IT IS the story of not one, but hundreds of coups de foudre, of a magnificent art collection amassed over 50 years by the late high fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, the businessman and patron of the arts Pierre Bergé.
The Saint Laurent-Bergé collection came under the gavel last night at the Grand Palais, in what is being called the sale of the century. It will take three days to sell off the 733 paintings, sculptures, pieces of furniture and objets d’art. The sale is expected to raise up to €300 million for the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent and the fight against Aids. If so, it will break all records.
The original coup de foudre was that between Saint Laurent and Bergé, when the designer showed his first collection for Dior, in 1958. Their passion eventually subsided into a loving friendship, but the creator and entrepreneur remained the best known homosexual couple of late 20th century France.
François de Ricqlès, the vice-president of Christie’s, the auction house that is organising the sale, calls Saint Laurent and Bergé “renaissance princes”. More than 30,000 people flocked to the Grand Palais to view the collection between Friday night and 1pm yesterday. As we queued in the rain, I talked to Alberto Pereira (21), a jewellery salesman for Dior. Pereira was so impressed by the collection that he brought his companion, Mathieu, for a second visit. If he could have bought any painting, it would have been Goya’s portrait of a boy from the Spanish royal family, which Bergé has donated to the Louvre.
“I was moved by the motivation of Pierre Bergé, who said the collection had no meaning from the day Saint Laurent died,” Pereira told me. (He died in June 2008.) Bergé is keeping only two works: an African sculpture of a mythical bird, the first piece they bought together, and their friend Andy Warhol’s portrait of Saint Laurent. Though not for sale, it too was on display in the Grand Palais. Despite the exuberance of the 1960s colours, one senses the tension in the designer’s face. His greatest quality, Saint Laurent said of himself, was determination; his greatest weakness, timidity.
In Saint Laurent’s death, as in his life, Pierre Bergé played the role of supreme organiser. He stood at the centre of the collection yesterday, dressed in a pin-striped suit, overcoat, black felt hat and purple scarf.
“This collection was about the quest for beauty,” he told me. “I have lived my life surrounded by beauty.”
Bergé’s favourite painting was Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Man Holding a Book, which hung in his library and is expected to sell for up to €1.2 million. “I went to see him and I told him, ‘Farewell. We won’t see each other anymore, but we loved each other.’”
Amid much bittersweet nostalgia over the auction, Libération’s editorial yesterday quoted the lyrics of the late French singer Barbara, about an auction house and “the fabulous treasures of a past that is no longer . . .
“Things have their secrets/things have their legend,” Barbara sang. “But things speak to us if we know how to listen.”
Bergé sees the dispersal of a lifetime’s collection as a process of renewal. He quotes the 19th century writer Edmond de Goncourt: “My wish is that the works of art which have been the joy of my life not be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum . . . that the joy each acquisition gave me can be experienced by someone who inherited my taste.” A crowd pressed around the glass case where bronze Chinese sculptures, the head of a rat and a rabbit, from the 18th century Qianlong dynasty, were exhibited. They were looted from the emperor’s summer palace in Beijing in 1860. A Chinese lawyer is attempting to block their sale. So should France give them back?
I asked the French people around me. “Absolutely not!” replied a white-haired woman. “Saint Laurent and Bergé didn’t steal them. Other countries don’t give back art works. Why should we?”
Because of the economic crisis, the reserve price for a cubist painting by Picasso was marked down from €30-€40 million to €25-€30million.
Other treasures include a Brancusi sculpture, estimated at €15 to €20 million. The sheer quantity is stunning: works by Ingres, Dégas, Cézanne, Modigliani, Munch. There are canvases by Léger, Matisse and Mondrian, all of whom inspired Saint Laurent dresses.
The sale is presented as a test of the survival of the art market during the recession. But even if the Saint Laurent-Bergé collection sells well, it’s far from certain others will.
“These things have a dual value; the inherent value of the works themselves, and the fact they belonged to these two exceptional men,” observed Julie Prevel, who works for a contemporary art foundation.
Yves Saint Laurent said he hated “the snobbishness of money”. He and Pierre Bergé invested their earnings from high fashion in art, not banks or the bourse.
A homosexual who loved women, Saint Laurent recognised nature as ultimately superior to art: “Nothing is more beautiful than a naked body,” he said. And he kept his own genius in perspective, adding that “the most beautiful garment that can dress a woman is the arms of the man she loves”.