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"Funny and whimsical. There are wonderful asides ... It is also poignant." --The New York Times An utterly charming book by beloved Parisian artist Pierre Le-Tan, filled with dazzling illustrations and intriguing tales about often eccentric art collectors. Le-Tan, known for designing New Yorker magazine covers and collaborations with fashion houses, summons up memories of inveterate collectors in this lavishly illustrated volume. He evokes fascinating, sometimes troubled figures through insightful and curious portraits. With seventy of his distinctive pen and ink drawings--in vibrant color with meticulous cross-hatching--A Few Collectors opens a window onto the vast or minuscule world created by collectors out of a mix of extravagance and obstinacy. It recounts encounters in Paris, the Côte d'Azur, North Africa, London and New York, where Le-Tan's subjects have amassed a range of treasures. Some involve famed figures like former Louvre Museum director Pierre Rosenberg. Others are insolvent aristocrats, princes of film and fashion, expatriate dandies, and flat-out obsessive eccentrics. Le-Tan devotes perhaps his finest chapter to himself.… (more)
User reviews
The director of the Louvre fills his apartment with a gleaming menagerie of Murano glass animals. An impoverished princess gives the young Le-Tan a guided tour of her collection: the unfaded rectangles on the walls of her apartment, where the pictures by Rubens, Guercino and others used to be. A fellow he happens to meet on a train shows him his carefully displayed and labeled collection of crumpled pieces of paper: envelopes, paper towel squares, even used tissues (!), relishing the play of shape and texture and shadow. Le-Tan describes this so sympathetically that when he reveals that this man's heirs took all his crumples and smoothed them flat so they would all fit in a box, I was horrified.
Le-Tan is respectful and fascinated. He understands what drives them, whether it's a passion for Islamic tiles, English porcelain, Italian drawings, dolls, or waxen death masks topped with the criminals' own hair - or an assortment of objects chosen for nothing but how beautiful they are to their beholders. Le-Tan's own evolving collections are of a widely eclectic sort, interesting in part because he freely sells them off when he needs money for bills - or another piece of art - without a qualm. His is a curious attitude - he is contemptuous of "vulgar" collectors, ultra-wealthy people who have "lived only for money and power," and who acquire art for purposes of glamor or investment, while purely aesthetic delight remains "alien" to them. Le-Tan acquires objects because they do truly delight him, yet the physical possession of them seems to mean rather little. Sometimes he comes across a piece he once owned in someone else's apartment, and it pleases him to feel that his "children" have been left in the hands of "someone who I trust... safe and happy on my friend Jacques' wall." A lovely, odd, engaging little book - kudos to New Vessel Press, a steady source of such well-chosen titles in translation.