Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé: The quintessential collectors
(First of two parts)
The auction of the Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé collection by Christie’s was touted as “the sale of the century.” One of the finest in private hands, it consisted of a whole range of treasures from rare paintings by Picasso, Matisse and Degas to important Art Deco designer furniture, and ancient Roman and baroque sculptures.
Taking place at the Grand Palais of Paris eight months after the death of Saint Laurent, a lot of hype and controversy preceded this milestone event, from the nightmarish logistics in shipping the art objects to Brussels, London and New York for preview exhibitions, to the lawsuits by the Chinese government which demanded that a pair of Summer Palace animal head bronzes be returned to their homeland, which British and French troops allegedly stole in 1860. Even for those who were not prospective buyers, this was an event of a lifetime, queuing for five hours just to take a peek into a world that had been hidden from the public eye all these years.
Saint Laurent, after all, was one of the greatest couturiers of Paris, the fashion capital of the world. If Coco Chanel gave women freedom, it was Saint Laurent who empowered them with his revolutionary ideas, like appropriating the man’s suit and tuxedo to fit their bodies, giving them confidence to assert themselves in a male-dominated world. He also gave them the most beautiful clothes to wear for a modern lifestyle, giving prêt-a-porter a respectability unheard of before.
And right by his side all this time was his lover and business partner, Pierre Bergé the industrialist, art patron and philanthropist who built the YSL empire into the name that symbolized the pinnacle of French elegance all over the world. The creative duo was legendary, known for their refined taste and trend-setting choices. Their influence went beyond the world of fashion, affecting even the social, political and cultural spheres. So when Bergé announced that he was auctioning off the collection, which he and the iconic designer amassed since the late 1950s when they met and fell in love, you can just imagine the frisson created in Paris and the great cities of the world. Aside from close friends and a few journalists, no one had access to this private world of Yves and Pierre. They always guarded this incredible collection of artworks as if it were their “secret garden.”
It was something they built together, based on the principle that they were looking for exceptional pieces that would give them pleasure, a point Bergé stressed at a pre-auction interview.
“It was very easy because we shared the same taste and we never bought anything unless it was the best,” Bergé said. “You have to love art only for a good reason, never for your wallet, and believe me, we never thought in terms of money, even I. Never. I will be very happy if the collection brings a high price; money will improve the quality of the sale, but it isn’t the point. I don’t respect people, very rich people, who buy paintings or art like stock options. Yves and I never did that.”
What also made the collection special was the synergy between the two: Saint Laurent’s extraordinary eye and Berge’s rich world of references, being an esteemed literary figure and a renowned expert in music. The paintings and objects were not just perfect aesthetically but had a rich history and provenance that made them even more desirable. The list of former owners of these pieces is virtually a history of patronage, from Louis XIV and King Louis-Philippe to Ernst Duke of Cumberland, and the King of Hanover, and several generations of Rothschilds.
The Rue De Babylone Home
The duplex that housed the collection, at 55 Rue de Babylone in Paris’ seventh arrondissement, was supposedly renovated by an American in 1929 with sleek oak paneling and streamlined brass radiators but with “le krach de Wall Street,” who had to sell it to Marie Cuttoli, the wife of an Algerian Senator. Mme. Cuttoli had very distinguished artist friends like Picasso, Braque, Matisse and Leger who helped her transform the house into what Picasso biographer John Richardson called “a kind of hallowed space, associated with modernism.”
When the house went for sale in 1969, Yves and Pierre visited it and fell in love with it immediately, undertaking a two-year restoration project. Among the early furnishings was the first object they bought together, a rare, 19th-century West African Senufo bird sculpture that peered over a flight of parrots, macaws and parakeets of an Ernest Boiceau carpet. There was also a pair of brass and lacquer vases by Jean Dunand, from the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs — the Parisian World’s Fair that gave the design movement its name, Art Deco.
Saint Laurent and Bergé were actually one of the first to rediscover Art Deco at the time it was still being dismissed by modernists as rather ditzy.
Jacques Doucet: An Inspiration
Some of their major Art Deco acquisitions also came from the collection of Jacques Doucet, a Belle Epoque couturier and art collector who was a role model. In the late 1920s Doucet furnished a suite of rooms in his Villa St. James in Neuilly, with a grand salon that was conceived as a jewel box to display and savor the masterpieces of modern art, which he assembled.
Furniture, paintings and objects were thoughtfully arranged into groupings, in layers of color, texture and form that made it a complete aesthetic experience. The grand salon in the rue de Babylone apartment was an homage to the inspiration of “Le Magicien,” as Doucet was known. Doucet’s pieces — the pair of banquettes in red lacquer and leopard skin upholstery by Miklos, a stool by Pierre Legrain, and a haunting painting by de Chirico — held a privileged place in a wonderfully orchestrated tableau that “the magician” himself would have approved of.
Perhaps one of the reasons the collection is so refined is that the principal furnishings evoke a glorious phase in French culture, the period from around 1910 till the end of the 1930s when Paris reigned supreme as the world center of artistic creativity, setting the tone in the fine arts as well as the applied arts: from fashion and theater design, cabinet making and decoration, to all the crafts like jewelry, metalwork, glass and ceramics.
With its perceived brilliance in the industries de luxe, the City of Light also attracted influential artists from other countries. Brancusi, Picasso, Man Ray, Miklos and Csaky are some of the foreigners who further enriched the creative scene. The best from this period was definitely assembled by Yves and Pierre with connoisseurship and finesse, with exquisite Art Deco furniture and objects deftly set against magnificent modern paintings and other works of art, bringing to life an era of unparalleled creativity, sophistication and elegance.
Contemporary Art Commissions
Although most of the collection ranged from antiquity to the early 1900s, there were also contemporary artists represented: Andy Warhol was commissioned to do a portrait of Saint Laurent in 1972, and the husband and wife sculptors Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne were also asked to create pieces. Claude is remembered for the risqué body jewelry for Saint Laurent’s fall-winter 1969 line while Francois-Xavier produced a flock of faux sheep for the couple’s library. “They help me pretend I am on a farm in Normandy, “ according to the designer. It was probably one of the sources of calm for Saint Laurent who was always beset by depression, which led to alcohol and drug abuse.
The sheep became iconic, coming out in all the magazines and being snapped up by the likes of Valentino, Gianni Agnelli and Marie-Hélène de Rothschild. For the music room, Claude created a pair of bronze and copper mirrors with undulating vines and blossoms. Not content with two, over a dozen more were commissioned from 1974 to 1985. “I can’t live in a room without mirrors,” Saint Laurent said. “ If there aren’t any, the room is dead.” The effect of multiplying reflections was quite dazzling, if a tad vertiginous. “Some nights it’s a little unsettling,” the designer admitted.
The Muse: Marie-Laure De Noailles
More than Jacques Doucet or the Lalannes, however, a major decorating and collecting influence was the Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, an iconoclast who was proud to be able to trace her ancestry back to both Petrarch’s Laura and the Marquis de Sade. Sometime in the ‘60s, Yves and Pierre began to be invited to the Noailles’ Paris house, the vast Belle Epoque hotel known as the Hôtel Bischoffsheim in the Place des Etats-Unis.
The décor and art collection of this couple had been famous since the 1920s. The house was designed by Jean-Michel Frank with walls in goatskin parchment, doors in bronze-finished metal, and specially designed modernist furniture in ivory leather and straw marquetry. But what really inspired Yves and Pierre was what the Vicomtesse did with the minimalist shell of Frank, the way she subverted his luxe pauvre aesthetic with her quirky eclectic choices of furnishings and art pieces. She counter-pointed master paintings by Rubens and Goya, for example, with the cubist canvases of Picasso, Braque and Dalí. Renaissance bronzes were positioned on the chimneypiece and bookshelves with Tanagra figurines and Byzantine ivories while marble and gilt bronze side tables became the settings for gem-encrusted snuffboxes, etuis and 18th century cartes de bal.
“Noailles was, like Yves, a devil spirit, a revolutionary,” says writer and photographer François-Marie Banier. “Yves did with couture exactly what Marie-Laure did with décor: breaking the rules by putting together things that have nothing to do with one another.”
The American writer James Lord, who visited the Vicomtesse in the 1950s, wrote that “it was impossible to avoid the assumption that such a room had been knowingly arranged as a setting in which its proprietor’s existence and personality could most dramatically be displayed. It was, in a word, her stage.”
This stage intoxicated Saint Laurent to the point of delirium and obsession. He once gave his antique dealer a photo of the Vicomtesse reclining in her salon beside a table filled with silver, silver-gilt and gold objects. He wanted the dealer to look for the same bibelots so that he could replicate the setting. After a lengthy search, similar pieces were found but the designer was not content and wanted the dealer to look further. Only after a firm “You have to stop, this is not Monoprix!” from an exasperated Pierre did the designer finally channel his energies to other pursuits.
Through the years, many other outstanding German silver and miniatures from the 16th- to the 18th-century were collected, from mounted exotic nautilus shells and ostrich eggs to models of ships known as nefs, to drinking cups in the form of lions, swans, owls and even a mythical unicorn.
(To be continued)
