60 19th March 2011 international events Gourdon sale makes Paris
■ €40-60m collection further strengthens auction profile of the French capital
■ Salon du Dessin at the heart of busy season
Anne Crane reports
AS spring approaches and the cafés and boulevards across across the Channel fill up with shoppers taking the early sunshine, the sap rises in the art world. There is a flush of spring fairs, high- profile auctions and dealer events to tempt collectors to spend their Euros and other currencies.
The next few weeks will be particularly
busy. Alongside the usual Salons and associated events, two big-ticket auctions are taking place in the French capital. Christie’s who made headlines in
2009 with their €374m sale of the Yves St Laurent collection, are set to make another splash with their three-day auction at the end of March of the Collections of the Château de Gourdon held, like the St Laurent sale, off site, and estimated to fetch in the region of €40-60m.
Aguttes sale brings Provence to Paris
ANOTHER collection, that of Christine and Thierry de Chirée, has provided Claude Aguttes with some 700 lots for their sale at the Drouot in Paris on March 29-30. From their home of the Convent of the
Visitation near Avignon, the collection features furniture, paintings, haut époque and other objets d’art, as well as an ensemble of Old Master drawings (well timed for a sale in Paris Drawings Week). Along with works by Antoine Coypel
and Nicholas Largillière, on offer will be this drawing of a woman in a cloak holding a fan by Jean Baptiste Desheys (1729-1765), that is estimated at €8000- 10,000.
Above: part of the silver and grey lacquered and engraved wood panelling created by Jean Dunand for a smoking room for Madame Colette Aboucaya, estimated at €3m-4m in the Château de Gourdon sale at Christie’s.
Right: this Cubist-inspired standard lamp in lacquered tubular metal made by Eileen Gray c.1924 for her own use is estimated at €400,000-600,000 in the Château de Gourdon Sale.
This will be followed at the beginning
of April by a four-day sale at Drouot of works of art from the collection of Commandant Paul-Louis Weiller to be offered by Gros et Delettrez. Indeed the cusp of March/April
promises to be especially busy for anyone pitching up in Paris, for this is also the time of the Semaine du Dessin or Drawings Week. It centres around the annual Salon du Dessin held at the Palais de la Bourse on the Right Bank,
but the salerooms capitalise on this event by holding specialist auctions of art on paper, and numerous institutions in Paris and beyond also mark the week with their own exhibitions. Running concurrently with the Salon
is the Pavillon des Arts & Design, another specialist fair which is staged in the Tuileries. The activities are not confined to
Paris. Indeed the last weekend of March sees the country’s national association
CHÂTEAU DE GOURDON COLLECTION
CHRISTIE’S promise a serious feast for followers of 20th century decorative arts at the end of March with their sale of the Collections of the Château de Gourdon. The three-day sale with over 900 lots is
to be held in five sessions from March 29 to 31 at the Palais de Tokyo, an imposing and appropriately Inter-War building in the 16th Arrondisement. It offers an impressive selection of key pieces of Art Deco and and Inter-War modernism by the biggest names in the field and is expected to make €40-60m. The collection was assembled by
The 9½ x 7½in (24 x 19cm) portrait
is perhaps a study for the artist’s oil painting shown at the Salon in 1763. There is also a group of 50 landscape
drawings of Provence and Italy by Jean- Antoine Constantin d’Aix. The estimates range from around €500 up to €10,000.
www.aguttes.com
Laurent Négro, an enthusiastic devotee whose aim has been to put together a chronological assemblage that charts the development of French decorative arts of the 20th century, from Art Nouveau in the opening years through the main exponents of the Deco style and on to the development of Modernism. Purchased from auctions and specialist dealers, his impressive collection has been
put together over almost two decades and has been displayed in a private museum at the family home, the Château de Gourdon – a mountain-top castle overlooking the Gorges du Loup near Grasse in the South of France. What distinguishes the Château’s
collections is the volume, range and quality of pieces chosen. Not just big names, but key pieces by big names, and not just items with provenance, but items with significant provenances, made for important patrons or for the designer’s own use. Many of the star lots from decorative arts auctions held over the past decade or so have found their way into this sale. A few examples illustrate these key
attractions. Amongst no fewer than than 45 works by the key Deco designer Emile Jacques Ruhlmann is a black lacquer writing desk that he created in 1929 for the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs and was then acquired by André Tardieu,
of auctioneers, SYMEV, promote their profession with Un Week-end au Marteau (A Weekend at the Auctions). Right across the country, its members
launch special themed auctions, viewings, lectures and a host of other initiatives designed to get the general public to find out about their local auction house. Here and on the following four pages,
ATG looks in more detail at what’s coming up over the next few weeks.
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