nº21 / FESTIVAL D'HYÈRES 33RD / VILLA NOAILLES / HYÈRES
- Zoltan Alexander
- May 17, 2018
- 9 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
The Festival International de Mode, de Photographie et d’Accessoires, in Hyères, each year revolves around an international competition open to young fashion and accessory designers and photographers, including their shows and exhibitions, the much-anticipated prizes, panel discussions in the garden, and the permanent exhibition of the Villa Noailles.
Review by Zoltan Alexander
FESTIVAL
D'HYÈRES 33 Under the spell of the Villa Noailles, Fashion, Photography, Man Ray, Cocteau, Buñuel, Dali, Giacometti, and Marie-Laure de Noailles celebrated with Tilda Swinton and Haider Ackermann
“The last touch of elegance is elimination” J-M Frank
In the South of France, thousands celebrated the 33rd International Festival of Fashion, Photography and Accessory Design at the Villa Noailles. Hidden in the hills above Hyères, guests and celebrities were pouring in, and the media was overwhelmed with images.
Each year, the international competition revolves around the much-anticipated fashion show with prize-winners, and thousands of spectators in the Hangar de la Mouture, in the middle of the countryside, just off the road to Salin des Pesquiers. The Villa gives a perfect frame to the participants, up-and-coming fashion designers, emerging artists and photographers, the panel discussions in the garden, and satellite exhibitions in town.
THE FESTIVAL
During five executive days, the Villa Noailles is packed with editors, designers, agents, international models, students and members of the industry, perfectly orchestrated by Sylvie Grumbach and her 2e Bureau team from Paris. This year, the Festival was presided by Haider Ackermann (Fashion), Bettina Rheims (Photography) and Christelle Kocher (Accessories) with the participation of further members of the jury including Tilda Swinton, Lou Doillon, Eli Top, Michele Lamy, Ben Gorham and Jefferson Hack of Dazed Media, London.
The Festival partners, the House of Chanel, LVMH, Swarovski, Chloé, Première Vision, the Galleries Lafayette Group and the jury of professionals carefully selected the winners in each category, offering them a unique opportunity in their career.
VIDEO / Villa Noailles - Festival dHyèrs / Video © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander
On the top floor, on the glass-covered indoor swimming pool, Haider Ackermann curated a design exhibition with garments by Nicolas Ghesquière, Jun Takahashi and Azzedine Alaïa. For the inner squash court, the walls were papered in large-scale portraits taken by Bettina Rheims for Details magazine in the 90s. The other part of the Villa was occupied by an installation created by Arthur Hoffner and Gregoire Schaller.
With a special regard to the photographic competition, Bettina Rheims, the president of the jury, lined up an army of professionals with Bill Mullen, Jed Root, Ezra Petronio, Charlotte Collet, Jean Colonna, Serge Bramly, India Mahdavi, Saskia de Brauw, Alessia Glaviano and last year’s winner Daragh Soden to select the most innovative photographic works of the ten finalists.
THE WINNERS
The winner of the prestigious Photography Grand Prix of 2018 went to the New York-based Eva O’Leary for her series Spitting Image. She placed a mirror in front of American teenage girls aged 11 to 14 and recorded the reaction to their reflected images. She presented her photographic work with a video installation showing the girls’ discomfort and anxiety, posing in front of a mirror knowing that they were being photographed. A typical teenage vulnerability that emerges out of these photographs, overlapping with self-representation of the selfie-culture, staging a performance and stereotyping of female imagery.
Sarah Mei Herman from the Netherlands won the American Vintage Photography Prize, presenting her work Xiamen, a long-term project shot in China. It was the first time that she had travelled to Asia and was intrigued by how intimacy and affection are expressed in Chinese culture. She photographed young couples she met on the street and at other public places, portraying the nuances of their friendships, relationships, love, solitude and our desperate need to bond.
The Hungarian photographer Csilla Klenyánszki won the Still Life Prize. She put an imaginative installation together, projecting the images in wall-mounted light-boxes. The Pillars of Homes is a series of photographic images created in her Budapest apartment whilst her baby was napping. The project was a challenge between playing, balancing and meditating. She set 30 minutes, at most one hour, to come up with different ideas and installations with all kinds of domestic objects, anything she had available from floor to ceiling, while her son was asleep.
“I often treat myself as a subject, and most of the time I am not even recognisable in the pictures. This process allowed me to find concentration in a very limited amount of time." Csilla Klenyánszki
The other winners were Sanna Lehto of the Public and City of Hyères Award and the Paris-based Allyssa Heuze of the Wallpaper Magazine Award. Additionally, in the centre of Hyères, Luis Alberto Rodriguez, who was last year’s winner of the Prix du Public and Prix American Vintage with his strikingly beautiful photographs in a timeless dimension, presented his work with Daragh Sodenin as two solo exhibitions.
Festival d’Hyères is always a magical experience with beautiful meetings, professional exchange, long walks, beaches, parties, morning coffees at the pool, lunches at Chez Lulu, dinners at the Marais Plage. The history of the Villa is beautifully preserved by Jean-Pierre Blanc, the director of the Festival and the Villa Noailles.
THE SUMMER OF 1923
It’s a peaceful evening, sitting on the terrace of the Castel Pierre Lisse with a glass of wine, writing. Being a journalist, more like an investigative one, I am always intrigued by the roots and the background story of a place. Just below the Villa Noailles and the Jardin Remarquable, one cannot escape history.
Earlier today, someone brought me an envelope. I opened it, and time has stopped. The photographs were faded yet mesmerising. I heard music. In the obscurity, Cocteau sat next to me and started telling me a story, pointing at a person in one of the photographs.
We are now back in 1923.
The Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, the direct descendant of a wealthy German banking family and a French aristocratic clan, the pioneer of modernist sensibility, had long been at the centre of the Parisian avant-garde style for many years. She has been considered one of the most daring and influential 20th-century art patrons, with her handsome, courteous husband, Charles, who preferred men and flowers more than anything else.
According to Laurence Benaïm, in her book Marie-Laure de Noailles: The Vicomtesse of the Bizarre, the intellectually precocious Marie-Laure was apparently reading Mallarmé and Poe before the age of ten and reciting Baudelaire for family guests. At age twenty, in 1923, she married the Vicomte de Noailles.
Ned Rorem once wrote of her: “Marie-Laure is, first of all, a child, second, an artist, third, a Vicomtesse, fourth, she’s a saint, fifth, a masochist and sixth, a malicious bitch. Above all, she is generous, not to mention crazy.”
In another photo, it is the home of the Noailles, the hôtel particulier at 11 place des États-Unis in Paris, after a private screening. Champagne is pouring, and friends are amusing themselves scrupulously as ever.
The following day starts with a lazy morning. The cars are waiting for us. While smoking a cigarette, the Vicomtesse is deeply involved in a conversation with her rebelliously young decorator, Jean-Michel Frank. We are almost ready to leave and drive down to the South of France to a small town called Hyères, yet Gertrude Stein can be nowhere found.
After many hours of driving in the heat with a slight headache, we arrive at the top of a hill. The scenery is breathtaking. Orange and jasmine flowers are inescapably everywhere. Standing on the rocks with a book of Hölderlin, someone brings another bottle of champagne. The view is spectacular. The Vicomtesse walks around with Robert and laughs. The moment is perfect, and the plan is right in front of us: we all want a villa for the summer on this very spot!
PHOTOS / (upper photo) Performance at the Villa Noailles / Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander
PHOTOS / (middle left) Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian / (right) Jean Cocteau and friends / Photo © Courtesy of Villa Noailles
PHOTOS / (lower left) First floor reflection of the Villa Noailles / (right) performance / Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander
After Mies van der Rohe was too busy and Le Corbusier with his off-putting didactic personality, the summer residence of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the Villa Noailles, was constructed by the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens on the land offered by Charles's mother for his wedding. It was a ground-breaking, early modernist concrete building looking like a Cubist cruise ship, a strangely obscure labyrinth in which guests constantly lost their way.
Spanning over 1800sqm, the house consists of something like 50 monastic guestrooms, a large salon with no windows, just with a bizarre geometric skylight, a top-floor covered swimming pool, a squash court, an athletic centre for the pursuit of physical fitness, precious artworks and furniture by Marcel Breuer and a triangular Cubist garden designed by Gabriel Guevrekian.
The art collection of the de Noailles was vast and exquisite, with works by Max Ernst, Man Ray, Francis Picabia, Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Goya, and Mondrian. With far-ranging vision, the Vicomtesse kept the engine of innovation running among the Surrealists.
The Villa is an avant-garde masterpiece of the 20th Century and was an artistic hub for the rich and famous, a perfect meeting place for contemporary art and flamboyant artists. The interior was created by Jean-Michel Frank, who once said: “The last touch of elegance is elimination”.
We are back in Paris.
The Vicomte and Vicomtesse de Noailles often had film screenings at home. Guests often left shocked; often the police had to intervene and confiscate their films, like Buñuel’s “L’Age d’Or”. Buñuel once said: “Sucking on the big toe of a statue of the Pope and mocking all that is sacred “. At one point, even the bishop of Paris was alerted, and Charles’s mother had to go to Rome for a chat with the Pope to save Charles from being excommunicated.
Scandal was the best friend of de Noailles. Yet, they financed their friends, supported film projects, commissioned paintings, photographs, and sculptures by Man Ray, Jean Cocteau, Luis Buñuel, Constantin Brâncuși, Salvador Dali, Joan Miro, Balthus, Alberto Giacometti, and Francis Poulenc.
The Villa was a constant party with eccentric personalities and bohemians. The de Noailles took exceptional pleasure in shocking people and a good hysterical scene with a choice of audience or lovers, giving them great pleasure.
After a brief affair with Edward James, the twenty-one-year-old composer Igor Markevich, who was also the ex-lover of Serge Diaghilev, became the new lover of the Vicomtesse. Her aristocratic arrogance was immune to most ethical and moral prerogatives.
“Until the age of thirty I was timid and soft-spoken, then one day I began to talk, and I’ve never stopped since.” Marie-Laure de Noailles
Pierre Bergé, the business partner of Yves Saint Laurent, said in an interview that Charles and Marie-Laure “found their own equilibrium by exerting a destabilising influence on other people.”
During the war, the Villa Noailles was abandoned, occupied by the Italian army and used as a hospital. From 1947 until 1970, it was again the summer residence of de Noailles, but subsequently, in 1973, the Villa was purchased by the city of Hyères.
In 1986, Jean-Pierre Blanc dreamt big and invented the International Festival of Fashion and Photography with a flair of style and aspiration, following the creativity and artistic tradition of de Noailles. In 2006, he broadened the spectrum and added Design Parade to the programme, putting architecture and interior design into focus and building a strong link with the nearby city, Toulon.
The house of Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles in Paris is now owned by the crystal firm Baccarat, which commissioned Philippe Starck to redesign the Jean-Michel Frank interior. The Bischoffsheim vault at the cemetery of Montparnasse is now silent.
In Hyères, the sun sets slowly, and it is always a good time for a walk. Just under the Villa, the Parc Saint-Bernard, the Jardin Remarquable offers a perfect view of the town and the distant bay. The garden is designed with narrow paths and terraces filled with exotic plants and rare Mediterranean species, well-capturing the Vicomte's passion for gardening.
Cocteau has now left the garden, passing his seat to Tilda Swinton. The Festival d’Hyères is ready to take its next turn.
Now, you cannot say you didn't know.
INDEX
COVER
Villa Noailles, Hyères
Photo © Courtesy of Zoltan Alexander
Cover design © ZOLTAN+MEDIA Paris
FESTIVAL D’HYÈRES
33rd Festival d’Hyères
Hyères (France)
26 - 30 April 2018 / invitation only
and open to the general public during all summer
FIRST PUBLISHED
Published by © Zoltan Alexander
ARTLYST © 2018
London (UK)
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