Report from Paris

Even for the invitation-only preview on Friday night, the line of some 2000-plus VIP guests holding their white cards snaked in a double loop along the facade of the Grand Palais. On Saturday morning the queue for the general public viewing circled the entire block. The auction of the art and furniture collection of the late fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé, amassed over the course of fifty years, is already being touted as “the sale of the century”.

Although the century is still fairly young for such lofty billing, it’s fairly certain that the three-day auction at the Grand Palais, which starts Monday evening after the public viewings this weekend and Monday morning, is one of the largest single-collection sales ever held—orchestrated by Christie’s Paris and Bergé’s own smaller auction house, Pierre Bergé & Associés, more than 730 lots will go under the hammer.

The setting for the sale is unprecedented—it’s the first auction ever held in the imposing glass-roofed exhibit hall built for the Paris World’s Fair in 1900. For the viewing, the gargantuan collection is displayed in a series of 15 box-like rooms of varying dimensions set up under the soaring glass roof in the hall’s central nave. At the entrance, the display opens with a 1st-2nd century white marble Minotaur, a massive bull’s head on a muscular human torso.

There follows ancient Roman statuary of all sizes in marble and bronze; Art Deco furniture including a strange “dragon chair” by Eileen Gray; extraordinary 17th-century gold, silver and vermeil table ornaments and animal sculptures; quantities of heavy, mostly 19th-century table-sized ornamental bronzes including a replica of the Laocoön; and superb 18th-century Chinese bronze heads of a rat and a rabbit—thought to be part of a set of 12 heads made for an imperial zodiac fountain, their sale is being contested by the Chinese government, which claims the heads were looted from the Imperial Summer Palace nearly 150 years ago.

The array of 19th- and 20th-century paintings and drawings, of surprisingly uneven quality, includes works by Géricault, Manet, Léger, Derain, Degas, Ensor, De Chirico, Picasso and Mondrian, who is represented by a lovely pastoral landscape as well as three of the abstract color-block studies that inspired a memorable YSL couture collection. Among the standouts: a small, delicate Portrait of Comtesse de Larue by Ingres; Matisse’s brilliantly-colored 1911 Cowslips, said to have been one of Saint Laurent’s favorites; and a wonderful Goya portrait of a little boy in frilled velvet with a pink satin sash, Don Luis María de Cistué, that will not go on sale but has been donated to the Louvre. The highest estimate, at €25-€30 is for Picasso’s 1914 Cubist still life Musical Instruments on a Pedestal Table. Estimates for the entire sale are running as high as €300 million, which would be a terrific boost for the international art market in these troubled times.

But whatever the final hammer prices, the auction houses have spent nearly €1 million in setting up the show and the specially-built auction room at the Grand Palais. The immense and wildly eclectic collection is extensive enough to stock a medium-sized museum, and it’s open to the public, free, today and tomorrow from 9 am to midnight, and on Monday morning from 9 am to 1 pm. The sale starts Monday at 7 pm, with 1200 seats and standing room for 300, available only by advance reservation. The Tuesday and Wednesday day and evening sales are free entry.

Originally published in the February 2009 issue of France Today.