Ref: article by Anne Fulda , Le Figaro, November 2021
Some clichés are stubborn. Images so powerful they remain forever attached to a person. Peter Knapp is thus known to the general public as a great fashion photographer—an essential reference, behind the true visual revolution that accompanied the democratization of fashion in the 1960s.
At 90, with a mischievous gaze, a mind and stride still brisk, Peter Knapp has given up neither on touching up the picture. Yet he is far more than a photographer—an “image-maker,” as he defines himself. A graphic designer, painter and filmmaker, he insists he never took fashion photographs “to satisfy an artistic urge,” but with a pragmatic approach: “When I was given a garment, I tried to make it flatter everything you see in the photo.”
In the pantheon of this man who rubs shoulders with the most beautiful women in the world—but insists, “As for me, I’ve never had many women; when I loved, I lived with them”—are figures as different as Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and… Hélène Lazareff. It was the journalist who made him a muse of the image, spotting him and bringing him into the Elle team in 1959. Peter Knapp had just returned from a stay in New York, where he had hoped to make a breakthrough with his painting—the era when pop art was being born. He let himself be drawn into the Lazareffs’ wake, was invited on Sundays to their country house in Louveciennes, where he met all those who were shaping the times.
“Hélène amazed me: she wanted to have the 10 hours, but when there was an editorial meeting, she would reel off a whole plan of ideas. In fact, she got up at 5 a.m. and read magazines and newspapers from all over the world.”
Among the people who left a mark on him is also Slavik. It is, in fact, about him that we are meeting today in Paris—to discuss the release of a book, Slavik, the Drugstore Years (Norma Éditions), which he helped produce, notably with Pascal Bonafoux. Slavik was born under the name Wiatscheslav Vassiliev. When the young Swiss man arrived in Paris in 1952, with the idea—after attending the Kunstgewerbe Schule in Zurich—of going to the Beaux-Arts (“there was no art academy in Switzerland, or a school that would give you a diploma to earn a living; making artists isn’t Swiss”), he found himself disappointed by the capital. He found everything “old,” outdated—until one day he walked past the window displays of Galeries Lafayette. They were alluring, dynamic. “All the windows and sets were white, as was the fashion on display. I said to myself: ‘Ah, there’s something here!’” He then met Jean Adnet, the department store’s art director at the time, and Slavik, the decorator in charge of the store’s window displays.
They became friends and, in the process, the young Knapp became art director at Galeries Lafayette and had Slavik work there at the time. “I wanted the posters, the exterior, the ads, the cardboard labels done by hand. There was no way to go faster.”
In 1954, however, Slavik left the department store on boulevard Haussmann and created the first design office at Publicis. “He then entered modernity,” designing stackable chairs, many useful objects, “and then he created his masterpiece with the Drugstore de l’Étoile. A store commissioned by Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, who had been blown away before the war by those American stores—far less luxurious than their French counterparts—where you could buy anything, at any hour. Slavik did not present Bleustein with a plan, but with a red wooden board and dyed leather he proposed as cladding. He would add white marble, leather and chrome.”
Bleustein wanted to decorate the walls, and Peter Knapp went to the Saint-Ouen flea market to buy train luggage nets and old suitcases. Paradoxically, Slavik’s venue—trained at the Arts Décoratifs in Paris—would be recognized for its design only through this decoration of the first French Drugstore. He then embarked on an adventure that would lead him to create several hundred restaurants worldwide, including many Parisian pubs and restaurants, such as the Winston Churchill, the Pub Renault (“with visible ventilation pipes on the ceiling”) and, fifteen years before Beaubourg, Peter Knapp reveals, L’Assiette au Bœuf, Le Dôme, Zeyer, Jules Verne or L’Européen.
“Slavik,” Peter Knapp notes, “liked to step into art. At 80, he was still telling me: ‘When I stop doing restaurants, I’ll take up painting,’ but he threw himself fully into applied art.”
Always in the thick of it
Peter Knapp, for his part, never had to settle that dilemma. With a blend of pragmatism and humility, he draws no hierarchy between art and applied art. He does “always both.” He claims to be “in life,” always careful not to let himself be boxed into “a style, a repetition.” “Being curious at my age and still taking on new projects is what keeps me alive,” he admits. His way of looking, listening and speaking—focused, precise—immediately brings his words into sharp relief and lends them authority. Time has in no way dulled his liveliness or curiosity. He is clearly still driven by the desire “to do more.” Always. Like a kind of survivor. Always in the thick of it. Always eager to meet new people, to take on new challenges.
Born in Switzerland in 1931, where he still lives—in Klosters, commuting between his Paris apartment and his studio in Malakoff—the image-maker mentions, among his projects, an assignment for Alsace, a major exhibition in Switzerland, and a project with Claude Brouet for a major brand spanning 1950 to 2000.
“And when he is asked what he thinks of today’s art scene, he replies with a wry smile: ‘I’m not in the picture. It was better before,’ but I can’t stand bad taste, I don’t like tags: those mediocre artists who draw a cat’s paw on the wall and sign it. I hate Jeff Koons signing a handbag with the Mona Lisa. I can’t stand that way of moving forward.”
Clear-cut and unvarnished, demanding and aesthetic, without affectation, marked by a kind of common sense and an almost childlike innocence.
