It’s impossible to sum up what Jean-Paul Goude does in a single word. Artist just doesn’t cover it. A true multihyphenate, Goude, now 71, has worked as an illustrator, graphic designer, photographer, choreographer, and director of TV commercials—to name a few of his career pursuits. Such broad creative output provided abundant material for the exhibition “Goudemalion: Jean-Paul Goude, a Retrospective,” opening November 11 at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. The sweeping survey chronicles Goude’s life from his early days as an illustrator and art director at Esquire in the 1960s and ’70s to his photo and video work in the ’80s with Grace Jones (his best-known muse and mother of his first son) to his ad campaigns for Chanel in the ’90s. As a nod to the theatricality of Goude’s work, the exhibition opens with a stagelike entry, featuring pulled-back red curtains.
“His artistic world is powerful,” says Béatrice Salmon, the museum’s director. “His transversal approach across various techniques and art areas makes him exceptional. And this exhibition enables people to look at his work as that of an actual artist.”
The show’s centerpiece is a life-size wood locomotive Goude created for the parade festivities he directed on the Champs-Élysées celebrating the 1989 bicentenary of the French Revolution. Salmon says she particularly admires his Ektachrome cutouts, among them a portrait of Jones with bloodshot eyes and looking almost feline, her naked body clipped into a sharply angular, two-dimensional form. Salmon describes it as Goude’s “corrected version of ideal beauty.”
Goude’s relationship with female beauty has been complicated. He cut up, elongated, and otherwise manipulated images of not only Jones but also other subjects, including model Farida Khelfa and ex-bodybuilder Kellie Everts. His approach, Goude insists, never reflected aggressive feelings toward women. As he told the museum, “I have relationships based on love.”
November 11, 2011–March 18, 2012; lesartsdecoratifs.fr
