Living Lagerfeld

Photo by Francois Lacour, courtesy Chanel

Zaha Hadid's Contemporary Art Container for the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, here in its Tokyo iteration.

For more on Karl Lagerfeld and the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, click here

Constantin Brancusi Elie Nadelman James Turrell Jackson Pollock Nobuyoshi Araki Peter Behrens Erwan Bouroullec Daniel Buren

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Art is something you feel. You don’t have to own it. But I’m a slave to my books. I’m not a bibliophile. It’s the inside that is interesting to me.

Where do you keep them all?

At my apartment and elsewhere. I have a huge photography studio next door [on the Rue de Lille] with a bookshop in the front part [stocked with beautiful books on art, fashion, design, decoration, photography and gardens plus a selection of international art magazines] that is doing very well. In fact, I have three houses—I mean, I have three houses right there [around the Quai Voltaire] and other houses elsewhere. I turned a nine-room apartment into a huge suite only for me, with a kitchen to warm up things that people can bring when I call. I have no servants in there when I’m home. Nobody. I want to be alone, like Garbo. My studio next door is a huge place, and there is an apartment over there for guests. My library there has almost 60,000 books. When I leave my apartment where I stay for the night, I have a town house for lunch and guests and books next door. All these places are three minutes from one another.

A town house for lunch—I like that.

I’m a guest in my own house. I hate the smell of cooking. And in this little town house, you know what I am doing with the decor? It’s called the French house because I am mixing 18th-century furniture with French Art Deco by Louis Süe and André Mare.

You would never give up the 18th century completely, would you? 

No, it lives in me, but I don’t have to live in it.

In New York, you are living in the 21st-century design of John Pawson, who did the interiors of the Gramercy Park building. Architecture is also very important to you.

Today, modern art and architecture—what is the difference? Architecture is conceptual art, in a way. The drama of contemporary art is that it errs on the side of too much pretentious thinking, too much talking, not enough action.  People like Turrell don’t explain. You just get the message.

You had a collaborative hand in the architecture of the Chanel Mobile Art Pavilion, Zaha Hadid’s glamorous space-age gallery, whose gentle sweep of gleaming white arched panels is an abstract evocation of the iconic Chanel handbag.

Zaha did more than I did. And yes, it is the best object of the show, like a walk-in Brancusi. Zaha has destroyed the dryness of the post-Bauhaus aura that covered the world, all those ugly buildings and airports that came after the genius of the original movement.

What have you liked about the artists in the show so far?

The Japanese artist Tabaimo, who made a huge well [rimmed in black quilted leather and inhabited by video images of fantastical swamp life], is my favorite. I like Yoko Ono’s Wish Tree [covered in red blossoms to which visitors are invited to attach white strips on which they’ve written their own wishes]. It’s like decoration, with an unpretentious lightness. But I thought there were too many objects for the space. It will be different in New York. Another spring, another love—even if it’s fall. Life is about change, and art is about change, too.

"Living Lagerfeld" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.