Eventbrite tickets are for the online presentation via Zoom.
The presentation will be broadcast live from the Koret Auditorium at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Tickets for the in-person presentation are sold at the auditorium doors, and cost $5.
Eventbrite tickets are for those who cannot attend in person and would like to view the webinar.
A recording will be available for 14 days following the talk.
In this presentation based on their recently published book, Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art (MIT Press, October 2023), Nancy J. Troy and Ann Marguerite Tartsinis examine the explosive popularity of Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian dresses, tracing the circulation of the original couture models as they were copied in massive numbers and sold at every conceivable price point in stores throughout the United States, where the vast majority of the French designers’ models were destined to be marketed. Numerous iconic examples of these dresses were instantly identified with the characteristic features of Piet Mondrian’s abstract paintings of the 1920s and 1930s – a grid of straight black lines creating discreet rectangular surfaces of white or primary colors: red, yellow or blue.
But there was also a surprising number of Saint Laurent designs bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the Dutch painter’s style that were nevertheless identified by the “Mondrian” designation. Troy and Tartsinis focus on two such sleeveless cocktail dresses in wool jersey. Produced in 1965 for Bay Area department store I. Magnin, these dresses have been in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco for more than half a century. Women’s magazines, the fashion press, and mass circulation newspapers characterized these looks as Mondrian. Though they lacked the graphic look of the paintings, these models ultimately helped identify the ubiquity of the "Mondrian" style.
Nancy J. Troy is the Kress-Beinecke Professor 2023-2024 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, and the Victoria and Roger Sant Professor in Art, Emerita at Stanford University. She is the author of five scholarly books, including Couture Culture: A Study in Modern Art and Fashion (MIT Press, 2003) and, with Ann Tartsinis, Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art (MIT Press, 2023).
Ann Marguerite Tartsinis is a scholar of twentieth-century American art and fashion. She is currently visiting faculty member in the Graduate Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of the Arts and at the University of San Francisco. From 2010 to 2016, she was Associate Curator at the Bard Graduate Center and is the author of An American Style: Global Sources for New York Textile and Fashion Design, 1915–1928 (2013) and Mondrian’s Dress: Yves Saint Laurent, Piet Mondrian, and Pop Art, coauthored with Nancy J. Troy (2023).
**The authors will be available to sign your copy of Mondrian's Dress for those attending in person. Purchase your book in the bookstore and then come back to the Koret Auditorium for the signing **
