Pierre Bergé is not a man who relaxes much. After all, the dynamic French businessman not only steered his late partner Yves Saint Laurent’s haute couture empire for decades but also is a philanthropist, publisher, patron of the arts, a force in liberal politics, and an AIDS activist. All of which makes his fascination with Paris’s beau monde in the two heady decades before World War I seem somewhat surprising, given what he calls its preponderance of “lazy people, people who didn’t work.”

Then again, Bergé’s focus isn’t especially startling, given how he embodies that earlier era’s crisscrossing worlds of art, literature, politics, and high society—many of whose movers and shakers did work but often looked disarmingly soigné doing so. At least they do in the paintings of Jacques-Émile Blanche, the subject of "Du Côté de Chez Jacques-Émile Blanche: Un Salon à la Belle Époque," an exhibition that opened on October 11 at the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent in Paris. Established in 2002 to maintain the legacy of the fashion world couple (Bergé is its president), the foundation serves as a museum, conservation lab, and cultural center.

Wealthy, dapper, and a nimble social climber, Blanche (1861–1942) was France’s answer to John Singer Sargent, the man the culturati turned to when the time came to record their countenances for posterity. Comédie-Française beauty Julia Bartet emerges from a full-length swansdown cape like Venus on her way to an assignation at Lapérouse. The enigmatic poet Anna de Noailles, born a Romanian princess, is little more than a pair of elongated eyes staring sidelong out of a shroud of black silk. Then there is an aspiring writer named Marcel Proust, barely 21 years of age, his oval face as pale as the orchid sprouting from his buttonhole. Eye-catching historical documents, the portraits also prove Blanche’s genius, what Scribner’s Magazine in 1910 hailed as a “translucent clarity” that would ensure the artist “a permanent place in the annals of contemporary art.”

The perch, alas, proved to be temporary. “Today, however, very few people know about Blanche,” says Bergé, plainly dumbfounded. “He has completely disappeared, even from the museums. But I like Blanche, so decided one day to have an exhibition about him.”

To develop this tribute, Bergé asked his friend Jérôme Neutres—advisor to the president of the Grand Palais museum complex—to serve as curator. Neutres tracked down some 70 top Blanche works, including numerous portraits of fin de siècle icons, notably the famous Proust image, which was borrowed from the Musée d’Orsay. The Musée de Beaux-Arts in Rouen, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Musée de Grenoble, and the Musée de Beaux-Arts in Reims also loaned paintings and drawings, as did private collectors and Blanche descendants.

In addition to putting the artist back into the spotlight, "Du Côté de Chez Jacques-Émile Blanche" also revives the silk-velvet splendor of Paris a century ago. As Bergé asserts, the show is “not only the paintings but also armchairs, chandeliers, a fireplace, sofas, tables, and columns—many, many things.” Set designer/interior architect Nathalie Crinière and AD100 interior designer Jacques Grange (he decorated several residences for Bergé and Saint Laurent) transformed the 2,152-square-foot exhibition hall at the foundation’s Right Bank headquarters—a Second Empire mansion that contained Saint Laurent’s fashion house from 1974 until the couturier’s retirement in 2002—into a temporary evocation of the kind of hôtel particulier that Blanche and his subjects would have lived in or frequented.

A columned scarlet rotunda hung with portraits funnels visitors into three evocative spaces displaying even more Blanche works. The jardin d’hiver is shaded by potted palms in treillage urns. A salon sparkles with gilded pilasters and crystal candelabra. The cabinet of curiosities hosts a baronial mantel as well as an alluring Yves Saint Laurent gown with muttonchop sleeves; fashion executive Hélène Rochas wore it to the celebrated Proust Ball in 1971. Victorian button-tufted armchairs are tucked here and there, providing an explosion of ruby-red velvet and brocade against walls finished in pale gray, a shade that was particularly chic in the early 1900s and that elegantly sets off the colorful Blanche paintings.

“Even the picture lights are like those used long ago,” says Grange, who further amplified the period aura by unblocking two long-sealed windows to reinstate a view of a neighboring building laden with lacy iron balconies. “Every touch,” the designer adds, “evokes the time of Proust.” The atmosphere is so time traveling, in fact, that one can easily imagine the divinities in Blanche’s portraits stepping down from their gilt-wood frames and embarking on a heady conversation or a focused flirt, just as they did in their heyday.

Conjuring this reverie, however, meant more than assembling furniture, fabrics, architectural elements, and a little light demolition. Scent is part of the experience, too. A custom-made essence by award-winning perfumer Francis Kurkdjian, redolent of amber, Brazilian rosewood, and Moroccan jasmine, is diffused throughout the exhibition. For the public, that opulent scent has been translated into three 9.8-inch-long, honey-gold candles that can be purchased for €25 (approximately $32.50) in the foundation’s gift shop.

For additional information about "Du Côté de Chez Jacques-Émile Blanche: Un Salon à la Belle Époque," go to the website of the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent.