A Man of Style

Courtesy Martine Franck/Magnum Photos

Saint Laurent with Bergé in 1977

Courtesy Sichov/Sipa

Pablo Picasso Mark Rothko Jackson Pollock Fernand Leger J Goya Matisse Barnett Newman YSL/Bergé Auction Fetches Double Its Estimate

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For more than 40 years, the design icon Yves Saint Laurent, who died last June at 71, was the king of Parisian fashion and one of the most celebrated Frenchmen alive. Throughout his career, standing at his side as associate, manager, partner, confidant and longtime lover was Pierre Bergé. Over decades of collecting, the pair amassed hundreds of artworks and precious objects, from Roman marbles and Qing Dynasty sculptures to Picassos and the finest Art Deco furniture pieces, many of which elegantly filled Saint Laurent’s Rue de Babylone duplex and, later, Bergé’s spread in the Rue Bonaparte hôtel particulier where Édouard Manet was born.

This month, Bergé, 78, is selling the majority of the treasures in a 700-lot auction, to take place from the 23rd through the 25th at the Grand Palais, in Paris. It is estimated to earn between €200 million and €300 million ($280-560 million), a sum that, if achieved, would make it one of the most significant single-owner sales of all time. Christie’s is handling it in conjunction with Pierre Bergé & Associés (PBA), the firm that Bergé founded in 2002 after failing in an attempt to buy out and unite the 110 auctioneers that form Drouot, Paris’s historic (some would say archaic) auction house. The entrepreneur has applied to PBA, which handles fine art, books, design, jewelry, tribal art, furniture and antiquities in Paris and Brussels, the same business acumen that helped make ysl the global brand that he and Saint Laurent sold for more than $650 million in 1993.

In addition to PBA, Bergé runs the Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, which preserves and exhibits YSL creations, and plans to use the proceeds from the February sale to launch a new organization to fight aids. He has also restored and owns the Jardin Majorelle, in Morocco, which attracts 650,000 visitors a year, and operates a farm that produces an unlikely French delicacy — caviar — in the Gironde, north of Bordeaux.

One of France’s leading cultural gurus since 1988, when President François Mitterrand appointed him head of the Paris Opéra, Bergé has spent his highly eventful life pulling cultural strings and hobnobbing with the high and mighty: His autobiographical Les Jours s’en vont, je demeure details his relationships with two dozen artists, socialites and politicians. Yet he remains a private figure who seldom expresses himself in public. He was in an unusually expansive mood when he met Simon Hewitt on a blustery fall morning in the foundation’s offices, on the Avenue Marceau between the Champs-Élysées and the Seine, where the YSL fashion house was based for nearly 30 years. Spry, dapper and sometimes waspish, peppering his phrases with superlatives and voilàs, Bergé spoke about Yves Saint Laurent and his own preeminent role in assembling what the French media have dubbed the "sale of the century."

Why did you decide to sell the collection?

I learned that Yves Saint Laurent had terminal brain cancer in April 2007. He died 14 months later. I had plenty of time to reflect, and I soon realized that once he had died, the collection we had built up together would no longer have any meaning. I was not obliged to sell. I am sole legatee. I could have kept the collection, though I don’t know how, as there are more than 700 items in two venues: Yves Saint Laurent’s home, in Rue de Babylone, and mine, in Rue Bonaparte. So first, there was a problem of space. And what would I have done afterward — maybe sold a Picasso or a Matisse from time to time? Not a very satisfactory solution.
Another solution was to go and see the president and the culture minister to try and create a big museum somewhere in Paris. But that would have meant including all the costumes — I have 5,000 of them — plus 15,000 objects and drawings. So a very large space indeed would have been needed! What with French bureaucracy, the time needed to find somewhere and my age, I thought it was all a bit complicated.
The third solution was an auction. For me, this was the right one, for several reasons: It was the easiest and quickest, and I have always believed that we hold art in transit and that one day it must go on its way. I’m very glad about the idea that the art we collected will go to new homes or to museums. For me, that’s most important. People don’t know about the collection yet — they haven’t seen it. With an auction, it will exist. Not least because there will be five catalogues.