La Senteur : L’Art Invisible (Scent: The Invisible Art), a three-part lecture series exploring fragrance as a powerful artistic, cultural, and sensory force, proves that once again that the Alliance Française de Chicago’s 24th Symposium on the Arts of France, April 15, May 13 and June 10 at 54 West Chicago Avenue, is a feast for the senses.
It brings together perfumers, leaders from the luxury industry, and voices from academia who highlight new scents, the artistic connection with painting and sculpture as well as the “Proust Effect” when scent triggers vivid recollection.
Alliance Française Executive Director Mary Ellen Connellan said recently:
“Fragrance brings people together. It is something we can all connect to and experience in our own way. It draws on both science and artistry, but its impact is immediate and personal.
“Fragrance is a form of beauty and luxury that everyone can relate to. Imagine being a ‘nose’ and creating these invisible masterpieces. They are works of art.”
Chandler Burr, author of The Perfect Scent and The Emperor of Scent and New Yorker columnist, keynotes the series by inviting the audience to sample six contemporary works from the Marais-headquartered Parisian house Etat Libre d’Orange.
Speaking this week with Burr, we learned about the 19th-century creators of scent as an art form:
“By the beginning of the 1900s, French perfumers at the great Paris houses of Guerlain, Coty, and Worth had definitively established the most sophisticated forms of perfumery in Europe. French perfumery has evolved in fascinating ways. We will be experiencing the reinvention of the floral with an industrialist component and works of postmodern scent: six extraordinary creations, quintessentially French and entirely of today.”
“Aimé Guerlain was one of the most important olfactory artists of the 19th century, for the simple reason that he, along with the perfumer Paul Parquet, effectively invented olfactory art.
“Guerlain was born into an era of rapidly advancing technology and shifting artistic styles. Haussmann gaslights were changing the cityscape and turning Paris into the glittering bourgeois society in which Guerlain worked and upon which his art had a profound impact.
“The genius of Guerlain’s Jicky, which he created in 1889 the same year of the Eiffel Tower, is that it could never have existed in nature. By the use of synthetics, he was freed from nature. Guerlain had created both a new work of art and a new art form.”
“Chanel No 5 came in during the modernist period, the time of Mies Van de Rohe. Like the architect it had the power to change the way we see things.”
Burr, who founded the Department of Olfactory Art at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City, writes about five-course dinners using raw ingredients from fragrance-industry flavors with distilled essences of things like cardamom and mandarin with Fois Gras Chanel No 18 with a sauce of rose, lavender and lime.
Myriam Bransfield and Mary Swift serve as Symposium Co-Chairs. Mary Swift spoke with us recently:
“Fragrance is the most invisible and one of the most enduring of the arts. It moves quietly through our lives, marking memory, mood, and identity without ever demanding to be seen. A scent can evoke centuries of tradition or a fleeting moment on a spring morning, yet it belongs equally to both. Unlike other art forms, it does not live on a wall or a page, but on the skin or within a home, hotel, church, or store atmosphere and weaves itself into the rituals of daily life. In that way, fragrance is both ageless and immediate—an intimate, timeless expression of who we are.
“My three daughters each tell a beautiful and different story with their choice of perfumes. I, too, enjoy the moments of discovering what really resonates with my life and my desire to be carried away through the personal scent chosen for a particular day or event. Last year, my dear friend, Katie Hale, and I were chatting about what French art forms are frequently enjoyed by us, by our husbands, children and in our homes. We both said ‘fragrance’ at the same time and named one scent memory after another while agreeing that this is a fabulous topic!
“It is no wonder that fragrance inspires such an international devotion. Across cultures and generations, scent has long been tied to ceremony, seduction, comfort, and self-expression. In recent years, this universal language has only grown louder—the fragrance market has expanded rapidly as people seek small, meaningful luxuries that feel personal and transportive. A bottle of perfume offers not just aroma, but escape, identity, and artistry in a single gesture.
“And the allure extends beyond the scent itself. The vessel—the weight of the glass, the typography, the ritual of opening—transforms fragrance into a complete aesthetic experience. Packaging becomes part of the storytelling, a tactile prelude to what is invisible inside. Together, scent and design create a quiet kind of theater: one that invites us, daily, to engage with beauty in its most intimate and enduring form. For all these reasons, La Senteur: L’Art Invisible is celebrated as our 2026 Symposium on the Arts of France theme.”
Conery Hoffman, Director of Special Programs at the Alliance Française, told us:
“Moments like this reflect our commitment to bringing world-class voices and new ideas to the Alliance, and to sharing the full breadth of art with our community, not just the expected. Chandler Burr’s selections from Etat Libre d’Orange, a French house known for its independent and unconventional approach to perfumery, we not only hear about scent, but experience it in the moment. We look forward to also welcoming Linda Levy, President of The Fragrance Foundation, and Camille Goutal, daughter of the legendary Annick Goutal, who has made her own way in the fragrance world. Over the past 25 years, the Alliance has welcomed an extraordinary range of speakers, and this group will soon join that circle. Make sure to attend these lectures, they are exceptional and offered exclusively at the Alliance.”
On May 13, Linda Levy, President of the Fragrance Foundation, speaks on “A Journey into the Artistry and Passion of Fragrance.” Drawing on the beliefs of master perfumers such as Carlos Benaïm and Frederic Malle, she makes the artistic connection between perfumer, painter or sculptor through the use of ingredients, colors and materials. She will trace the history of perfume from ancient Egypt to France and then to America, predating the founding of the United States.
Established to educate the American public about the benefits of wearing fragrance, The Fragrance Foundation has consistently upheld fragrance as art and perfumer as artist, notably through its Awards. The Foundation also introduced seven Scent Categories to guide consumers in discovering their preferred scent profiles; continues its educational mission through programs such as Scents of Success and the online course Fragrance Escentials; and strengthens the industry through a commitment to representation, inclusion, and community.
On June 10, inspired by the “Proust effect,” the well-documented phenomenon through which scent triggers vivid recollection, Camille Goutal reflects on the aromas that have marked the emotional landscape of her life while continuing the legacy of her mother, Annick Goutal. Her earliest memory is anchored in the scent of coffee and toasted bread on quiet Sunday mornings with her mother, an intimate domestic ritual that reveals how deeply smell can bind memory to place and time.
Born in Paris in 1975, Camille Goutal grew up in a family of artists and musicians. After studying the arts, she worked as a photography assistant for several fashion and interior design magazines in Paris and London. In 1999, following the death of her mother, she trained in olfaction under Isabelle Doyen, who had worked with her mother for many years. Passionate about the connection between the visual and the olfactory, she became the artistic director of Maison Goutal, then headed by Brigitte Taittinger, while continuing her work in photography. Isabelle and Camille went on to create numerous fragrances together for the Goutal brand, as well as for other fashion designers, creators, restaurateurs, milliners, and jewelers. Their creations have also received numerous awards in France and abroad. In 2020, they launched their own perfume brand, Voyages Imaginaires, whose creations are made exclusively with natural ingredients—a true creative and olfactory challenge. Through their perfumes, they strive to capture emotions in a bottle and tell stories.
For further information about the programs, visit af-chicago.org or call the Alliance Française at 312-337-1070.
