Chanel literary exhibition opens in Venice

The exhibition opened in the Ca'Pesaro on Venice's Grand Canal on Saturday with actors and models linked to Chanel, including Kiera Knightley, Luisa Ranieri, Kasia Smutniak, Anna Mouglalis, Anne Berest, Caroline de Maigret and Alessandra Mastronardi in attendance.

Culture Chanel, the foundation of the French perfume and fashion house, opened its latest exhibition in a series telling the story of the life and cultural legacy of its iconic founder. This, the seventh stage in the project, is an exhibition of Coco Chanel's books and readings.

House of Chanel is still owned by brothers Alain and Gerard Wertheimer, members of the family who co-founded it with Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel in 1924.

Chanel's Paris library

Brought from her apartment in Paris, the works on display in Venice are ones that left an impression on Chanel's life and shaped her personality.

From her early years in the orphanage of Aubazine until the end of her life she surrounded herself with works by Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Virgil, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Dante, Montaigne, Cervantes, Madame de Sévigné and Stéphane Mallarmé. She also knew and admired writers and artists including Pierre Reverdy, Max Jacob and Jean Cocteau, who all dedicated poems and wrote letters to her.

The exhibition begins with a handwritten note by Chanel: "The life we lead always amounts to so little, the life we dream of, that's the great existence because it continues on after our death."

A love of Venice

Dedications, archives, photographs, paintings and drawings show how Chanel appreciated classicism and the Baroque era, and her love for Russia and the golds of Venice. In all, there are 350 pieces in the exhibition including art objects from her Paris apartment exhibited for the first time, as well as jewelry pieces and perfumes.

The exhibition, conceived by Jean-Louis Froment, shows how Chanel's "proximity to authors and their texts allowed her to find in her own expression - that of fashion - a modernity that defied its own temporality and projected itself far beyond it."

Gabriella Belli, director of the Venice Museums Foundation, said the city had been keen to present an exhibition dedicated to Chanel. The exhibition analyzes from "the unprecedented angle of her sources of inspiration: poetry, art and literature," Belli said.

'A classic author'

"The eyes of Coco Chanel as they lay on the pages of a book or the canvas of a friend painter provide us with an original, new and sometimes surprising outlook on the early 20th century history," Belli said.

In 1967, Roland Barthes wrote a famous article placing Chanel's work within the history of classic authors: "If you were to open a text about the history of literature today, you should find in it the name of a new classic author: Coco Chanel," Barthes wrote. "Chanel does not write using paper and ink (except as a pastime), but with fabric, forms, colors."

The Venice exhibition is the seventh in a series started by the Culture Chanel foundation in 2007. "The Woman Who Reads" follows individual exhibitions curated by Froment, the French artistic director, who has worked at previous editions of the Venice Biennale.

Each of the exhibitions Froment created for Chanel has been designed to tell the story of Coco Chanel and the House of Chanel, from their roots of the culture of her time.

The Venice exhibition, which continues until January, follows Moscow in 2007 (Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), Shanghai (Museum of Contemporary Art) and Beijing (National Art Museum of China) in 2011, Canton (Opera House) and Paris (Palais de Tokyo) in 2013 and Seoul (Dongdaemun Design Plaza) in 2014.