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PARIS: Less than four months after the death of the French couturier Yves Saint Laurent, his longtime partner and companion Pierre Bergé announced in September that he intended to sell the art collection that they had compiled over 50 years together. The three-day sale by Christie's France in collaboration with Pierre Bergé & Associés, Bergé's own auction house, will start here Feb. 23.
Labeled the “sale of the century” by Christie's, it will include over 700 lots with an estimated total value of €200 million to €300 million, or $255 million to $380 million.
The decision to sell almost the whole collection was made by Bergé as a way to find closure. “I wanted this sale,” he said at a press conference. “This collection could only have two destinies - end up in a museum, which would have been too onerous, or on the auction block. I chose the sale because I felt the collection would not be truly complete until the hammer fell on the last lot.”
Still, not everything from the collection will go. Bergé will keep an Andy Warhol portrait of Saint Laurent and a Senufo African bird sculpture, the first object that the two men purchased together.
While news of the sale has excited the market, Bergé's choice of Christie's over the Hôtel Drouot, a venue for local auction firms, including his own, has revived questions about the ability of French auctioneers to compete with the international houses.
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For Bergé the choice reflected reality. “I am aware of our limitations,” he said. “My auction house could not handle a sale of this size.”
It may also have been mixed with a dash of rancor, after an unsuccessful bid to take control of Drouot in 2002. “Drouot's auctioneers preferred to hold on to their cardboard crowns rather than sell their interests to me,” he said at the press conference. “Drouot is barely surviving now,” he added in a later magazine interview.
That view, unsurprisingly, is not shared by Drouot's managers. “Drouot generated €500 million in sales in 2007. We average 2,000 sales a year,” said Georges Delettrez, president of Drouot Holding, in an interview. “In 2003, we handled the André Breton sale with 4,100 lots generating €46 million and the Vérité sale in 2006 for €44 million, the most important primitive art auction to date. Mr. Bergé has simply not lived down his failed takeover attempt.”
Still, some independent observers agree that the structure of Drouot, a collective of separate auction houses, puts it at a disadvantage in competing against the big international houses.
“It is crucial that Drouot, which is today just a sale venue, become a unified auction house. It is behind in the times,” said Christian Giacomotto, president of the Conseil des Ventes Volontaires, a French auction watchdog.
Christie's, meanwhile is preparing to pull out all the stops to make the auction a success. “To celebrate this fabulous collection gathered by two extraordinary personalities, we will be holding the sale preview and the auction at the Grand Palais,” said François de Riqlès, vice president of Christie's France. The Grand Palais, built for the 1900 World Fair, is one of the grandest public exhibition halls in Paris.
“The extraordinary force of this collection is that it contains one-of-a-kind pieces not seen on the market in over 35 years,” de Riqlès said. “The entire art world is waiting for this sale.”
“We began collecting in the early 1970s when we started making real money,” said Bergé, who met Saint Laurent in 1958 and helped him open the couture house that bore his name in 1962.
A mix of styles and periods, the collection reflects an eclecticism developed through contact with some of Saint Laurent's prominent clients, including the Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, a Parisian hostess and art patron. “Saint Laurent's obsession was to build a collection of silver gilt objects like the one he had seen at the home of the Noailles,” Bergé said.
As collectors, Bergé and Saint Laurent avoided auctions and mainly bought from a handful of dealers, among them Alexis and Nicolas Kugel, owners of the Galerie J. Kugel, near the Orsay Museum. The Kugels sold them Renaissance bronzes, Venetian and Limoges enamels and 17th-century German silverware, including a series of 14 silver gilt standing cups made around 1640 in Lüneberg.
“The cups had belonged to the duke of Cumberland, king of Hanover,” Nicolas Kugel said in an interview, referring to Ernest Augustus, an uncle to Queen Victoria of Britain, who became king of Hanover in 1837. “Similar ones are in the Armory Chamber collection of the Moscow Kremlin Museum.”