French billionaire bids for Christie's

When the French billionaire, Francois Pinault, established his family holding company six years ago, he christened it Artemis, after the Greek goddess of hunting. It was a fitting name for one of France's most formidable predators, who began his career by haunting the commercial tribunals of his native Brittany, snapping up failing timber businesses and then selling them at a profit.Mr Pinault showed the extravagant side of his secretive personality on May 18th, when he launched a friendly takeover bid for Christie's International, the world's leading auction house, offering £721 million sterling 396 pence per share, compared to a closing rate of 312.5 pence per share the previous Friday. Not surprisingly, the board of Christie's urged shareholders to accept the offer, and the company's director, Christopher Davidge, welcomed its purchase by one of his best clients.For the first time since it was founded in 1776, Christie's is no longer under British control. Mr Pinault, a man of few words, would say only that Christie's held "significant potential" and that "trade in works of art will continue to grow throughout the world".

Indeed, many financiers feel that with stock markets over-valued, this is a good time to invest in property and art works. Bankers say Mr Pinault will have a hard time recouping his investment, but since Artemis is familyowned he is not accountable to shareholders.

Francois Pinault has been known to haggle over the price of a painting, but he didn't baulk at the high cost of Christie's. Until now, the art market was the only business in which Mr Pinault spent more than he earned.Francois Pinault is a rare species in France, a self-educated, self-made man, with only a primary school diploma to his name. The 62-year-old son of a forester from Treverien near St Malo in Brittany, he has amassed the world's 83rd largest fortune, after the Italian Benetton family, estimated at 14 billion French francs (£1.66 billion).The French magazine Marianne calls Mr Pinault "the man who wants to buy everything". In France, he is best known for owning La Redoute mailorder catalogue company, the Printemps department store chain and FNAC, the country's biggest book and record retailer. Five years ago, he bought his first "trophy" business, the prestigious Chateau-Latour vineyards - which was, like Christie's, English owned. More recently, Mr Pinault has shown what the French call papivore instincts, buying the weekly news magazine Le Pointand a small percentage of Le Monde. In the US, he owns Converse sports shoes, Samsonite luggage and the Vail and Beaver Creek ski resorts in Colorado.Mr Pinault's XVIIIth century mansion in the rue de Tournon, in central Paris near the French senate, has been furnished by his second wife Maryvonne with the finest Louis XV and Louis XVI antiques. Like his house in St Tropez and La Mormaire, his chateau near Montfort-L'Amaury outside Paris, the rue de Tournon mansion is a veritable museum. Mr Pinault bought his first painting in 1972. A decade later, with the proceeds of the Chapelle Darblay paper factory, he bought a Mondrian. Today, he owns one of the finest modern art collections in Europe - bought mostly at Christie's - including works by De Kooning, Lichtenstein, Mondrian, Pollock, Rauschenberg, Rothko, Ryman and Warhol.Mr Pinault almost never lends his paintings, although one of his Rauschenbergs was shown anonymously in the Paris Musee d'Art moderne's aptly titled exhibition "Private Passions". His gardens at La Mormaire boast an eight-metre high Seated Bather by Picasso, works by Henry Moore, Joan Miro and Calder not to mention 30 six-metre high steel blocks placed among the trees by the US sculptor, Richard Serra. Mr Pinault's taste in art, the French journalist Christine Mital of the Nouvel Observateur remarks, is like his personality: violent, brutal and without concession.The forester's son from Brittany has collected famous friends too, starting with President Jacques Chirac. Maryvonne Pinault is as close to the French first lady, Bernadette Chirac, as her husband is to the president. On the evening of Jacques Chirac's election, May 8th, 1995, Mrs Chirac dined with the Pinaults in the rue de Tournon. Many months earlier, when it looked like Mr Chirac's political career was over, Mr Pinault went to see him often and lent the future president a bungalow on his chateau grounds to write a book in.Other famous friends of the Pinaults include the writer, Bernard Henri Levy, and the actor, Alain Delon. Yet, because of his humble beginnings, Mr Pinault remains an outsider. His attempted takeovers of the Suez group and the Banques Worms failed in part because of resistance from the establishment. "He dreams of bringing these rich bourgeois to their knees," Laurent Neumann of Marianne magazine wrote recently. "These fat bankers, all these aristocrats who earn their money without sweating. . . He socialises with them. . . but he watches them as an entomologist would, vaguely sickened by the subject of his study."Biographers say two experiences formed Francois Pinault's character. In 1944, German troops tried to force his father to reveal where British members of the resistance were hiding on the family farm, stripping and lashing the unyielding woodsman in front of his son. Later, 30 months as a French soldier in the Algerian war, taught Mr Pinault to distrust politicians, and to abhor racism and torture. He nonetheless retained a rigid, bossy management style.So has Francois Pinault bought Christie's simply as a billionaire's toy? Or could the world's leading auction house become the instrument of a spectacular French comeback? The monopoly of a handful of sometimes unscrupulous French auctioneers, overregulation and taxation have nearly killed the Paris art market. But under new EU legislation, this is about to change, and Mr Pinault is waiting.