LONDON.- Hermès handbags are renowned as the world’s most sought after and exclusive luxury bags, capable of fetching hundreds of thousands of pounds at auction. Created in specialist ateliers by highly skilled craftsmen, no two bags are the same. Each has been fashioned from leathers — such as calf, crocodile, alligator and lizard skins, precision dyed and textured then painstakingly hand-stitched, to create unique items characterised by their iconic forms and rich materiality. In juxtaposing a selection of these handbags with paintings by the world’s most influential artists — Christo, Pierre Soulages, Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Andy Warhol and more, The Art of Hermès celebrates their potential to be appreciated alike as exquisite, sculptural objects.
Pairing seminal paintings from the late 1950s through to the late ’80s with Hermès bags, the exhibition proceeds as a dialogue between individual pieces in matching palettes and textures, highlighting the importance of colour, materiality and process across the worlds of art and fashion. One such coupling is that of the ‘So Black Kelly’ handbag and Lucio Fontana’s Concetto Spaziale (1962); just as the bag has black hardware on matt black alligator skin, Fontana’s punctured hole into the ebonised black painting is evocative of the absolute.
In Manzoni’s white-washed Achome, the artist used cotton squares coated in kaolin to create a grid-like pattern that covers the entire canvas surface. The materiality of the kaolin plays elegantly against the dappled white togo leather of Hermès ‘Kelly Blanc’. Similarly Chung Sang-Hwa’s multi-layered, meditative monochromatic canvas has a formal affinity with the tactile surfaces and labour-intensity of Hermès’ alligator skins.
Materiality and colour are central too to the works of Christo, who insisted that the meaning of the monumental urban and environmental projects (created with his wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude) lay entirely in their immediate aesthetic impact. He is represented in the exhibition with The Umbrellas (1989), a collaged drawing in wax crayon, charcoal, strings map and photograph — the startling aquamarine geometries of its sunshades visually rhyming with the intensity of hue and graphic grooves of an alligator skin ‘Kelly Cut’ bag in electric blue.
Celebrity too is revealed as an interchangeable characteristic between the history of Hermès’ bags and that of post-war artworks. Andy Warhol’s photo silkscreen Jackie (1964) is shown alongside a ‘Kelly Touch’ bag — so called after Princess of Monaco and former film star Grace Kelly, who had been given one on the set of ‘To Catch a Thief’, was photographed holding it over her stomach to conceal the early signs of her pregnancy. While Warhol’s iconic work and the blue bag exhibit a formal sympathy, they also both harness fame — and amplify it in the process.
By exhibiting these objects side-by-side, The Art of Hermès emphasises parallel attributes between a unique work of art and the exclusivity of a hand-crafted Hermès bag, confirming their status as art objects as well as collectors’ items.
