After passing through Tokyo and Los Angeles in 2022, Veuve Clicquot closes the celebration of its 250th anniversary at Picadilly Circus in central London, with the reissue of the traveling exhibition Solaire Culture that brings together the works of nine women artists curated by Camille Morineau, curator for a decade of the Center Pompidou, and the architect and designer Constance Guisset. They were all given the freedom to portray the feminine entrepreneurial spirit and audacity of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, a 27-year-old who, widowed, took over the family business in 1805 and built it into an empire.
"If in the search for perfection we can take two steps at a time, why settle for just one?" This phrase attributed to Madame Clicquot reflects one of the dominant traits of her temperament, an optimism against all kinds of adversities that revolutionized the sparkling industry with the champagne of a spectacular vintage, that of 1811, known as the wine of the comet. Madame Clicquot circumvented the restrictions of Tsar Alexander I at war with Napoleon, and she exported several boxes to Kaliningrad where she waited to jump to Saint Petersburg. When the war ended, the Russians had already fallen in love with her bubbles, and she had passed the competition on the right.
The Grande Dame of Champagne was born in Reims in 1777, the family home and its champagne cellars are still there. Precisely, the intervention of a classic portrait of her by the artist Yayoi Kusama opens the exhibition, where you can also appreciate the interpretations of her by Cece Philips, Rosie McGuinness, Pénélope Bagieu, Olimpia Zagnoli, Inès Longevial and the manga artist Moyoco Year. In addition, 20 historical documents are on display, including a letter signed by Madame Clicquot and an original bottle from the 1840s, found in the Baltic Sea after a shipwreck.
The 250 years of the maison are told through the succession of historic wine labels, and the many works of art produced for Veuve Clicquot by artists and designers between the 20th and 21st centuries, including My Heart That Blooms in Yayoi Kusama's The Darkness of The Night, and Tom Dixon's Comet Lamp.
Veuve Clicquot's commitment to women entrepreneurs around the world dates back to 1972, and is realized through the international program BOLD by Veuve Clicquot, dedicated to giving influence and visibility to women entrepreneurs around the world.
The energy of the yellow of the Veuve Clicquot label retains the strength of the Grande Dame of Champagne two and a half centuries later.
