Robert Murphy

Private World of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé

Emmett

'This is not a book on decoration. It is a window on two shared lives.' - Pierre Bergé, foreword.

What these immensely beautiful interiors and their constitutive works really meant to their owners, we know only partially through the text through recounted rituals of selection and purchase. For this reader it has been a lesson in the intricate art of arrangement. To slowly realise the order and balance in the idiosyncratic maximalism of the furnishings, and learn how harmony of line, colour and form emerges from the anachronistic inventory of each space. You only need to look long enough.

And perhaps one can begin to understand the anecdote of Saint Laurent bringing to the Galerie Kugel a photograph by Milly Wayward, showing Marie-Laure de Noilles in her drawing room, and asking them to reconstitute all the objects on a table. (He bought all of them except one.)

Private World of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé

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