The Line of Beauty: René Gruau at Somerset House

I briefly met René Gruau in the early '80s while I was living in Rome, and he was as charming as he was talented – and that is saying a lot. Slim, dapper, he was the Fred Astaire of fashion, whose line captured the styles of the forties and fifties superbly. He loved the luxe sweep of the full skirts of Dior’s New Look and the embroidered draperies of Balmain’s evening wear. A sensualist, he was happy with the extremes of fashion: the hugely extravagant silhouette or the pencil-slim shape. He did not do middle-of-the-road and he was not always happy with rigour of the sort that Balenciaga and Chanel evolved during the fifties.

Unlike many fashion artists, Gruau allowed his irrepressible sense of humour and joie de vivre to illuminate much of his work, which may be why commissions for magazine editorial pages dried up in the fifties as he drew more and more for advertisers. Possibly it was also because editors were unhappy about the confusion that might arise if the same hand were seen on advertising and editorial pages.

I don’t think it unduly worried Gruau; after all, advertisers paid much more and were not always as demanding as editors. Increasingly, his bold, lively line and strongly blocked colour became associated with the beauty and fragrance campaigns of the house of Dior, and it is these works which make up the majority of those displayed in the exhibition Dior Illustrated: René Gruau and The Line of Beauty currently on show in London at Somerset House (until 9 January 2011), along with drawings for the trade magazine International Textiles, for which he regularly provided covers.

René Gruau was prolific, and this is perhaps most apparent in the work brought together here. For every marvelously intuitive, exhuberant drawing there is, alas, at least one more where the technique is not so confident. The name of this exceptional fashion artist might have been better served if there had been a more selective curatorial eye.

As it is, I feel that Gruau’s talent has been slightly compromised by the needs of commerciality, rather as his later work was towards the end of his life. In art, commercial always leads to crude. But, nevertheless, Gruau’s work still stands firm as one of the great delineators of the impossible style and glamour of the mid-twentieth-century years - even if much of the later work in this exhibition is the slick recycling of a technique well past its time.

Colin McDowell is a fashion historian and author of many books on the subject, including Fashion Today