More Is More: Saint Laurent and Bergé’s Style Flies at Auction Again

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/arts/design/pierre-berge-yves-saint-laurent-style.html

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PARIS — They were among the most influential tastemakers of our age. The French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, who died in 2008, and Pierre Bergé, his business partner and longtime companion, who died last year, created opulent, eclectically furnished homes in Paris, Provence, Normandy and Morocco.

“Le goût YSL-Bergé,” as it has been called (“goût” being French for “taste”), has long been admired as an antidote to the monochromatic minimalism of contemporary interiors. It has also breathed much-needed life into the ailing market for antiques.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, Sotheby’s in Paris sold artworks and objects from Mr. Bergé’s final residences. Featuring 975 lots, many acquired while he was living with Mr. Saint Laurent, the sale, titled “From One Home to Another,” was held in collaboration with Mr. Bergé’s own auction house, Pierre Bergé & Associés, which will also sell his library in December.

With a presale estimate of 4.7 million euros to €7.2 million, or about $5.3 million to $8.2 million, Sotheby’s sale was not in the same league as Christie’s blockbuster YSL-Bergé auction in 2009. Described at the time as “the sale of the century” (at least to that point), but likened by Mr. Bergé to “an exorcism,” the three-day bidding frenzy in the Grand Palais in Paris raised a final revised total of €342.4 million.

Nonetheless, Sotheby’s used its recently expanded Paris rooms to imaginatively recreate Mr. Bergé’s four distinctive homes. This presentation, together with the sense that this could be a last chance to buy a piece of the YSL-Bergé legend, helped prices climb far beyond what equivalent pieces would have made in other contexts.

“The prices are incredible. Everything is very expensive,” Marc Lordonnois, a Paris lawyer who collects furniture, said Tuesday evening. For instance, a pair of 18th-century Southern German rock crystal candlesticks soared to €60,000 with fees, 10 times the upper estimate. “It shows how people are interested in souvenirs,” Mr. Lordonnois added.

Earlier, during the first morning session of the sale, Mr. Lordonnois had seen a modern patinated iron garden table and four chairs sell for €32,500. Similar sets of garden tables and chairs can routinely be bought for a few hundred euros at French flea markets.

“The presentation was really well done,” Mr. Lordonnois said, referring to Sotheby’s recreation of Mr. Bergé’s interiors. “The way they mixed things was great.”

As was the case at Christie’s 2009 sale at the Grand Palais, this latest YSL-Bergé auction included some notable paintings. From 1950 to 1958, Mr. Bergé was the companion of Bernard Buffet, a once-acclaimed French figurative painter now fallen from critical favor. The Sotheby’s sale included 12 paintings the artist gave to Mr. Bergé, the most coveted of which proved to be the 1956 work “Couple Nu Assis,” a stark depiction of a seated naked couple, at €705,000.

Over all, the “From One Home to Another” sale raised €27.4 million, the highest total Sotheby’s has achieved for a house contents sale in France.

Every lot sold. The highest sales price was €2.4 million, given for the Orientalist tour de force “The Harem’s Gate, Souvenir of Cairo,” painted in 1876 by Jean-Jules-Antoine Lecomte du Nouÿ. Showing slumbering guards outside a seraglio at dawn, this richly detailed canvas had been estimated at €400,000 to €600,000 and set a new auction high for the artist.

“That partnership was the first to create a lifestyle synonymous with an aesthetic,” Michael S. Smith, the interior designer who decorated the White House during the Obama presidency, said of Mr. Saint Laurent and Mr. Bergé. “The drama of that aesthetic, the way they layered rare objects and used heavy, fantasy-like ideas was incredibly impactful,” he added.

But does this final round of major YSL-Bergé auctions represent an end or a beginning?

“I don’t know. I hope the pendulum swings,” said Mr. Smith, who is maintaining the YSL-Bergé legacy in his own way, creating opulent and personal interiors for his clients.

The eclectic collections gathered in four homes decorated by Mr. Smith were recently auctioned by Christie’s in their midrange “Collector” series of decorative arts sales. As was the case with the Sotheby’s Pierre Bergé auction, association with a well-known tastemaker — if not a famous owner — made these objects more desirable.

On Sept. 26 in New York, Christie’s “Rooms as Portraits: Michael S. Smith, a Tale of Two Cities, New York & Los Angeles” sale of two private collections found buyers for 96 percent of the 220 lots, raising $3.3 million.

And then there is the “Cabana” phenomenon. Founded in 2014 by Martina Mondadori Sartogo, the London-based heiress to the Zanussi home appliances fortune, “Cabana” is a twice-yearly magazine sumptuously illustrated with vibrant details from distinctive homes and historic buildings, evoking an exotic, Latin-Moorish chic that surely would have appealed to Mr. Saint Laurent and Mr. Bergé. Issued in a range of cloth covers, each copy weighs almost four pounds and costs 22 pounds, or about $29. The magazine has a circulation of about 85,000, according to Ms. Mondadori Sartogo.

“Cabana is a magazine that wants to be a physical place where people meet and look at different things,” Ms. Mondadori Sartogo said. “We use interiors as a tool of inspiration. We mix high and low, with things that wouldn’t make the grade in a Sotheby’s sale.”

But can the flamboyant, cross-cultural mixing of “le goût YSL-Bergé” and its followers challenge the global hegemony of the plain white interior?

Well, Cabana now has its own online store of home furnishings. Its “Thanksgiving” collection has Persian rug-style tablecloth priced at £572, and an orange Murano glass tumbler costing £124. And in April, the French chain Roche Bobois — known as a retailer of safe modernist furniture in many shades of gray — introduced a more sumptuous “Globe Trotter” collection, created by the Dutch designer Marcel Wanders. Deep purples and reds, and Moorish furniture shapes, all echo the YSL-Bergé taste.

But Mr. Smith, the Obamas’ decorator, remains skeptical that a “maximalist” revolution is about to transform today’s vanilla-white interiors.

“YSL taste was never mainstream,” he said. It was “a risk,” he added. “And safe always feels better.”