Sun, May 11, 2003 page12

• Antique trade stays profitable

  Karl Lagerfield, a Paris-based couterier, made US$21.3 million from his most recent auction in 2000. The sale of his art-deco collection should enable him to indulge his tastes further

  • By Wendy Moonan / NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
  • • 
    • 
    • 

  "I like to collect, but I'm not crazy to own things," said Karl Lagerfeld, the Paris-based couturier. "I'm a fashion person. I'm excited by finding things, but in the end there's an accumulation and I want to get rid of it." He said that was why he was selling his collection of French 20th-century decorative arts on Thursday at Sotheby's in Paris. "I'm buying 21st-century things now," he said. "My three passions are fashion, books and photographs."

  Over the last two decades Lagerfeld has auctioned off other collections. In April 2000, for example, he made US$21.3 million selling his 18th-century objets d'art and French furniture at Christie's in Monaco.

  

  A hammered-oak table by Marcel Coard at Sotheby's will be part of the French 20th-century decorative arts sale.

  PHOTO: SOTHEBY'S/NY TIMES

  He acquired most of his French Art Deco furniture, rugs, lamps and ceramics at three Paris galleries: Jacques de Vos, Anne-Sophie Duval and Galerie Vallois. "These people are the greatest experts in the world," he said. "I've been collecting Art Deco since the 1960s. I like their taste, and I trust them."

  One wonders how he finds the time to shop. He continues to design haute couture and ready-to-wear for Chanel, and he does ready-to-wear lines for Fendi and his own label. He photographs his advertising campaigns, does fashion spreads for magazines and shoots album covers for groups like the Rolling Stones. He owns a publishing house called 7L and runs a Paris bookstore by the same name (at 7 Rue de Lille). His library has more than 240,000 volumes.

  The Sotheby's sale includes works by lesser-known talents as well as the most famous designers of the 1920s and '30s, including Jacques Adnet, Pierre Lagrain, Paul Dupre-Lafon and Jean-Michel Frank. There are 51 pieces by Frank in the auction. "No gallery has 50 pieces by Frank," Lagerfeld said.

  "Frank was a Modernist who was able to combine his love of beautiful materials -- sharkskin, rare woods, vellum -- with his preference for strict, geometric forms," Patricia Bayer writes in Art Deco Interiors (Little, Brown, 1990). In decorating a Paris apartment for Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles, Frank covered the walls of a salon with large squares of glazed parchment to make a sleek but sumptuous background for his rectilinear sofa and chairs. The cabinets were sheathed in straw marquetry.

  The Sotheby's auction includes a few Frank classics, like his X-shaped, chiseled-oak Diabolo table from the 1930s. There are two of these tables, each estimated at US$45,000 to US$67,000. A rarer model in the sale is his "pineapple table," a low table of sanded oak raised on stepped, pyramidal legs. Its estimate is US$56,000 to US$90,000.

  More amusing are the plaster sconces resembling stylized masks. The brothers Alberto and Diego Giacometti made them for Frank in the 1930s. They look like the face-protectors worn by fencers. The most useful item may be a patinated white plaster lamp with wildly scrolling handles, also made for Frank by the Giacomettis.

  Some of Lagerfeld's antiques are quite rare. "A lot of items in the sale are things you don't see very often," said Gerard Widdershoven, the owner of Maison Gerard, an Art Deco gallery in Manhattan. He was referring to works by Jean Besnard (1889-1958), a ceramist whose abstract brown-on-white patterns seem African-inspired.

  "I love things that show African influence," Lagerfeld said. "I like the transposing of cultures." Besnard made vases, lamps, animal sculptures and enameled pots.

  "Besnard's work is coming back into vogue because it goes so well with furniture from the late 1930s, 1940s and 1950s," Widdershoven said.

  Another ceramic artist well represented in the sale is Emile Decoeur (1876-1953), an art potter who made stoneware and porcelain vessels in Asian shapes. "He was known for his understated, sophisticated, monochrome glazes," Widdershoven said. There are 24 Decoeur pots in the sale, in celadon, tan, gray and brown. Estimates range from US$800 to US$7,000.

  Lagerfeld has a special appreciation for ceramics. "He identified a few ceramic artists he found important and went out to find the best examples he could," said Barbara Deisroth, director of Sotheby's department of 20th-century works of art. "He's into texture, tactile quality and serenity. He likes shapes that are pure and colors that are Chinese or African-inspired."

  Marcel Coard (1889-1975) was a French decorator and furniture designer influenced by African, Oceanic and Asian art. "He did a lot of very refined, one-of-a-kind pieces," Widdershoven said. "He worked with lapis lazuli, silver and tortoiseshell inlay." Lagerfeld is selling Coard furniture in chiseled oak. Jean Cocteau's brother Paul once owned the African-style hammered-oak center table in the sale.

  The Paris couturier Jacques Doucet (1853-1929), a noted collector and connoisseur, was another Coard patron. Around 1912 Doucet sold his paintings, books and 18th-century French furniture and took up Modernism. He got a new apartment and persuaded Paul Iribe and Legrain to help him decorate it. "Doucet's apartment, when it was completed, was called a `temple of Modern Art' by one critic, and in that temple a pantheon of designers and artists displayed their talents, in without doubt the most outstanding example of a modern interior at that time," Bayer writes in "Art Deco Interiors." "Unfortunately, few people saw the inside." Along with Coard, Eileen Gray, Pierre Chareau, Rene Lalique and Jean Dunand also contributed.

  Coard's style, Deisroth said, was "not 1925 high-style Deco." She added: "It's beyond that refinement. This is gutsier and more visceral. There is no ornamentation."

  Maison Desny, a Paris decorating firm on the Champs-Elysees from 1927 to 1933, created furniture, rugs, lighting, murals and decorative accessories for clients. One of the most striking lots in the sale is a silvered-metal centerpiece that is a study in geometric forms. Jigsaw-style, a dozen shiny vases somehow fit together on a rectangular mirrored plateau. "Very few of these were made and it's rare to have a full set," Deisroth said. "Andy Warhol had a set, without the tray, that we sold in 1988." Made in the 1930s, the Desny centerpiece is estimated to sell for US$45,000 to US$67,000.

  Lagerfeld has a highly trained eye. "It's a well-edited collection," Widdershoven said. "Everything is good quality."

  Deisroth added: "It is a very cohesive collection. It holds together better than anything I've sold before."
• Most Popular

  • 1

    US to deliver 10 new F-16s, source says

  • 2

    Coco Gauff falls in Berlin after French Open victory

  • 3

    Taipei begins park renovations amid resident protests

  • 4

    Taipei court rules in favor of bureau on coal-related fines for power plant

  • 5

    US involvement in Iran could affect Taiwan: expert