complexity that has frequently gone unnoticed. His popular scenes of regattas and horse races meant that by the late 1920s critics and art historians already referred to his work as essentially agreeable and light-hearted. Without ignoring the existence of an undeniably hedonistic facet in his work, the present exhibition moves away from this interpretation in order to reveal the slow evolution of the artist’s particular language, his ongoing quest for new visual solutions and above all, his more introspective side.

Juan Ángel López-Manzanares, the exhibition’s curator and a curator at the Museo Thyssen Bornemisza, has devised a chronologically ordered structure for the exhibition, which follows the development of Dufy’s painting through four sections: his early work (From Impressionism to Fauvism); the period when the influence of Cézanne led him towards Cubism (The Constructive Period); his output as a designer of textiles and ceramics (Decorative Designs); and finally, his mature phase (The Light of Colours).

The exhibition opens with the animated scenes of harbours and markets that Dufy painted in Normandy, as well as in Marseilles and Martigues when he visited the Midi in 1903. In 1905 he moved away from these subjects, gradually lightening his palette and loosening his brushstroke in order to depict scenes of leisure activities in bright sunlight.

While Dufy acknowledged his debt to Impressionism, he soon appreciated the need to go beyond it. He recounted how, when painting on the beach at Sainte-Adresse, he realised the impossibility of capturing the continuous changes of light: “This method of copying nature led me towards the infinite, towards meanders, towards the smallest and most fleeting details. And I was left out of the painting.” While Monet, Sisley and Pissarro had aimed to capture the impressions of the retina on their canvases, the new generation of artists aspired to something more than mere visual satisfaction.

Dufy was impressed by Matisse’s paintings at the 1905 Salon des Indépendants. This discovery led him to change direction in his work: “[…] for me Impressionist realism lost all its charms when I saw the miracle of imagination introduced into drawing and colour. I suddenly grasped the new mechanic of painting.” During the summer of 1906 Dufy fully assimilated the Fauve idiom. In his views of the beach at Sainte-Adresse and of the port and streets of Le Havre decorated with flags for the 14th of July, Dufy gradually abandoned a vibrating brushstroke in order to convey the light through broad zones of colour. His palette became more intense and he abandoned the use of black shadows, replacing them with blue and mauve tones. The aim was no longer to faithfully reproduce exterior reality but to offer a lyrical interpretation of nature in order to arouse emotions through colour.

The Constructive Period
Like many artists of his day, Dufy was profoundly moved by the paintings by Paul Cézanne that he saw in the Salon d’Automne and at the Bernheim Jeune gallery in Paris in 1907. Cézanne’s influence is evident in the orthogonal lines and simplified forms of Boats in Martigues (1907-1908) and in the canvases that Dufy painted in L’Estaque during the summer of 1908 in the company of Georges Braque. The latter reveal the use of much more geometrical forms, a limited colour range and the use of a Cézanne-like constructive brushstroke. In contrast to Braque, however, Dufy did not pursue the path of Cubism but rather experimented with his own language while reviving his earlier interest in colour, as evident in one of the most notable works of this period, The Large Bather (1914).

This section presents for the first time a selection of the drawings that Dufy produced for
Apollinaire’s Bestiary or the Parade of Orpheus, considered one of the first masterpieces of the livre d’artiste. Combining pagan and Christian motifs, the illustrations that Dufy produced for this text are inspired by Medieval and Renaissance works and assist the reader in understanding the essential meaning of Apollinaire’s poetic.

Dufy had already proved himself a skilled printmaker with his first woodcuts of 1907-1908, a technique that Apollinaire considered particularly appropriate for accompanying the quatrains and five- and six-line stanzas in which the Bestiary (his first book of verse) is written. This selection of drawings loaned by the Centre Pompidou allows visitors to appreciate the highly meditated process of the book’s creation while also offering a close-up insight into the working process of a great draughtsman possessed of an impressively secure line and decorative facility.

Decorative Designs
Dufy’s illustrations and prints were the forerunners of a new creative adventure on which he embarked in 1909 when he met the fashion designer Paul Poiret, then later signed a contract with the Bianchini-Férier textile company which lasted from 1912 to 1928. For Dufy, textile design was a continuation of his experiences with printmaking as well as a field for free experimentation with colour. His initial designs reminiscent of his prints gave way to floral and animal patterns in which he liberated himself from his constructivist aesthetic and rediscovered the decorative fantasy that was innate to his artistic personality.

From 1924 onwards, Dufy also focused on ceramics. Working with Llorens Artigas, he decorated jugs and tiles with sinuous designs of bathers, animals and shells. In the so-called Salon Gardens (co-designed with Artigas and the Catalan architect Nicolau María Rubió) reality and fiction combine in the form of original planters for bonsais that evoke different types of traditional western gardens.

The Light of Colours
Dufy regularly visited the south of France after the end of World War I. Inspired by the serene nature and landscape of Provence, he aimed to imbue his work with a new classical harmony. In addition to the sculptural forms of the landscape, the light of the Mediterranean was now a key element in his painting: “The unchanging light of the Mediterranean naturally produces that calm, that classical serenity which is so different to the fleeting effects which the Atlantic or the Channel give to landscapes.”

In his landscapes Dufy thus aimed to reach a synthesis between the splendour of nature and the pleasure of painting outdoors on the one hand, and on the other a desire to establish a strictly visual order associated with his subsequent reflections in the studio. In order to achieve this he structured his landscapes into chromatic strips, organising the highlights and shadows through the light emanating from the colours themselves: “To follow sunlight is to waste time. The light of painting is something else, it is a light of distribution, composition, a light-colour.” Furthermore, Dufy’s previous experience with printmaking and with gouache textile designs enabled him to separate the colour of the figures and objects from their outlines. A duality between exterior and interior is also evident in the artist’s numerous views of open windows and balconies, such as Open Window, Nice (1928), Window onto the Promenade des Anglais, Nice (1938), and The Studio at L’Impasse Guelma (1935-1952). In these works Dufy followed Matisse when establishing a complex equilibrium between the illusionistic transparency of the glass and the opaque surface of the painting.

Time and its representation are also present in Dufy’s mature work. For the artist, painting should represent not just the visible but also an accumulation of recollections, traditions and experiences associated with a specific place. His depictions of the modern world thus often include allegorical or mythological elements and classical buildings. This is the case with Port with a Sailboat. Homage to Claude Lorrain (1935) in which Dufy depicts the Colosseum next to an idealised port that recalls both Marseilles and the landscapes by the 17th-century French painter.

In the last years of his life most of Dufy’s work, by this date of a more intimate character, focused on music. The musical environment in which he grew up in Le Havre explains his profound love for this discipline, leading him to seek out visual equivalents to musical sounds throughout his career. One example is Still Life with Violin. Homage to Bach (1952), in which the artist makes use of both a sinuous stroke that strongly suggests musical notation and the power of the colour red to evoke the sound of that instrument.

Black becomes more important in his late depictions of bullfights and in particular in his series The Black Cargo Boat. This subject, which he had first depicted in 1925, returns in a series executed between 1946 and 1953 in which Dufy once again made use of black to covey the maximum degree of luminosity. While Dufy did not aim to make his painting the expression of his emotions, this series can be interpreted as the presentiment of his imminent death.

‘Paul Delvaux, A Walk with Love and Death’ at Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 24 February to 7 June 2015

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Crucifixion, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Palace in Ruins, Paul Delvaux, Pygmalion, The Dream, The Sleeping Venus, The Viaduct, Woman at the Mirror

MADRID – This February, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza is presenting an exhibition on the Belgian painter Paul Delvaux (1897-1994), an artist represented in both the Museum’s Permanent Collection and the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. Organised in collaboration with the Musée d’Ixelles and curated by Laura Neve, that institution’s academic advisor, Paul Delvaux: A Walk with Love and Death will present a thematic survey featuring more than 50 works loaned from public and private collections in Belgium, in particular that of Nicole and Pierre Ghêne, which constitutes the nucleus of this project and is represented by a loan of forty-two works. Fascinated since 1962 by the work of Delvaux, Pierre Ghêne began his collection in the early 1970s. Since that time it has continued to grow and now numbers hundreds of them, most of which are in the Musée d’Ixelles.

Following his experiments with realism, Fauvism and Expressionism, Delvaux discovered the work of Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico. Surrealism was a crucial revelation for the artist, although he never considered himself a Surrealist painter in a strict sense. Delvaux was more interested in Surrealism’s poetic, mysterious facet than its iconoclastic battles, leading him from the 1930s to create his own, unique universe, free of the rules of universal logic and located between classicism and the modern world and between dream and reality. Notable for its stylistic unity, Delvaux’s output is characterised by a strange, enigmatic atmosphere. The principal motifs, ranging from women to trains and including skeletons and buildings, are part of that universe: isolated, self-absorbed, almost somnambulist beings, often located in nocturnal settings and apparently unrelated to each other, the only link between them being the artist’s own experiences.

The exhibition focuses on the five principal themes in Delvaux’s iconography, all revolving around love and death: Reclining Venus, a recurrent motif in his work which refers to his unconditional love for women; The Double (Couples and Mirrors), which focuses on seduction and the relationship with the alter ego; Architectures, which focuses on the omnipresent buildings in his oeuvre, particularly classical ones but also examples from WatermaelBoitsfort (Brussels, Belgium) where he lived; Train Stations; which are essential to the construction of his pictorial personality; and finally, The Skeleton of Life, which analyses Delvaux’s fascination with that motif, which he used as substitutes for live figures engaged in everyday activities.

Born into a family of lawyers, Delvaux received his father’s permission to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels where, after briefly studying architecture, he opted for decorative painting and graduated in 1924. His early works reveal the influence of the Flemish Expressionists such as Constant Permeke and Gustave de Smet, who represented the Belgian avant-garde of the time. At this early date Delvaux began to reveal an interest in depicting the human form, particularly women, which would remain a constant artistic concern throughout his career.

Born into a family of lawyers, Delvaux received his father’s permission to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels where, after briefly studying architecture, he opted for decorative painting and graduated in 1924. His early works reveal the influence of the Flemish Expressionists such as Constant Permeke and Gustave de Smet, who represented the Belgian avant-garde of the time. At this early date Delvaux began to reveal an interest in depicting the human form, particularly women, which would remain a constant artistic concern throughout his career.

Reclining Venus

Delvaux’s interest in the motif of the sleeping Venus began in 1932 when he visited the Spitzner Museum, one of the principal attractions at the Foire du Midi in Brussels, which displayed wax figures showing surgical innovations, illnesses and physical deformations, together with specimens preserved in formaldehyde. Delvaux was above all struck by an exhibit entitled The Sleeping Venus and that same year painted his first canvas on this subject, subsequently reinterpreting it on numerous occasions and with striking variations.

The version of 1932 included in the present exhibition is particularly original in its execution. At this period Delvaux was close to Expressionism and his work reveals the influence of James Ensor, particularly in the use of the grotesque and in the strange atmosphere that pervades the work. The artist had not yet created his Surrealist universe but already made use of some of its key elements such as the woman, the skeleton, the unexpected, angst, etc.

Two years later Delvaux admired De Chirico’s work in the exhibition Minotaure held in Brussels in 1934, and his painting The Dream (1935) already reveals new aesthetic ideas in which a dreamlike reality prevails over an objective one. The principal figure in this canvas does not directly refer to Venus but rather to the woman in general, as representative of the female sex. Probably due to the fact that Delvaux’s relations with the opposite sex were never easy (he had a domineering mother, a platonic affair and an unsuccessful marriage), the theme of the woman was one of his obsessions and is expressed in his oeuvre in the form of mysterious and beautiful but, to the artist, unobtainable young women.

The Double (Couples and Mirrors)

Another recurring concept in Delvaux’s oeuvre is that of seduction. From the early 1930s onwards he painted both heterosexual and lesbian couples, fascinated by the latter relationship given that it pertained to the realm of female intimacy and representing it in a much simpler and more intimate and spontaneous way. His visit to a brothel around 1930 may lie at the origins of this theme of “female friends”, which began to reappear in his work. Over the following months Delvaux depicted numerous embracing women in sketches and studies characterised by an enormous freedom of expression. Livelier and more expressive than his canvases, these drawings allowed him to give free range to his imagination and to explore various taboos.

Some experts consider that Delvaux made use of lesbianism to convey his disappointment with heterosexual relations, which he tended to stigmatise in his works, condemning his figures of opposite sexes to a lack of contact and dialogue. In Pygmalion (1939), represented in the exhibition by a preliminary study, the female character prefers a stone sculpture to a man, inverting the original myth in which the sculptor fell in love with the statue he had carved. In the painting the two members of the couple have their alter egos in the background. This represents the theme of the double, which is notably present in Delvaux’s work and is associated with his use of mirrors as another important element in his paintings. All entitled “Woman at the Mirror”, examples of this theme such as the one of 1936 in the Museum’s Permanent Collection, endow the mirror with an active role and favour the specular image rather than the tangible one.

A separate area within this section is devoted to The Conflagration (1935). It has recently been discovered that this is only the right-hand half of a larger canvas that was cut in two by Delvaux before he exhibited it at the annual Salon in Antwerp that same year. At a later date the collector Pierre Ghêne acquired the rediscovered lost half, which he subsequently donated to the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. The two parts could be seen together for the first time last year at the Musée d’Ixelles and will also be present in this exhibition.

Architectures (Acropolis)

Architecture occupied a prominent position in Delvaux’s work from the mid-1930s onwards. Fascinated by classical mythology as a child, he drew battles inspired by the ones he had read about in the Iliad and the Odyssey. Delvaux’s first mythological canvas, The Return of Ulysses, dates from 1924 to 1925 and heralds the importance that the classical world would have in his work, even though the subject is treated in a relatively literal manner. The artist was not convinced by the results and abandoned classical subjects in favour of Expressionism, returning to them, however, in 1934.

De Chirico’s influence is evident in this return to classical culture, which was fundamental to Delvaux’s iconography and is expressed not just through architecture but also through mythology and the clothing of his female figures. For the artist, antiquity represented a means of escape from everyday reality and a comforting way of liberating his imagination.

Delvaux’s works acquired a theatrical, even cinematic character due to the importance of the settings, the structuring of the compositions into successive planes and the hieratic poses of the figures. In some cases classical antiquity is suggested by architectural details that become part of the setting. In other works Delvaux painted entire classical panoramas; whole cities in which he nonetheless included anachronistic elements and combined different styles, giving the scenes an absurdist character. Palace in Ruins (1935) was his first authentically Surrealist work and paved the way for the development of his subsequent style, characterised by a mood of poetic mystery in which silence prevails.

The buildings that appear in Delvaux’s canvases are precisely painted. The artist researched and documented each element through models and photographs with the aim of faithfully reproducing reality. His depictions of classical architecture became increasingly accurate, particularly after his visits to Italy in 1937 and 1939 and Greece in 1956. The motif of the ancient city increasingly replaces the depiction of ruins, with references to real buildings and partly surviving monuments. During this period Delvaux’s chromatic range became lighter and he placed new emphasis on colour.

Train Stations

From a very early age Delvaux was interested in the world of railways, which for him represented a fascinating symbol of incipient modernity. By the 1920s the Luxembourg Station in Brussels was already one of his favourite sources of inspiration and he would paint there outdoors. Delvaux produced a dozen large-format canvases in which he depicted the station’s bustling life, its wintry atmosphere and the conditions of the railway workers, in a continuation of the social realism initiated in Belgium by Constantin Meunier.

Delvaux subsequently abandoned the world of trains but returned to it, better prepared academically, in the 1940s and from then on it would be indissolubly linked to his pictorial identity, to the point where he was known as the “painter of stations”. Without referring to their actual destinations, Delvaux located trains and trams in contemporary settings or in classical cities in scenes peopled by women on the platforms or in the waiting rooms prior to a rendez-vous or to the start of their journeys.

With regard to the artist’s childhood memories, in 1950 he embarked on a series of nocturnal scenes in which young girls wait in empty stations, reflecting his fears provoked by the adult world. The erotic tension of the 1940s now gives way to tranquillity and calm, as in The Viaduct (1963), in which everything is frozen, seemingly for an event that never actually happens.

The Skeleton of Life

Delvaux’s fascination with skeletons dates back to his years at school when he paid close attention to the skeleton in the biology classroom, which both frightened and fascinated him. From 1932 onwards the skeleton became an element in his visual vocabulary and one of particular expressivity. On occasions, skeletons substitute the principal figure and thus reinterpret the narrative in the manner of an alter ego. When not the principal figure they appear in the background, blending in with the setting and playing a secondary but no less important role in which they behave in the manner of humans.

In the 1950s Delvaux executed a series on “The Passion of Christ” (the Crucifixion, Descent from the Cross and Burial), also featuring skeletons, which he exhibited in 1954 at the Venice Biennial, the theme of which that year was The Fantastical in Art. They provoked a scandal (unintentional on the artist’s part) and were condemned as heretical by Cardinal Roncalli, the future Pope John Paul XXIII.

First major retrospective of Hubert de Givenchy at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza

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Audrey Hepburn, Bettina blouse, Duchess of Windsor, Hubert de Givenchy‏, Jacqueline Kennedy, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Princess Grace of Monaco

MADRID – Between 22 October 2014 and 18 January 2015 the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will be presenting the first major retrospective on the work of the French fashion designer Hubert de Givenchy, a key creative figure of the 20th century and a living legend in the history of haute couture. The exhibition, which marks the Museum’s first incursion into the world of fashion, is curated by M. de Givenchy himself and will thus offer an exceptional focus on his creations over the course of half a century, from the opening of Maison Givenchy in 1952 to his retirement in 1996. The designer has selected around one hundred of his finest creations, loaned from museums and private collections worldwide, many of them never previously displayed in public. They will now establish a dialogue in the Museum’s galleries with works from its collections.

Since he founded his own fashion house in Paris in 1952, Hubert de Givenchy’s collections have enjoyed continuous success. He is a declared admirer of the work of Cristóbal de Balenciaga, from whom he inherited his way of understanding fashion design, characterised by the purity of lines and volumes. Hubert de Givenchy was the first designer to present a luxury prêt-à-porter line in 1954 and his clothes have dressed some of the most iconic personalities of the 20th century, including Jacqueline Kennedy, the Duchess of Windsor, Caroline of Monaco and his muse Audrey Hepburn.

The exhibition will devote a special section to their creative friendship and professional relationship, which began in 1953 and continued throughout Hepburn’s life. The actress wore Givenchy’s designs in some of her best known films, such as Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, stating that “Givenchy’s clothes are the only ones I feel myself in. He is more than a designer, he is a creator of personality.” Hepburn also lent her image for Maison Givenchy’s first perfume, L’interdit, which was launched in 1957. Hepburn’s image in the campaign was immortalised by Richard Avedon’s photographs.

As a collector of 17th- and 18th-century paintings and works by early 20th-century artists, M. de Givenchy has frequently acknowledged the influence of painting on his work. This is evident, for example, in the fact that his creations combine the classic elegance of haute couture with the innovative spirit of avant-garde art. This aspect, which has not always been easy to convey, will become evident through the dialogues established between his designs and the selection of works in the exhibition from the collections of the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, including examples by Zurbarán, Rothko, Sargent, Miró, Robert and Sonia Delaunay and Georgia O’Keeffe.

Innovative creations and early successes

The exhibition opens with a section devoted to the start of Maison Givenchy in 1952, with outstanding examples from Givenchy’s first collection for his own couture house. Notable among them is the famous Bettina blouse, named after one of the most beautiful models of the day who was also a close friend of the designer’s. Made from men’s white shirting material, an inexpensive fabric, and with an open neck and sleeves embellished with broderie anglais, these blouses marked the designer’s first major success in his career and his first step towards international fame. The Bettina blouse was followed by other creations arising from Givenchy’s exceptionally innovative imagination, including loose evening dresses that could also be worn with a skirt or trousers; interchangeable elements that allowed the clients to apply their own style and preferences when mixing and matching them, hence the term “separates”.

An outstanding selection of short dresses, leather garments and delicate dresses in silk and lamé is displayed in the following rooms, revealing one of the principal lessons that Givenchy absorbed from his master Balenciaga, namely the importance of the fabrics. His work with different materials, combined with the chromatic approach that he applied, for example, to leather made Givenchy an innovative, ground-breaking designer but one who never lost sight of the elegance and simplicity that defined his particular talent. This section of the exhibition culminates in a display of dresses that combine black and white, introducing what would become one of the designer’s best known characteristics: his masterful use of black.

Major clients

The core of the exhibition focuses on creations made for some of Givenchy’s principal clients, key figures for establishing and maintaining a career marked by ongoing success over the course of a fashion designer’s lifetime. Notable among them are four iconic women in the history of fashion, who were also great friends of Hubert de Givenchy: the Duchess of Windsor, Princess Grace of Monaco, Jacqueline Kennedy, and above all, the actress Audrey Hepburn, the designer’s muse and the ambassador for his maison since they first met in 1954. Many of the creations on display are part of the history of cinema and of the visual memory of the 20th century, such as the dress worn by Jackie Kennedy at the official reception given by General de Gaulle during President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s official visit to France in 1961; or Audrey Hepburn’s black dress worn in the film Breakfast at Tiffany’s from the same year. Together with other creations that Givenchy designed for numerous actresses and films, these dresses emphasise the importance for his career of the cinema, which offered him an outstanding platform for promoting his work internationally.

The exhibition then moves on through a series of dresses that make use of exquisite craft skills in their embroidery and gauzes and muslins, to be seen in garments such as the déshabillés, before focusing on another of Givenchy’s identifying traits, his elegant use of colour. In particular, this section reveals the influence on his work of the great painters of the past and the way he has been able to translate or transform what they expressed in specific works, such as the two by Sonia and Robert Delaunay on display here, making them his own and giving rise to some of his most exceptional creations. These connections are also to be seen in the following room, where a direct dialogue is established between paintings by Miró, Rothko, Ernst, Fontana and Van Doesburg and some of the designer’s most spectacular dresses.

Bridal and evening gowns

Two of the most important areas in which M. de Givenchy achieved the greatest international fame – bridal and evening gowns – are the stars of the next room. The former have always been a speciality of Maison Givenchy, defining the style of gowns of this type for decades. A selection of these remarkable bridal gowns from different periods, presented here in a particularly attractive display, once again allows visitors to appreciate the designer’s innovative and ground-breaking nature, always perfectly harmonised with the timeless beauty of classical elegance.

In contrast to the spotless white of the bridal gowns is another high point of Hubert de Givenchy’s achievements: his evening gowns, in which black, his key colour, stands out from among the other hues. It was Givenchy who first achieved a peerless mastery in the impeccable use of black with the creation of the famous “little black dress”, a garment that became essential in any wardrobe from that date onwards. It is these apparently simple dresses that offer the best examples of the purity of lines and volumes with which Hubert de Givenchy imbued his creations, constantly indebted to the influence of Balenciaga.

Under the attentive gaze of top models of the 1980s, photographed by Joe Gaffney, the exhibition ends with some particularly glamorous pieces from that era, one of the last great moments in the recent history of fashion.

Hubert de Givenchy

Count Hubert James Marcel Taffin de Givenchy was born in 1927 into an aristocratic Protestant familyin Beauvais, France. Brought up and educated by his mother and maternal grandmother following the death of his father, it was from them that he inherited his passion for cloth. He confirmed his vocation during the haute couture fashion presentations at the World Fair in 1937 and embarked on his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Paris in 1944. He subsequently went on to broaden and further his studies with designers such as Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet, Lucien Lelong and the avantgarde Elsa Schiaparelli. In 1952 he founded his own fashion house in Paris, Maison Givenchy, presenting a surprising and revolutionary collection that achieved immediate success due to its innovative nature in comparison to other more conservative designs of the period.

Soon after that date, M. de Givenchy met Cristóbal Balenciaga, his great friend and master, of whom he has always declared himself a profound admirer, acknowledging him as a source of inspiration. This special affection for Balenciaga represents one of the designer’s connections with Spain, a connection he has revealed on numerous occasions including his firm support for the creation of the Museo Cristóbal Balenciaga, for which he is also the president of its Foundation. In recognition of this commendable endeavour and other comparable ones, such as his donations to the Museo del Traje in Madrid, the Spanish government awarded Hubert de Givenchy the Order of Arts and Letters in 2011. Following decades of success and recognition, in 1988 the designer sold his firm to the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessey group (LVMH), taking full retirement
seven years later.