“What art does — maybe what it does most completely — is tell us, make us feel that what we think we know, we don’t. There are whole worlds around us that we’ve never glimpsed.” Greil Marcus — Thursday April 4th — —

The idea is to die young as late as possible. — Ashley Montagu — Thursday April 4th — —

I love listening. It is one of the only spaces where you can be still and moved at the same time. — Nayyirah Waheed — Thursday April 4th — —

n°5 Culture Chanel

Chanel n°5 first saw day in 1921 within a highly dynamic creative context. Since the Cubist revolution brought about by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’avignon, in 1907 and the advent of Futurism in italy in 1908, the avant-garde ceaselessly went about writing a particular modernity which would finally triumph at the dawn of the 1920s. From that moment abstraction spanned all forms of creativity, equally inspiring art, poetry, literature and music, and the fragrance of this new perfume which evoked a very mysterious flower, unless of course it didn’t firstly evoke a woman.

Coco Chanel hoped and prayed for this “perfume with the scent of woman” and she baptized it with the number 5, to avoid any attempts at defining it figuratively or descriptively. Close to some of the most innovative creators of the day, including Cocteau, Picasso, Apollinaire, Stravinsky, Dali and Diaghilev; Chanel maintained an amicable dialogue with each. The rich exchanges of ideas strengthened her as she rode the current of modernity she had taken as her own. The n°5 CULTURE CHANEL exhibition in the Palais de Tokyo in Paris is a voyage to the very heart of the Chanel universe. Between reality and fiction, the n°5 story provides keys to a creative world which never ceases to enrich itself through time. Born in the spirit of the moment, and of a woman’s aspirations and those of an epoch, the n°5 perfume bears and reveals a creative approach which is both visionary and unique to Chanel.

The exhibition has once again been entrusted to Jean-Louis Froment, the curator of  the previous editions of CULTURE CHANEL, held successively in Moscow’s Pushkin State Museum for Fine Arts, in Beijing at the National Art Museum of China and more recently in the Opera House in Canton. Others that participated in the creation of the exhibition are graphic designer Irma Boom, legendary garden designer Piet Oudolf, Laurent Burgisser and Jérôme Schlomoff.

The exhibition will run from May 5th until June 5th, 2013 at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.