Yves Saint Laurent’s on-off partner Pierre Bergé’s rare art and artefacts to be auctioned
Eclectic items belonging to co-founder of the YSL haute couture house include paintings by Bernard Buffet, a Picasso sculpture and many first editions
Yves Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé shared a passion for refined and beautiful objects throughout their on-off romance and business relationship that lasted half a century.
Their homes were filled with an eclectic mix of priceless paintings, sculptures, objets d’art, archaeological artefacts, African masks, books and manuscripts, all chosen carefully to sit well together.
After Saint Laurent died in 2008 of brain cancer, Bergé, co-founder of the YSL haute couture house, began disposing of key parts of the unique collection to fund two cultural foundations dedicated to the designer.
Now, after Bergé’s death aged 86 last September, preparations are under way for what is expected to be the final big auction of personal and private items belonging to one of France’s most passionate collectors.
A total of about 1,200 objects, the contents of Bergé’s four luxury properties including his residence in Rue Bonaparte on Paris’s Left Bank – an 18th century house where Édouard Manet was born in 1832 – and the Villa Mabrouka in Tangiers, Morocco, that he shared with Saint Laurent, will be sold by Sotheby’s in October.
The sale of works, from antiquity to modern and much in between including tableware and furniture, will take place over three days. It will be followed a few months later by an auction of books and manuscripts from Bergé’s celebrated library, including first editions of Gustave Flaubert, Charles Dickens, Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde.
Among the highlights of the auction, in association with Pierre Bergé & Associés, will be 10 paintings from the 1950s by the French expressionist Bernard Buffet, who was Bergé’s lover until he met Saint Laurent in 1958, and a Picasso sculpture called Masque, produced in 1961.
The sale is being overseen by the businessman’s long-time partner and legal heir, the American landscape architect Madison Cox, 59, whom married Bergé in May 2017, months before his death.