A guided tour of these two exhibitions was organized for the benefit of media representatives as part of a “press weekend” which also includes an exceptional private tour, on Saturday, of the Oasis villa and its garden.
“Majorelle Garden: Who are we?” (man nahnou? / Who Are We?”), which celebrates the centenary of this emblematic garden, created by the French orientalist painter Jacques Majorelle (Nancy, 1886, – Paris 1962), traces the history since its creation in the palm grove in 1924 and its opening to the public in 1947 until its acquisition in 1980 by Yves Saint Laurent (Oran, 1936 – Paris, 2008) and Pierre Bergé (Saint-Pierre-d’Oléron, 1930 – Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, 2017) in order to save this magnificent place from a real estate project.
The exhibition includes a model, created especially for the exhibition by Monim Sabyh, and which presents the places as a whole (the public garden and the garden of the Villa Oasis), as well as the Pierre Bergé museum of Berber arts and the museum YSL Marrakech.
Numerous historical documents such as unpublished drawings by Yves Saint Laurent, the architect Bill Willis and the landscaper Madison Cox, taken from the collections of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle, but also old photographs and printed works from the Archives and the Library of the Majorelle Garden Foundation, or even period films and others made especially for this exhibition with exceptional aerial views, also invite you to take a trip to the little-known reserves of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Marrakech.
Likewise, maps, plans and other documents relating to the city of Marrakech yesterday and today allow visitors to discover the history and rapid evolution of this unique garden.
As for the exhibition “Yves Saint Laurent and the comic strip: La Vilaine Lulu”, the result of a new collaboration between the mYSLm and the Yves Saint Laurent Museum Paris, it opened from July 11, 2024 in the mYSLm photography gallery.
In 1956, the young Yves Henri Donat Mathieu-Saint-Laurent, then aged twenty, worked alongside Christian Dior as an assistant and drew sketches for the collections. In the evening, one of the house’s employees, Jean-Pierre Frère, enjoys dressing up: “Often, after six o’clock, a Christian Dior employee would disguise himself. One evening he had pulled his pants up to his knees. I remember he wore long black socks. In the mannequin booth, he found a red tulle petticoat and a gondolier hat. Very small, almost worrying, with his stubborn and cunning appearance, he impressed me and I said to him: You are the naughty Lulu*”, we read in a presentation note for the exhibition.
It is from this “anecdote that the character of La Vilaine Lulu was born, which inspired Yves Saint Laurent to create a facetious comic strip”, we underline.
The reader therefore follows the adventures of a little girl, “La Vilaine Lulu”, over the course of twenty-four stories, such as “Lulu at school” or “Lulu year”. Always dressed in the same way, she is accompanied by her pet, a white rat. His own language punctuates the dialogues, with his favorite expressions, “Pluck” and “Schmuck”.
In a statement to MAP on this occasion, the president of the Jardin Majorelle Foundation, Madison Cox, explained that the comic strip exhibition is out of the ordinary and stands out from the usual themes of the exhibitions housed in this magnificent space. , thus reflecting the creative aspect and the slightly fun side of Yves Saint Laurent.
The celebration of the centenary of the Garden “offers us the opportunity to question where we came from?, what are we doing? and where are we going?”, hence the idea of organization of this exhibition “Jardin Majorelle: Who are we” in order to answer these questions and allow the general public to better discover this magical place, he noted.
A lot of research has been carried out to collect various documents which relate 100 years of history of this space, he underlined, noting that the exhibition also offers an overview of the main projects that the Foundation plans to launch, including an educational and artistic and cultural education program for the benefit of children and students in schools, a public library and a temporary pavilion dedicated to exhibitions around the theme of botany, given the increasingly growing importance the ecological aspect (nature and green spaces) and the question of water.
For his part, the director of the Yves Saint Laurent Museum in Marrakech, Alexis Sornin, indicated that the exhibition “Jardin Majorelle: Who are we?”, which will continue in the temporary room of the mYSLm until next February, tends to explain to visitors the long history of the Garden, but also to serve as a “mirror of a community of more than 200 people who work there every day with unique skills”.
As for the second exhibition, he continued, it evokes another less known creative aspect available to Yves Saint Laurent, namely his “good pencil stroke”.
Internationally recognized as one of the most beautiful gardens in the world, the Majorelle Garden in Marrakech, which is celebrating its centenary this year, ranks among the most visited sites in Morocco.
In 2023, more than 1.2 million visitors explored this magical and emblematic place in the Kingdom.
2024-10-09 01:23:28