For Yves, art was food for the soul
For Yves, art was food for the soul"So what can I do for you?" asks Pierre Bergé urbanely. Does he really not know why I am in his Paris office? At the end of
February the extraordinary art collection he built up with his late partner Yves Saint Laurent - a collection that runs from
the Renaissance to Picasso and Matisse, from French enamels to African wood carvings - is being put under the hammer by
Christie's, Paris. Bergé and Saint Laurent built up this collection over half a century. Its creation was one of the motors
of their relationship. Selling it in the teeth of an economic gale that has been buffeting the art world has been Bergé's
decision.
"I'm here to write about the collection," I tell him.
"Of course," he says, serenely.
The office, which is dominated by a 1962 Andy Warhol portrait of Saint Laurent in profile, is on the first floor of 5 avenue
Marceau, in the VIIIème arrondissement. It is where the Yves Saint Laurent couture house used to be and is now occupied by
the foundation set up to secure his legacy.
So it is the centre of the world according to Yves Saint Laurent. But it was Bergé who turned an enormous, sometimes
excruciatingly fragile talent into an empire. He was the couturier's partner in life as well as business, and together they
built an art collection which is unusual compared to almost any other great modern collection in that the objects and
artworks came from widely different periods, places and categories. And also unusual in that these unlike pieces worked
together brilliantly. Joan Juliet Buck, a Paris-based writer and former editor of French Vogue, describes the grouping of the
work in Saint Laurent's Paris flat in the rue de Babylone as "a conversation".
Saint Laurent died last June. In July Bergé announced he was putting the fruit of 50 years of amassing art on the block, that
he was working with Christie's and that half the proceeds were to go to the foundation and half into Aids research.
Bergé isn't selling everything - he is keeping the contemporary art and an African piece he loves. Indeed, the auction, at Le
Grand Palais on 23, 24 and 25 February, required the printing of five catalogues which will list almost 800 items.
These will include paintings by Géricault, David and Ingres - but not the Goya of the boy in the red sash, which Bergé has
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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.
Even in these tough times Christie's believes it will realise between ￡200m and ￡300m. A Picasso still-life of musical
instruments is estimated at between €23m and €30m and a wooden sculpture by Brancusi at between €15m and €20m. It is a
remarkable collection, made by two driven men.
I bring out one of Bergé's books. Few entrepreneurs write "real" books - as opposed to accounts of just how they got to be so
terrific - but Bergé has written four and this one, Les Jours S'en Vont, Je Demeure (the days fly, I remain), published by
Gallimard in 2003, is a series of sketches of interesting folk he has known. He begins with an observation of Jean Cocteau:
"When one paints a landscape or a still life, one is always painting a self-portrait."
Referring to the book, he continues: "Have I painted mine? It is not impossible."
I start to read this out but Bergé sees where I am going and pounces before I get out more than a few words. "It is the same
with the collection," he says. "The art collection is exactly the image of Yves and I. We made it as a collection. Two men
with... not with taste."
I am taken aback, "Not with taste?" I query.
"L'art c'est plus que nous. Plus grand." Art is greater than us. It is bigger.
But he is selling it. Unusually, he didn't even ask Christie's for guarantees. Briskness is clearly all.
Pierre Bergé is the son of a tax official and a Montessori teacher, both anarchists, from near Bordeaux. He went to Paris
after finishing school in La Chapelle and his first day in the capital came close to being his last. He was walking on the
Champs Elysées when the prominent poet Jacques Prévert nearly landed on him during a botched suicide.
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"He fell. Comme ?a!" Bergé says. "They took him to the hospital. I didn't know it was Jacques Prévert. I learnt later from
the newspaper."
Bergé was infatuated with art and artistry and soon showed he knew how to promote talent. He hooked up with the equally
youthful painter Bernard Buffet, who had made some interesting early work but was quickly subsiding into repetition and
mediocrity.
Buffet became hugely successful as far as sales went but his very success created a backlash and he was scorned both by the
avant garde and France's cultural powers-that-be. Even Picasso, who was normally diplomatic about his fellow artists, chided
Jean Cocteau for his friendship with Buffet.
Bergé somewhat blamed himself for this. "He became bitter and consoled himself with alcohol and sex," he wrote of Buffet in
Les Jours. "He painted always with a sort of rage, as if to revenge himself for this celebrity. He would have liked to begin
again, to return to the painting which he had loved in his youth... It was too late. I had been complicit, probably guilty. I
had believed too much in his genius. All that went bad. A war of merchants began. The worst got him."
But then in 1958, Bergé, who was 28, met Saint Laurent, who was six years younger. They became lovers. The year before, Saint
Laurent had taken over as head designer at the house of Dior after Dior's unexpected death at the age of 51. Saint Laurent's
spring collection made him a star.
But his subsequent collections did less well. Then, in 1960, he anticipated the way he would embrace culture and cultural
politics in his work by up-marketing the beatnik styles of the Left Bank - Angry Young Man turtlenecks, Brando-esque black
leather jackets - and the mockery of the bon ton of haute couture, to say nothing of the fashion media, was savage.
According to the gossip it was at the urging of the owner of Dior, Marcel Boussac, that Saint Laurent was almost immediately
conscripted into the army, then fighting the Algerian war. He endured 20 days of brutal treatment before winding up in a
military hospital. This was where he got the news that he had been sacked from Dior. He wound up in a mental hospital, where
he was given electric shock therapy and pumped full of psycho-active drugs. Saint Laurent never doubted that his later mental
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problems, and his drug dependence, began then and there.
In November 1960 he was discharged from hospital. Bergé secured financing from J Mack Robinson, an entrepreneur from Atlanta,
Georgia, and they launched the Saint Laurent couture house the following year. Perhaps he had chosen a duff talent with
Buffet, but he was confident he had a winner in Saint Laurent and it was Bergé who kept things going. He was needed.
"Yves was funny and he was witty. But he wasn't gifted for happiness. He was very depressed," says a woman close to them.
"Pierre was the father figure. He always was the one who kept things together. He got him support. He put together a gang."
The Yves posse would at one time or another include Loulou de la Falaise, Talitha Pol, Betty Catroux and Thaddée Klossowski,
the son of the artist Balthus, and they were key. They were pretty, witty and buzzy, a fiercely protective coven devoted to
the diffident designer with the letterbox smile. At their helm was Clara Saint, a Chilean heiress.
Rather like Warhol's Factory, I suggest?
"Yes. But they had social positions. Or they had jobs. So there weren't the suicides," she says. However Talitha Pol, the
ravishing daughter of a Dutch painter, and her husband John Paul Getty Jr, were likened by Saint Laurent to Scott
Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned, and she did overdose on heroin in Rome in 1971, but no, she did not commit suicide.
In 1969 Saint Laurent and Bergé bought a flat at 55 rue de Babylone, a two-storey space with a garden which was relatively
unchanged since it had been decorated in 1927 by the minimalist Jean-Michel Frank for an American who never actually lived
there having been wiped out in the depression.
Restoring it took two years. Bergé and Saint Laurent set to buying furniture, objets d'art, sculpture and paintings. Bergé
had already begun collecting before meeting Saint Laurent, but in a fairly small way.
"I bought a Chinese goose. In bronze," he says. "It was fantastic, 18th century. And a bull by Giambologna. And a wonderful
marble medallion. Louis XIV. And also unicorns."
In Saint Laurent, Bergé found a collecting partner like no other. Most art collectors - even the speculators and trophy
hunters who were the motors of the recent boom - have an obsessive gene. But few have come close to the obsessiveness of
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Saint Laurent, whose hunger for art was also a strategy for survival.
"He really needed beauty. Ugliness hurt his eyes," says Valérie Lalonde, a Parisian member of the tight Saint Laurent circle,
now married to the pioneer American documentary maker, Richard Leacock. "He was so permeable that he really needed great
things," agrees Joan Juliet Buck. "Great art, great literature, great music, great dance. It cheered him up. It was food for
the soul for him."
Saint Laurent once told her: "Symmetry calms me down, lack of symmetry makes me crazy."
At the beginning, Bergé and Saint Laurent would go on their art hunts together. "The first thing we bought was a beautiful
piece of African art - Senufo," Bergé says. "It's from Mali perhaps, or Burkina Faso. We bought it from the African art
dealer, Charles Ratton."
Did they ever disagree on an acquisition?
"No. About art? Never. In life, from time to time, yes. But about art? Never!"
Nor did they seek the help of consultants. "We never had a guide," Bergé says. "But we trusted three people." He scribbles
down their names, Nicolas and Alexis Kugel, from whom they bought objets d'art, and Alain Tarica, from whom they'd buy
sculpture and paintings.
The launch of the YSL scent Opium in 1977 was a turning point. Saint Laurent was a superstar. At the end of the 1970s, when
Le Palace and New Jimmy's were the Paris equivalents of Studio 54 and Xenon, he came as close to being a public presence as
he would ever be. Then, at the beginning of the 80s, his long process of withdrawal from the public eye began and he would
lose himself increasingly in art.
Bergé and Saint Laurent separated as a couple in the mid-70s but remained united in friendship and in business. In 1983 they
bought the Chateau Gabriel in Normandy, near Deauville.
"In Marrakech they had a village," a friend exaggerates. "Well, two or three houses... and they had a place in Tangier. And
Pierre kept his old apartment in the Lutécia for years."
Collecting kept them glued together. They bought their first major piece of fine art, Madame LR, an oak piece by Constantin
Brancusi, from Alain Tarica. Soon they were acquiring choice pieces by Matisse, Picasso, Klee and Mondrian, and much of this
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visual energy went directly into charging Saint Laurent's work.
"Yes," agrees Bergé, "And Bonnard. And Picasso. But he designed his famous Mondrian collection in 1965. And we bought our
first Mondrian in 1972. Now we have five Mondrians."
I note the present tense. Did Saint Laurent have a specific Mondrian in mind when he designed the dress?
"Yes, yes, yes. Because he bought a Mondrian book at that time. And you have to understand, the Mondrian on which he designed
that collection is a real Mondrian. I mean, he copied it line for line, almost."
There were also the objets d'art. And the design art, including art deco. Hard-core modernists had long dismissed art deco as
effete, unserious - and oblivion had claimed such past masters of the form as Jean Dunand and Eileen Gray. Bergé and Saint
Laurent had no qualms whatsoever.
"We started to collect art deco, especially Dunand, in 1966," Bergé says. "We were the first in Paris to collect art deco.
Nobody knew! Even French people. And Eileen Gray the same."
Joan Juliet Buck visited many of the Bergé Saint Laurent domiciles. "The last time I was in Babylone they had the Goya boy in
red there and in the living room they had the Juan Gris. It had astonishing stuff. It also had this collection of Diane de
Poitiers enamels.
"Deauville was totally within the period, totally an 1890 house," she says. Proust was the governing spirit there with
different guest rooms named for different characters.
"I don't think they took one step out of period with that house.
"In Morocco they were quite clever, because what was precious about it was the large brocades. There was a lot of upholstered
work. The Villa Majorelle, their house in Marrakech, was all about wall panels... the raw crystal candelabras... the
banquettes... the snakeskin marquetry... the tortoise-shaped clock... It was all very decorative."
There was nothing remotely methodical about the way the pair collected. "I don't collect. I accumulate," Saint Laurent told
Joan Juliet Buck in 1987. He noted that he sometimes made major discoveries by peering into shop windows on late-night walks.
This reliance on serendipity shaped the collection. There is a near-total absence of American work and, aside from a couple
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of canvases by the pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones, not much from the UK either. Indeed, I assume that this was a matter of
choice. Far from it.
"No. We don't have American art. And we are very sorry about that," Bergé says, again using that desolating present tense. "I
would have liked very much to buy a Barnett Newman for instance. But we never asked an art dealer. Oh, you know - 'We have an
empty wall and we would like a Rothko please. Can you find a Rothko for us?' Never. We just find a painting... Pure hasard!"
Sheer chance.
Another thing about the collection intrigues me. A framed photograph by Helmut Newton hangs on the ground floor of the
foundation. Joan Juliet Buck wrote of the rue de Babylone: "There are photographs of the people he loved, Marie-Laure
de Noailles, Francine Weisweiller, Lily Brik, Mayakovsky, Andy Warhol, Loulou de la Falaise, Violette Leduc, René Crevel, Pat
Cleveland, Cocteau, Margot Fonteyn."
Bergé was also well aware of Robert Mapplethorpe, whom he described thus in Les Jours: "Mapplethorpe, when I knew him in
Paris, was far from being celebrated for having made the difficult work he would make... He fabricated bijoux from wire to
make a living. It wasn't much of a living."
But there are no photographs in the auction. Are there any in the collection?
"No. We don't have any photographs," Bergé says.
Why not? They were in the fashion business. They worked with some of the greatest photographers in the world.
"Because," Bergé says equably, "I think photography is like fashion. That means it is not an art. But fashion and photography
need an artist to exist."
Irving Penn is not an artist?
"I admire very much Irving Penn. Yes, he is the most close to an artist. But the result? It is not art, I think."
I observe that Henri Cartier-Bresson gave up being a great photographer in order to become a not-great painter.
"I love Cartier-Bresson. I knew him very well with his famous small Leica. He was a genius. Saint Laurent is a genius,
Cartier-Bresson is a genius, Irving Penn is a genius. And Balenciaga and Chanel. But where is the work of art? That is the
paradox of the fashion business, of the couturier.
"Saint Laurent is an artist, a great artist. But you cannot hang a dress like a painting."
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Whether as an art or an elevated practice, does haute couture still exist after Saint Laurent? "Not at all. It's a joke. It's
a joke."
This highlights one of the great strengths of the Bergé Saint Laurent collection, which is its peculiar Frenchness, the way
that the work they acquired, even the most radical pieces, was effortlessly subsumed into the classical tradition. Saint
Laurent described the process thus: "Often when I buy an object it sleeps with me the first night. I look at it from every
side and the next day it takes its place."
But Saint Laurent was becoming increasingly shut-in during the 1990s. "He would use any kind of drug that was available. But
he mainly used alcohol," says a friend. He would potter around his various properties. He had hardly poked his nose into the
garden in Babylone in 20 years. "It's either too hot or too cold," he said. Still, Bergé managed to keep the business
thriving.
The collecting continued unabated. But there were no more mutual jaunts nor late-night peerings into shop windows. "As you
know, he was not very... How would you say? Mobile," Bergé says. "But I brought him things. I brought his things." Saint
Laurent's social life had all but ceased.
"At the end you never saw him," mourns a once-close friend. "He had withdrawn. He hated the media, he hated the attention."
Bergé wrote of their close friend Andy Warhol: "He became a subject for tabloids. Like a bullfighter, a dancer, a singer, a
couturier. In a word a star."
This was meat and drink for Warhol. For Saint Laurent it was torture. And it got worse. It was rumoured that he had broken
both arms, perhaps because he was on medication. A brain tumour was spoken of. A friend says, "He didn't want to live."
Bergé and Saint Laurent entered into a formal civil union shortly before the couturier's death. Bergé is his legal heir.
I ask Bergé whether Saint Laurent ever expressed any intentions over the future of the collection.
"No," he says. "Never."
So the decision to disassemble the collection was his alone?
"OK! It is my decision," Bergé says. "Because since the very beginning with Yves I organised everything. And I don't want to
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die tomorrow without dealing with my collection. And to have the money to give to the foundation. And to know what to do with
the money."
I observe that most collections differ from the Bergé Saint Laurent collection in that the works remain great when they are
dispersed. But the Bergé Saint Laurent collection derives much of its power from its juxtapositions - the intricate
conversations of piece with piece.
Bergé accepts all this. But it makes no difference.
"Those apartments made complete sense as long as they were occupied," Philippe Garner of Christie's says. "But with Saint
Laurent himself gone, I'm sure the last thing Bergé would have wanted to see is them become a mausoleum. They could not be
frozen in time and roped off with velvet ropes. There's something so intensely personal about those rooms. It was not for
display. It was to satisfy personal needs. And there's an intimacy to that. It was Saint Laurent and Bergé."
Bergé surely agrees with this.
"Yves Saint Laurent is dead," he has said. "The collection doesn't mean anything any more."
The Warhol portrait of Saint Laurent in his office is one of the few relics. Bergé tells me the collection is their self-
portrait. Half of such a self-portrait is a zero, a mirror that reflects nothing.
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