PARIS.- A wide-ranging collection assembled over fifteen years in a Proven鏰l farmhouse will come to auction at Drouot on October 27, when Artello offers more than 300 lots spanning ceramics, design, jewelry, furniture and modern and contemporary art.
Built by a former advertising executive identified as Mr. M., the collection reflects what Artello describes as an unusually restless and eclectic eye, moving freely between postwar Vallauris ceramics, objects by Line Vautrin, modernist design and works by artists including Marie Vassilieff, Arman, Igor Mitoraj and Thomas Hirschhorn.
“There isn’t a day when I don’t buy something,” the collector has said.
Among the most striking works is Dominique Pouchain’s monumental Bovid, created around 2015. Standing 1.65 meters high, the glazed ceramic sculpture carries an estimate of €6,000 to €9,000. Another Pouchain sculpture, also dating from around 2015, is estimated at €1,200 to €1,800.
“As soon as we arrived at the farmhouse, we understood that a remarkable collection was opening up before us,” said 蒷odie Beriola, auctioneer and co-founder of Artello. “Every object seems to have been chosen as much for the story it tells as for its individual qualities.”
Ceramics form the core of the collection, with a strong emphasis on Vallauris, the southern French town that emerged as a major center of postwar ceramic production. Artists and workshops represented include Roger Capron, Albert Thiry, Les Argonautes and Robert Picault.
A large glazed ceramic dish by Picault, Portrait de Madame Picault, dating from around 1950, is estimated at €2,000 to €3,000. Pablo Picasso is represented by a Visage no. 101 dish produced by the Madoura workshop in 1963 in an edition of 150, with an estimate of €3,000 to €5,000.
The auction also includes six works by Gilbert Portanier, whose centenary is being marked this year. Among them is Bouclier, a unique painted and glazed ceramic work from 2013 estimated at €2,500 to €3,500.
Another major group is devoted to Line Vautrin, with 17 lots ranging from bronze objects from her early career to works in talosel, the resin-based material she developed and made central to her practice. The pieces have been examined and authenticated by the Fonds de dotation Line Vautrin.
An additional eight lots are attributed to Vautrin’s students and include jewelry and decorative objects made in talosel, lumaline and mirror tesserae. Works by Mith Espelt and two sculpted-earth pendants created by Jean Cocteau in 1958 further expand the decorative arts section.
The collection also reaches back to the interwar Parisian avant-garde through a small portrait by Marie Vassilieff. The Russian-born artist, a fixture of Montparnasse artistic circles, portrayed her friend, composer and poet Claude Duboscq using mixed media, cut paper and aluminum. Estimated at €1,000 to €1,500, the work has the intimate, icon-like quality of several pieces Vassilieff dedicated to Duboscq following his death in 1938.
Design and contemporary art are also strongly represented. A resin Il rumore del tempo table by Gaetano Pesce, number 14 from an edition of 99, is estimated at €2,500 to €3,500. Arman’s Tubes de peinture, in which paint tubes are encased in Altuglas, carries the same estimate.
A 1988 bronze H閘ios by Igor Mitoraj, numbered 161 from an edition of 1,000 hors commerce examples, is estimated at €3,000 to €4,000, while a 2004 sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn is expected to bring €2,000 to €4,000.
The sale reflects the collecting habits of a buyer who has repeatedly built and dispersed collections over the past three decades. Previous areas of interest have included rare perfume bottles, jewelry, design and ceramics. According to Artello, the Proven鏰l farmhouse was filled with objects chosen with equal attention to quality, personality and narrative.
The collector is now parting with the ensemble in order to begin again elsewhere — assembling a new collection in another home.
