Auction Details
<p>To compose a collection is to capture the game of chance’
Nothing better describes the spirit and energy of thiscollection, born in the madcap and feverishly creative roaring 20s, or better expresses the essence of the “French Eye” that composed it for a Californian home.
<p>To compose a collection, as if by accident. In the same way as the Surrealists composed their seemingly haphazard poems and spawned their impossible creature-like paintings. Or as Jean-Michel Frank and Robert Mallet-Stevens, Christian Bérard, Alberto Giacometti and Robsjohn Gibbings, Eileen Gray and Pierre Chareau recomposed a world in an apparently random reorganization of space, volume and lines.
<p>The French Eye has that noble and serene trait of trusting itself, and itself alone, to detect a nascent art form that one day will become a classic. A free-thinking yet disciplined appraiser of fashions and styles, this eye is eccentric yet incisive, nourished by the passementerie and brocades
of Louis XV and the implacable lines of Louis XVI that fore-
shadowed modernity.
<p>Thriving on paradox, this is the knowing and avant-garde eye that explores and caresses the object, intrinsically comprehending what it is: its substance, its line and, above all, its feel. The surface over which the collector’s expert fingers can detect its authenticity or its deception, its sense or its enigma, its inventiveness and its brilliance. In a flash, this eye arbitrarily decides on the object, rediscovering and revealing it, seizing its true beauty and restoring it to life.
<p>Of course, posterity has done its job of glorifying or betraying, of sifting and categorizing all of these objects. It has confirmed the eye even more than the prestigious name that has brought them together. This collection is the singular story of a journey of forgotten objects revived by the eye of the collector, an aesthete and man of taste : the emotive Theatrical Mask exiled from the stage, the hieratic elegance of the Renaissance mantelpiece, an early Dali that Marie-Laure de Noailles, one of the great aesthetic adventurers of the 20th Century and icon of this style, once hung between a Watteau and a Goya in her Parisian Town mansion, decorated by Jean-Michel Frank.
<p>This arbitrary and paradoxical game of chance has also revealed the unknown artist, a mysterious sculptor and perhaps master undetected, until now, by posterity, whose probing poetry placed a mad world on the shoulders of four men in the form of a globe, its map ripped apart and redrawn between two
world wars.
<p>Surrounded by Giacometti’s Leaf, Cat and Lioness on the mathematically rigorous metal and oak console by Mallet-Stevens, this bronze of ring-dancing men gives a forceful masculine balance to the extremely feminine house dreamed up by Robert Couturier for a woman. A house filled with white silk and witty elegant materials in bright colors, all cut in seductive lines that has led Roger Prigent to aptly remark, “Robert Couturier has not made a house, he has made a ball gown”. A grand evening gown designed in the spirit of the legendary costumes balls
of the 20s and 30s, which were paroxysms of inventive frivolity and fun, rare
and exhilarating moments in celebration of beauty and life, in the wake of World War I. Indeed, Robert Couturier’s house for a lady recalls the lifestyle of Marie-Laure and her husband that great arbiter of taste, Charles de Noailles in their South of France Villa built by Mallet-Stevens, where they revived a holiday version of the 18th century salon tradition, frequented by many of the great artists of their time.
<p>These many past and present images are reflected in the Mirror by Serge Roche, the imaginary and abstract root of this collection. Serge Roche cut and fragmented the Venetian glass into a radically modern structure, breaking old rules to create new ones, which is the very essence of modernity. An insolent and sensual tribute to the 30s and 4Os, this mirror reminds us that their powerful vitality and indomitable intelligence is more alive than ever.
<p>Many great collections owe their existence to the power and fragility, the structure and liberty of the French Eye. The eye of the unconventional and audacious collector who appreciates the luminous and ascetic elegance of Jean-Michel Frank’s parchment and sycamore furniture or style of straw marquetry yet still discerns a thousand discreetly valuable little objects, from the slender extravagance of the Nautiles by Bolette Natanson to the ceramics by Savin. This elegant and eclectic eye has a poetic quality that places the moving humanity and disquieting dream-like fragility of Christian Bérard’s paintings in a whimsical world combining futuristic and minimalist objects like Royere’s wall lamps, a 16th century stone mantelpiece or a bed by Frank with an almost baroque 19th century Italian console in a mysterious dialogue with the implacable strictness of a cabinet by Arbus, an Empire chair and a plaster cast tree standing lamp.
<p>“To compose a collection is to capture the game of chance” is what Robert Couturier and Philippe Lauro-Baranes say with some modesty and a little hesitation. Certainly, a few discerning collectors, gallerists, experts and amateurs of everything stylish and recherché will be more than happy to accompany them on the journey presented to you today.