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'I received an email telling me it was over. I didn't know how to respond. It was as if it wasn't meant for me. It ended with the words: Take Care of Yourself. I took this recommendation literally. I asked a hundred and two women, chosen for their profession, to interpret the letter in their professional capacity. To analyse it, provide a commentary on it, act it, dance it, sing it. Dissect it. Squeeze it dry. Understand for me. Answer for me. It was a way to take the time to break up. At my own pace. A way to take care of myself.'

Saint Laurent was a key artist of the 20th century. Today to many his name evokes the reefer jacket, the trench-coat, the Mondrian dress, the smoking jacket and feminine trouser suits. He is remembered as the man who gave the safari jacket a new lease of life and as the man who stood out from the rest with his famous transparent dresses. The first fashion designer to parade Asian and African models on the catwalk, he also worked in tandem with the theatre and cinema. Furthermore, he was the first leading couturier to lend his name to a pret-à-porter range, Rive Gauche, while maintaining his haute couture activities. But what do we really know about the man beyond his renown? Here, the author opens up the door to Yves Saint Laurent¿s studio and invites us into the great creator¿s nerve centre, where everything took place, where the work and artist became one. Here we see how Saint Laurent set about his creations, the secrets behind his approach, providing a voyage of initiation through his hideaway where the master alchemist shares his secret formulae.

Art faber is an umbrella term for works of art ¿ whether pictorial, literary, photographic, musical or cinematographic ¿ whose main or secondary themes are work, business and the world of economics. The word faber is rooted in the foundations of the economy. It is the Latin word for ¿smith¿ and the etymological root of Romance language of ¿making¿ and ¿manufacturing¿, as well as the essence of Homo faber. Homo faber or ¿man the maker¿ is the toolmaker, the manufacturer of machines and consumer products, the main protagonist of secondary industries, but also of the tertiary, service sector. Homo faber is also a producer of life, especially in terms of cultivation and animal husbandry ¿ the farmer, the breeder, the tamer, the transformer, adapting the natural world to our needs: harnessing animals¿ strength for work, creating consumer products, such as milk and meat; and processing wool and hide for artisanal ends. For several decades now, however, this manufacture of life forms has raised several ethical and moral questions about animal well-being, food strategies, sustainable development, ecology, short-and-long term disaster management, and intensive breeding and its impact on the environment and consumers. This first issue of the Cahiers de l¿Art faber tackles the field of photography through the ¿Bestiaux¿ portrait series begun by the artist Yann Arthus-Bertrand thirty years ago. In the series, the artist looks at the privileged relationship between breeder and livestock, inviting us to reflect upon the economic vocation of their animals, and on the system in which animals are produced, used and consumed. As wells as a previously unpublished interview with the photographer by Catherine Briat, the issue features articles from the historian Éric Baratay on domestication, the economist Jean-Marc Dupuy on the history of animal production in France, and the legal expert Jean-Pierre Marguénaud on the issue of animal rights, as well as a presentation of the results of a Havas-BETC survey into the contemporary relationship between humans and animals by Olivier Vigneaux, the chair of BETC advertising agency¿s Digital Studio. With this first Cahier, the Art Faber collective inaugurates a series of articles exploring major societal themes today in an attempt to create a cross-fertilization of two disciplines that are oft considered unrelated: contemporary art and economics, to encourage debate, expand scope for fresh interpretations, and encourage dialogue between the two fields.

In electrical and electronic systems, a ground noise is a sound interference, a stray noise considered as disturbance. Like a flying insect trapped in a lamp, it is a continuous rustle, a vibration that seeks to escape. Its presence is considered annoying, therefore one usually seeks to get rid of it. Insects and arthropods trigger atavistic reactions in us. Even dead and pinned under glass, a spider will be able to frighten, even for a moment, an adult human being. Admittedly, we have somehow tamed our fears towards them, through admiration (¿the incredible work of ants¿, ¿the beauty of butterflies¿) or recognition (¿the bees, our so useful nurturers¿), but this teeming fauna remains nonetheless mysterious, obscure, even unsettling. This work is extended by a conversation between Céline Clanet and eco-acoustician Jérôme Sueur, a specialist of the ¿melody of insects¿.

The King¿s kitchen garden was created by La Quintinie in 1678 on a plot of land nearby the Château de Versailles to provide fruit and vegetables for Louis XIV¿s dinner table to the Sun King¿s great delight. The whole garden covers nine hectares and is composed of a sequence of smaller plots, garden chambers whose walls and terraces control exposure to the sun and create microclimates to diversify production. La Quintinie was able to cultivate and harvest figs, melons, asparagus, peaches, plums, pears and more, sometimes even out-of-season. The King¿s kitchen garden is also a secluded haven, sheltered by high stone walls and foliage, conducive to daydreaming and letting time stand still. A listed national monument, it has been open to the public since 1991. Today the ethos of the King¿s kitchen garden is to protect the living world and the diversity of species. It contains roughly four hundred and fifty varieties of fruit and four hundred varieties of vegetable. It has conserved its triple function as a place of cultivation, experimentation into new techniques and training in gardening. Today it welcomes students from the national school of gardening, who are allotted plots for their own practical endeavors, as well as courses in gardening theory and practice. The garden has been growing and teaching for more than three hundred years without interruption. Walking the alleys between the plots we sense the history of this magnificent royal garden and the people who have made it what it is over the centuries.

Devised for Château La Coste, Mater Earth takes us into the heart of humanity and the myths of creation. Prune Nourry created a monumental sculpture representing a pregnant work emerging from the earth, an immersive installation based on the principles of eco-responsible architecture. The work was first imagined back in 2010, when the artist invited a pregnant woman to pose in a bath of milk for a photography session. From those images of serenity, she created a life-size sculpture. Prune Nourry was instantly seized by a desire to produce a larger scale version of the work but it took several years of reflection before the desire became reality. The book follows the creation of the statue in situ, offering readers an original experience of symbolic rebirth. The work brings an inside view of the project and the mysteries of its conception, situating Mater Earth in Prune Nourry¿s rich and varied career. We see the stages of its development towards an ideal of ¿ultracollective chaos¿ involving multiple artists and artisans, as well as Prune Nourry¿s own ethical and ecological reflections and self-questioning. The work provides a rare vision of the gestation of creation, a window onto the creative process, showing everything that nourished the project and brought it to life. The illustrations resonate with this birthing process, creating a catalogue of the cultural and artistic motifs that inspired the work. Nancy Huston¿s journal provides sensitive, thoughtful insight into maternity, reflecting the slow metamorphosis of all works of creation.

Since a young age, Lorenzo has delighted audiences with his spectacular horsemanship and stunning equestrian shows. Over the years, increasing numbers of horses, black and white, have taken the stage with him, whirling dervishes of energy and virtuosity performing to perfection in spectacles imbued with poetry and magic. At the final curtain, every show is greeted with lengthy standing ovations. Because what the audience has witnessed is not just Lorenzös technical prowess but a unique relationship between artist and horse. Through the sensitive lens of the Swiss photographer Heini Heitz, we follow Lorenzo at his secret ranch in the Camargue and also in the arena in performance. He talks about his special relationship to his horses, and how he trains sixteen at a time in total freedom to create his incredible feats of showmanship. We discover how he works with foals, how he lives alongside horses, and what they become in their retirement. We also meet Lorenzo the instructor teaching equestrian acrobatics to increasing numbers of young people while constantly inventing new figures to astound us in the arena.

A creative reinterpretation of one of Paris' leading art collections Presenting the artist Laurence Aëgerter's (born 1972) in situ interventions at the Petit Palais Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, this book creates a new narrative of the museum's collection through rarely displayed works and surprising pairings.

Swiss figurative sculptor Zaric (1961-2017) drew on mythology and the aesthetics of antiquity to make sculptures of hybrid man-animal creatures, such as a human-sized rabbit in a two-piece suit or a female nude with the head of an ox. Body-to-Body documents works created throughout Zaric's career.

In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, botanist Nikolaï Vavilov (1887-1943), predicting the disappearance of plant biodiversity, built the world's first seed bank. A living museum, the Vavilov Institute hosts roughly 330,000 specimens and stands as a monument to its creator--a scientist who devoted his life to food security and died of starvation, a political scapegoat in the basement of a Soviet prison. One hundred years after Vavilov's first specimen-collecting expedition, Swiss photographer Mario Del Curto (born 1955) retraces the botanist's steps and meets the people who continue his work, seeking, selecting and preserving the planet's plant species. Part meditation on the scope of Vavilov's work and part travelogue into the heart of the Vavilov Institute and its 12 satellite stations, Seeds of the Earth is a beautiful and urgent meditation on food security, ecology and history.

This volume collects the sensitive, affectionate pictures French photographer Mélanie Wenger (born 1987) has taken since 2014 of an elderly Breton woman living in isolation among a strange collection of dolls. It is published to celebrate Wenger's receipt of a 2016 HSBC Photography Foundation prize.

Intimate and empathetic portraits from a remote corner of RomaniaPublished to accompany her 2016 HSBC Photography Foundation prize, this volume presents the intimate, empathetic portraits of the people and places of a far-flung corner of Romania taken by English photographer Laura Pannack (born 1987).

This is the first retrospective on French-born, New York-based artist Prune Nourry (born 1985), who uses sculpture, installation, performance and video, while also collaborating with researchers and scientists, to address bioethical issues such as gender selection, artificial procreation and genetic engineering. Her critically acclaimed triptych on gender selection started in India with the projects Holy Daughters (2009) and Holy River (2011). The third part, Terracotta Daughters, a life-size army Prune made in Xi'an, China, traveled the world in 2014 before being buried in 2015 as a contemporary archaeological site. This volume surveys ten years of work, with essays by the psychoanalyst François Ansermet, Sophie Makariou, director of the Musée national des arts asiatiques Guimet, the artist Orlan, Tatyana Franck, director of the Musée de l'Élysée, the artist Clifford Ross and the Indian sociologist Ravinder Kaur.

CS Studio is the first monograph on the South African architecture practice founded in 1989. The agency has long embraced projects of a deeply social and political nature, initially fighting against apartheid and then against the urban exclusion of the poor.

Korean-born, Paris-based painter Lee Jin Woo takes an unusual approach, superimposing layer upon layer of traditional Korean paper, hanji, with figures in ink, natural pigments or coarsely crushed charcoal in between. This monograph presents his hybrids of tableau and sculpture.

The surging brushstrokes and vibrant colors of Vincent van Gogh's Provence periodAlthough Vincent van Gogh is now considered one of the most original artists of his time, his art was deeply rooted in tradition. Modern subjects and styles began to enter Van Gogh's oeuvre after he arrived in Paris in 1886, and his subsequent years in Provence found him experimenting and refining his personal style. But Van Gogh always remained true to the subject matter that had interested him in his early years. Three genres dominate Van Gogh's work from the beginning of his career to its end: the figure, the landscape and the still life. Van Gogh in Provence argues that Van Gogh's achievements as a modernist are best understood in relation to these traditional loyalties. Using vibrant colors, surging brushstrokes and daring compositions to give established motifs new, expressive form, Van Gogh built a modern house on a traditional foundation. Vincent van Gogh was born in the Netherlands in 1853. His painting career began when he was in his late twenties, influenced first by his work as a missionary in a mining region of Belgium, and later by his exposure to Impressionism while living in Paris. His bright, signature style emerged after relocating to the South of France, where he produced over 2,000 artworks in just over a decade. After bouts of mental illness, the artist took his life in 1890.

This set of four slipcased monographs documents the production of works by four young artists over the course of their Hermès Foundation residences in 2015. The artists are Gael Charbau (born 1976), Jennifer Avery (born 1983), Clarissa Baumann (born 1988) and Lucie Ricandet (born 1982).

In his photographs, HSBC Prize for Photography winner Guillaume Martial (born 1985)--formerly a high-level sportsman--contorts his body into letter shapes, in order to create his own personal alphabet. This monograph compiles his highly staged, largely black-and-white works.

Algerian artist Rachid Koraïchi (born 1947) created The Invisible Masters as a set of 99 handmade cotton banners. Each banner features Koraïchi's inventive signs, and pays homage to one of 14 Sufi mystic masters such as Rûmî and Hafez. This book reproduces the entire series with critical commentary.

Charting the rich history and continuing legacy of France's oldest glass manufacturerIn 1767, King Louis XV of France conferred the title of "Royal glassworks of Saint-Louis" on the Müntzthal glass workshop in Lorraine, already in operation for 200 years. Fifteen years later, the workshop's crystal glass formula was perfected, and the site was renamed the "Royal crystal-works of Saint-Louis." Since 1829, the workshop has devoted itself solely to the production of crystal, and "Saint-Louis crystal" products--dinner services in the signature "Trianon" pattern and luminous decorative pieces, chandeliers and lamps, exquisitely hand-decorated in 24-carat gold or platinum--have become synonymous with a certain tradition of luxury and refinement. Les Cristalleries Saint-Louis charts the history of 19th- and 20th-century design and craftsmanship as expressed in Saint-Louis luxury crystal products, and explores how partnerships with contemporary designers have brought the brand, representing France's oldest glass manufacturer, into the 21st century.

For this fourth edition of the Hermès Éditeur project, Hermès invites Argentinian Julio Le Parc (born 1928) to appropriate its emblematic silk scarf. Le Parc, a famed proponent of kinetic and Op art, has produced 60 silk creations with his characteristic abstact designs.

Nuages examines the ubiquity of the cloud as a motif and its many meanings across the arts and sciences in a gamut of cultures. Some of the 54 artists featured in the publication are Jean Arp, Javier Pérez, Man Ray, Charlotte Charbonnel and Patrick Bailly-Maître-Grand.

This set of four slipcased monographs documents the production of works by four young artists over the course of their Hermès Foundation residences in 2013. The artists are Gabrielle Chiari, Marie-Anne Franqueville, Anne-Charlotte Yver and Marcos Avila Forero.

Born in France but raised in West Africa, representational painter Philippe Cognée (born 1957) is known for his technique of mixing oil pigments into heated beeswax, to create a thick impasto. This publication is the most expansive retrospective on his work to date.

This set of four slipcased monographs documents the production of works by four young artists over the course of their Hermès Foundation residences in 2012. The artists are Oliver Beer, Felix Pinquier, Andres Ramirez and Oh You Kyeong.

Inspired by the "Arab Spring" uprisings, the Lambert Collection decided to stage an exhibition commemorating the struggles of the southeast Mediterranean Arabic countries and the visual history of Orientalism. This volume includes works by Adel Abdessemed, Le Corbusier, Eugène Delacroix, Isabelle Eberhardt, Douglas Gordon, Pierre Loti, Mona Hatoum, Vik Muniz and Henri Matisse.

In 2000, the famous French gallerist and collector Yvon Lambert installed her personal art collection in a splendid eighteenth-century mansion in Avignon. Throughout the 1960s, Lambert was among the leading European advocates of Minimalism, Conceptual art and Land art. In the 1980s, she embraced the new figurative painting, and in the 1990s focused on photography; the collection has since grown to incorporate video art, installation and contemporary painting, while always privileging up-and-coming artists. In advance of the gallery's expansion and reopening in 2015, Lambert is staging two consecutive exhibitions consolidating the work she has exhibited over the past half-century. This handsome catalogue is the first of two volumes documenting the exhibitions, with works by Miquel Barcelo, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Daniel Buren, Christo, Nan Goldin, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Anselm Kiefer, Richard Long, Robert Mangold, Brice Madern, Gordon Matta-Clark, Fred Sandback, Andres Serrano, Cy Tyombly and Lawrence Weiner, among others.

This set of four slipcased books traces the production of works by four young artists, Marine Class, Emilia Pitoiset, Atsunobu Kohira and Sébastien Gscwind, sponsored by Richard Deacon, Susanna Fritscher, Giuseppe Penone and Emmanuel Saulnier, during Hermès Foundation residences in 2011. The set comes with a documentary DVD.

This set of four slipcased monographs documents the production of works by four young artists, Simon Boudvin, Elisabeth S. Clark, Benoit Piéron and Olivier Sévère, over the course of their Hermès Foundation residences in 2010.