Jacques Doucet - Yves Saint Laurent - Vivre Pour L'Art

Image via Fondation Pierre Berge - Yves Saint Laurent

Hello dear readers.  This post comes some ten days after my return from Paris where I quite luckily took in this exhibition at the Fondation Pierre Berge - Yves Saint Laurent.  Long time readers are more than familiar with my posts and mini obsession with the collecting prowess of Jacques Doucet.  This exhibition made links between the two couturiers and their voracious collecting habits that were largely against the grain and were testaments to their forward thinking visions.  I came across the press release for the show some months ago and it appeared to highlight about twenty works and I thought it would be a fairly modest yet interesting showing.  I was pleasantly surprised by what the Fondation PB-YSL was able to achieve.

Exhibition vignette -- Image via FOMO blog

The exhibition was able to reunite an impressive amount of material from Jacques Doucet's "Studio" collection, culled from public and private institutions across the globe.  Turning every corner within the galleries was truly a jaw dropping experience.

Exhibition vignettes -- Image via WWD

I was especially struck by Marcel Coard's "Africaniste" sofa from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts being reunited with Henri Rousseau's canvas "The Snake Charmer" lent by the Musee D'Orsay in Paris.

Doucet's "Studio" showing works in-situ -- Image L'Illustration 30 Mai 1930

Exhibition vignette -- Image via Deco-Source

Moments like this are truly breathtaking, when you see pieces separated by time and circumstance reunited with the original collector's vision in mind.  Unfortunately, the exhibition closes today, but the exhibition catalogue is exceptional.  Every single piece is documented and illustrated.  There are also a number of essays weaving a thread between Doucet and YSL and their overlapping collections.  I was particularly grateful for the number of previously unpublished period images that give one a better sense of the layout of Doucet's "Studio" and its contents.  Around every corner was an object that I had never seen in its original context...but I digress.

Doucet "Studio" period images -- Images Fonds Pierre Berge - Yves Saint Laurent

I have plenty of material to pour over for the time being...until next time I leave you with this clip of the exhibition presented by curator Jerome Neutres--AR.

Of Serpents and Sirens: Rare Eileen Gray Chair on the Block at Christie's

Months ago I heard that famed art deco dealer Tony Delorenzo had agreed to a single owner sale at Christie's. I was left to venture a guess as to what treasures he had left in order to entice the venerable auction house into offering him a coveted evening sale. This is of course the Tony Delorenzo who privately sold Ruhlmann's fabled "Donkey Cabinet" which was the centerpiece of the grand salon of the Hôtel d'un Collectionneur at the 1925 Paris exposition. I was more than pleased to hear that it would feature the Sirène armchair by Eileen Gray. The catalogue has not yet gone to press and no image has been released thus far, but you my dear readers shall benefit from my research.

Photo: Sotheby's

The lot can be none other than the Sirène armchair which last appeared on the auction block in 1989 at Sotheby's when it was part of the now famous "Philip Johnson Townhouse" sale. The sale was in-fact the amazing art deco collection of troubled antiquities dealer Robin Symes. At the time the chair was thought to be unique and with its stellar provenance sold for a then staggering price of $209,000. Stylistically the piece relates to Gray's exotic period prior to the first World War, a period where she experimented heavily with lacquers and claimed couturier Jacques Doucet as a client. With its seahorse clutching mermaid the chair is vaguely Asian and western with a dash of Egyptomania. The chair was recorded as being sold from Gray's Paris gallery Jean Desert in 1923 to the singer Damia who was also romantically linked to the artist. Damia kept the piece all her life and it was sold from the auction of her estate in 1978. Considering the resounding success of Gray's Serpent/Dragon chair from the estate of Yves Saint Laurent the current lot seems set to fly at an estimate of $2-3 million.

Photo: Christie's

In fact, the four Eileen Gray lots in the Saint Laurent sale each performed in the low millions except for the Serpent/Dragon chair (above) which brought an insane $28.2 million. I have had to explain this result endlessly and will not engage in that tired tirade here. As pointed out above, the Sirène armchair was (until very recently) thought to be unique...until six others appeared on the market and were sold as successive lots at Camard in Paris, June 1, 2005.

Photo: Camard

The lots were believed to be a suite of dining chairs, again for the songstress Damia and collectively brought in a staggering €8.9 million establishing a record for the artist to be smashed later at the YSL sale. The French press noted at the time that four chairs were purchased by Galerie Vallois and the remaining two went to a private collector. Their exact link to Damia is lost having been rediscovered via inheritance in 1997 with no apparent provenance left behind (its a wild story, read it here). It has been asserted that the specialist for the sale, Jean-Marcel Camard, based the provenance solely on that of the known example currently on the block at Christie's. Nonetheless they are undoubtedly the same model, perhaps more tarted-up, but essentially the same. I prefer the sleek black example as it has an austerity and refinement that are almost haunting. Now to the sordid topic of coin...given how well exceedingly rare works have been performing this season, I feel that the chair will sail past its $2-3 million estimate with the hammer settling somewhere between $5-7 million. We will have to wait until the evening of December 14th for our answer.

UPDATE:

I attended the Macallan Whiskey/ Lalique charity auction at Sotheby's this week and got some clarification from an industry insider. According to my source apparently the six chairs sold by Camard were later deemed to be fake. I have found nothing in the press to confirm this but it seems likely as they have never surfaced in the past five years and are not going to be listed in the forthcoming catalogue raisonne. The catalogue for the Delorenzo sale has come out and every indication is that this is the only example of the model...how exciting!

UPDATE II:

I attended the evening sale session and sadly this Eileen Gray masterwork failed to sell. It was devastating to say the least. Art professionals in attendance were in general agreement that the sale was a bit aggressively priced and unfortunately this chair was the major casualty of the day.