The Art of Acquisition – The New York Times


Starting from his childhood, French illustrator Pierre Le-Tan has amassed many things: a Prince Albert tin can, a complete set of Japanese armor, neo-Romantic and Surrealist paintings, a 15th-century Italian marble piece.

Mr. Le-Tan, who died in 2019 At 69, he was best known for his diagonal drawings and watercolors that appeared on New Yorker covers, ad campaigns, and children’s books. He spent most of his life in Paris.

He was also a well-established art and object collector. “I admit that I have thousands of objects,” he wrote. “Today I continue to seek, to find, to acquire, although most of them are nothing but memories.”

But Mr. Le-Tan was also a collector of other collectors and their collections; He took a glance at people like himself who couldn’t help but achieve things. He turned vignettes of some of his encounters with collectors into a picture book, “Few Collectors” was published in France in 2013 and will be published in English by New Vessel Press in April. The book contains most of the collectors’ drawings of the objects and accounts of the people who own them.

There is the Brioni Princess, a bankrupt former aristocrat who is selling her painting collection. There’s an eccentric collector in Rome who keeps creepy wax models of dead criminals in his cellar. There is a man whose apartment in Paris will continue to sell successfully, but is filled with trendy abstract paintings and trinkets that seem “hopelessly uninspired” to Mr. Le-Tan.

There’s also the guy who collects the crumpled papers. “Light and shadows,” says the collector, Mr. Le-Tan, when he wonders what interests him about newspapers. The author is saddened when, after the collector’s death, his nephews unfold the papers and take back his life’s work.

Taken as a whole, these slices of life show something about the strange urge to ruthlessly acquire, even if it comes at a cost. (Mr. Le-Tan often sold objects to pay the bills, then bought more.)

“What I find really refreshing about the book is that it’s incredibly honest about collecting,” said Michael Z. Wise, co-founder of New Vessel Press, who read the book in French and decided to have it translated into English. “He is not afraid to show the negative side of coercion. He’s very honest, but at the same time, collecting for him and the people he portrays is really one of the driving forces in their lives.”

Mr. Le-Tan is able to convey this because he is a driving force in his own right. Andrew Strauss, a dealer and art expert who Managed the 1994 sale of Mr Le-Tan’s belongings at Sotheby’s In Paris, he described the collector’s approach as far-reaching.

Mr. Strauss described Mr. Le-Tan’s taste as “timeless”. It could be anything from Egypt in 1300, a 17th century Persian rug, Chinese furniture, 20th century art, first edition books.” Whatever it was, Mr. Le-Tan had a “wonderful eye”.

This eye, of course, often adapted to his drawings. Whit Stillman, the director of films such as “Metropolitan” and “The Last Days of Disco,” commissioned Mr. Le-Tan to create this film. movie posters and covers for his novels.

“He was a versatile personality, both of whom he was a genius as an artist, yet cultivated broadly and deeply,” said Mr Stillman. “Like his collector’s books, he puts a lot of humor into his work. This wonderful sense of humor in his work and daily life. Being with him was like a constant comedy.”

The book is also often funny and weird. There are wonderful aspects of her that evoke her colorful social scene, “Last time I saw her. [the painting’s] The owner at the New York party – where Andy Warhol is – and he told me the price had been cut in half. It evokes the lost societies of Paris, New York and Rome and their cast of characters. But it’s also poignant, especially when he returns to lost objects and his own possessions.

After Mr. Le-Tan died, most of his collection auction At Sotheby’s, it dissipated as he predicted. He documented other major collections that were dispersed after the deaths.

But in “A Few Collectors,” he impressively writes about what he hopes to leave behind, painting one of the marble statues his daughter has next to the troll doll. He also draws his son’s terracotta eggplant.

“I hope to leave behind only these little things,” he writes, “probably pathetic but very valuable, made or given to me by my children in the past: a clay figurine, a hollow, a figurine. broken seashell. Rosebud …”



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