Keeping the Faith

Photo by Estelle Hanania

Pierre-Alexis Dumas contemplates the artistic future of Hermès.

Josef Albers FIAC’s Cour Carrée “So Good It’s Scary” When in Basel for... Art Basel Rummaging Through Rauschenberg’s Trash An Elegant Mind Giorgio Morandi [Husbands and] Wives Dóra Maurer

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

Together or separately, the half dozen Hommage au Carré scarves are an intense visual experience. There’s one in a white-silver palette, a lemon-sunshine one, a peachy-salmon, a noir, a blues, a green: four hues apiece. They’re supremely modern in their asymmetry. “Twenty years ago imbalance was disturbing to the eye,” Dumas says. “Today we really enjoy imbalance. We’re the cut-and-paste culture. We have a Mac when we’re 20. Our eye has evolved because our tools have evolved.”

Then again, many of the tools in an Hermès atelier have barely changed in centuries. I gawk at a workroom near Dumas’s office where a pair of leather artisans work Birkins with that famous, priceless saddle stitch, radio blaring. They’re actually smiling as they sew. It’s like some performance-art installation at the New Museum: The Lost World of Craft.

I think of Ménéhould de Bazelaire, surrounded by Hermèsian equineabilia. “The horse was the first rhythm of the road,” she says, clapping her hands in canter time. Then she gestures at the glass cases and moves the cantering hand to tap her chest, ba-boom, ba-boom. “With all this,” she continues, “you have the feeling you’re just passing by. Time is not something abstract but the beating of the heart.”

It’s easy in those oak-paneled rooms full of centuries’ worth of fantastic objects, representing millions of hours of handiwork, to perceive solid things as talismans, and as anchors of time. But Dumas, artistic and businesslike, has carried great-grandfather Hermès right on over into minimal, glass-walled number 26. “I question today where the border is between craft, applied art, and contemporary art,” he says. “I think that bridge between art and craft has collapsed. My mission is to reinvent that bridge over and over again.” He pauses, possibly thinking intensely colored, square thoughts, then declares firmly: “The world that bridge leads to is civilization.”

And civilization, though equipped with hand-stitched leathers and jewel-colored silks, is not about luxury. "Keeping the Faith" originally appeared in the Fall 2008 issue of Culture+Travel. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Culture+Travel's Fall 2008 Table of Contents.