Monsieur Yves' garden

I recently wrote a piece on the fire sale – read auction – of Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection. Then, a few weeks later, all quite unexpectedly, I ended up visiting the Majorelle Garden in Marrakech, where the late fashion designer’s ashes were scattered following his death in 2008.

Located a short walk out the old city, along the wide boulevards of the French colonial district, the Majorelle Garden is prickly place. Literally. It is filled with hardy shrubs and cacti. Established by the French painter Jacques Majorelle in 1924, the garden has been open to the public since 1947. Monsieur Yves and his partner Pierre Bergé acquired the garden, which includes a defiantly blue modernist villa amidst the greenery, in 1980. 

Walking around the raked garden, pausing to look at the graffiti on the thick bamboo stems, listening to Mark Coetzee speak of his encounters with Monsieur Yves at a breakfast deli in Paris in the 1990s, smiling too at the remembered recollection of Bergé describing his lover as “a man of exceptional intelligence practicing the trade of an imbecile", I found my mind wandering off elsewhere. 

Earlier this year, over lunch in Kloof Street, Lin Sampson complained to me that a lot of newspaper journalism nowadays is shorthand for what already exists on the internet. There was little if any personal experience or insight contained in these cut ‘n’ paste pieces. Perhaps the piece I wrote on Monsieur Yves for the Sunday Times was a case in point. 

Sitting in the garden, looking at the unembellished memorial column erected in his honour, I was reminded of the unavoidable honesty attached to a personal encounter. I never met Monsieur Yves.

Anyway, here is the piece I wrote:

It’s his myopic blue eyes I want to see, nothing else. Trawling the vast image archive online that responds to the entry “Yves Saint Laurent”, I find myself oddly frustrated. It’s those thick-framed glasses: they feature in almost every picture of the Algerian-born Frenchman, a shield to the enquiring gaze of the world.

There they are, framing his coy reserve as he faces the world, fresh faced, 21, the newly appointed head of the House of Dior. And there they are again, behind the scenes at a 1970 Paris catwalk show, Monsieur Yves further sporting a raffish silk scarf and tight-fitting safari jacket.

And so it continues, my ambition thwarted by the endless pictures of the sartorially composed couturier in, you guessed it, glasses. The more frantically I search, the more I find myself getting lost in the smoky after burn of a life well lived – one in which he always seemed to be wearing glasses. Then suddenly, yes, no, could it be?

It is a Polaroid portrait of Monsieur Yves by Mister Warhol. It was taken in June 1972. He is wearing a dinner jacket, yellow polka dot bowtie and vertically striped shirt. More importantly, he is barefaced, without glasses. But, for all their nakedness, his eyes remain obscure, lost in the imperfection of an aging Polaroid. Damn.

Of course, I know that Monsieur Yves had shockingly blue eyes. Why all this fuss? Call me foolish, but I want to study them for clues. After all, these were the eyes that helped put together one of the twentieth century’s great art collections.

In an art world prone to hype, where tags like “highly important” are used to puff second-rate collections, Monsieur Yves’s collection truly deserved the accolade important. Amassed without the aid of an advisor, his only confidante his lifelong business partner and lover, Pierre Bergé, the pair’s Paris residences were the stuff of legend.

Paintings by Picasso and Matisse hung in close proximity to collectable crystals and silver decorative ware, also an armchair by Eileen Gray, the later an audacious Art Deco masterpiece. So jam-packed were the pair’s separate residences, they hung a Monet painting in the toilet of one.

The collection, which included a rare African inspired sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, was the outcome of half century’s activity. Started in the late 1950s, when Monsieur Yves first met the older Bergé, it gained manic fervour in the 1970s when Opium become the biggest selling perfume brand in the world.

More than mere trophies, the pieces in the collection held together their tumultuous personal relationship while also giving Monsieur Yves great creative inspiration. Take his 1965 Fall collection, its shift dresses inspired by the minimalist grids of his Mondrian canvases.

Fashion observer Suzy Menkes, writing in the New York Times shortly after the inimitable couturier’s death from cancer in June 2008, summed up the audacity of Monsieur Yves’ collection at his Rue de Babylone apartment as follows: “It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. Incredible art on the wall and you had to resist the urge to gape.”

For decades, however, it was only an elite few who gaped. Death changed all this, Bergé opting to sell the pair’s collection shortly after his lover’s passing.

“The second I knew that Yves was ill, condemned, I knew I would sell everything,” Bergé told the London Telegraph newspaper in January, a few weeks before auction house Christie’s hosted a three-day, 733-lot sale of the pair’s collection of rare art and unusual antiquities.

The collecting world gasped.

“One of the most remarkable ensembles of fine and decorative arts created in the twentieth century,” gushed the Financial Times at the time of the collection’s display at the Grand Palais in Paris. “This happens once every 100 years,” offered Japanese collector Misako Takuku to Agence France-Press. “It’s like a dream.”

2009 has been a terrible year for the art world, even locally. Drought and famine are the more commonly used metaphors, not dreams. All of which made the outcome of the Paris sale that much more dizzying. Records, records, records.

Monsieur Yves’ two beloved Mondrians, one an austere composition in grey, the other a geometrical symphony of blue, yellow and white, fetched R242 million and R162-million respectively (all prices include buyer’s premium). The early Brancusi wood sculpture sold for R328 million. Gray’s unusual “dragon” chair collected a whopping R246 million. All prices that make paupers of the Tretchikoff adoring bidders turned out at the Kebble auction in May.

The headline grabbing final tally for the sale, R4.2 billion (373,935,500 Euro), the biggest-grossing auction of a private collection ever, wasn’t achieved without some effort. Seating had to be arranged for more than 1,000 buyers, 100 telephone lines had to be installed, and eight auctioneers prepped for their marathon shifts. According to one report, a small airport north of Paris witnessed a 35% increase in traffic as bidders arrived in private jets.

The great dispersal of Monsieur Yves’ things is not over yet. Over four days in November, Christie’s, in association with Bergé’s auction house, will be hosting a second sale of personal effects. Almost 1200 items (jewelled pendants, lamps, candle holders, a leather Eames chair, black 2007 Mercedes Benz S Class 350L and Tiffany Studios lamp, to name but a few) will go under the hammer. The sale is expected to achieve a moderate R45 million. (The four day sale eventually netted €8,990,212, including buyer’s premium.)

Perhaps the most striking feature of the auction is the photographic record of the late designers Normandy getaway, Château Gabriel à Bénerville. Built on 74 acre estate by an American family in 1874, the home was styled to evoke the aura of French novelist Marcel Proust’s classic book, À la recherche du temps perdu (translated both as In Search of Lost Time and Remembrance of Things Past.)

“This is my haven between two storms,” said Monsieur Yves of his opulent hideaway, the bricks and mortar of which now belong to a Russian. “I come here to rebuild my strength.” Which no doubt involved taking off those character-defining glasses.