It's the most glamorous kind of fairy tale. Boy meets boy, they fall in love and then together they spend the next 50 years amassing one hell of an amazing art collection. When Yves Saint Laurent died last June his longtime companion Pierre Bergé decided fairly quickly that he would put most of their art up for auction and split the proceeds between the Saint Laurent foundation and AIDS research. Christie's will be conducting the sale in Paris next week, and Anthony Haden-Guest cataloged just a few of the highlights in his article for the Observer:
These will include paintings by Géricault, David and Ingres - but not
the Goya of the boy in the red sash, which Bergé has donated to the
Louvre. There are also works by Cézanne, Gauguin, Munch, Brancusi,
Mondrian, Giacometti, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Vuillard, Léger, Gris
and Paul Klee, and terrific pieces of art deco by Jean Dunand, Eileen
Gray and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann. Then there are the Greek vases, the
Qing dynasty bronzes, the icons, the Renaissance bronzes, the mirrors -
without which Saint Laurent said a room was "dead" - and rock crystal
pieces of a quality which he said was becoming hard to find because
they were being used for rocketry.
No wonder the collection is expected to fetch a cool €300m even in these dire economic times. You can see some of the pieces that will be featured in the auction here, including an obscenely desirable perfume bottle by Marcel Duchamp.