St Laurent's Deco armchair sells for a record £19m

THE three-day sale in Paris of the paintings, furniture and objets d'art of Yves St Laurent and his former lover Pierre Bergé ended last night in record prices and a stampede out of money into art.

The sale amassed £333.3 million, far above the £200-£250 million estimate of London auctioneers Christie's and far and away the highest in sterling for any auction.

The astonishment in the Grand Palais when fine, but not supreme, paintings by Matisse, Picasso and Mondrian were sold for double or treble their estimate was eclipsed when Art Deco furniture from St Laurent's apartments in the Rue de Babylone was brought out for sale. The crowd of 1,000 gasped in disbelief when two bidders fought over the price of a single armchair – to £19.3 million.

The price was not only 10 times Christie's expectation. It was 18 times the record price for a chair set last June in London for a Thomas Chippendale creation for the house of Sir Lawrence Dundas in Mayfair. Chippendale fell from his position as this shower of gold in Paris descended on Irish designer Eileen Gray and her curvaceous, orange-lacquered "Dragons" armchair — made in 1917 when Art Nouveau was in its fullest glory.

Opinion was divided on the floor as to whether the awesome price was sense or folly.

"This chair was unique," said Raphael Sinai, the Mayfair dealer in 20th century design.

"It is an icon of 20th century furniture. It has been off the market for 30 years — no one had any idea where it was — and it will never appear at auction again. Yes, the price was through the roof but this was a landmark sale, a reference sale. Whoever bought it was buying a work of Yves St Laurent', destined to be one of the great provenances of the 21st century."

The money-no-object buyer on the telephone was Paris dealer Robert Vallois, whom Mr Sinai suspected of buying for "an exceptional collector".

"Whoever it is, he paid repeatedly and heavily for Art Nouveau and Art Deco furniture featuring curling dragons and serpents. I suspect someone of immense wealth is pursuing a theme."

An Eileen Gray snake-handled cabinet, the Enfilade of 1917, fetched £3.5  million while a Vase with a Rearing Serpent by Jean Dunand of 1920 achieved 13 times Christie's estimate at £289,250.

St Laurent and Bergé amassed the art collection in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties. It was bought clandestinely through four dealers with the mega-millions of the YSL empire and on the designer's success in taking women out of haute couture and putting them in trousers and ready-to-wear, and ranks with the world's finest post-war collections — such as those of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Stavros Niarchos, Robert von Hirsch, Victor Ganz, David Geffen, Paul Mellon, S I Newhouse, Hubert de Givenchy, Ronald Lauder, Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend and the Sainsbury family.

Few knew about it, fewer still saw it. Those who visited St Laurent and Bergé at their houses in the Rue de Babylone, the Rue Bonaparte and at the Chateau Gabriel in Benerville-sur-Mer, Normandy, were rich and famous but very discreet. The art gave birth to a "look" in Paris and Normandy and was hailed as unique — a mix of Art Nouveau and Art Deco furniture and interiors with Impressionist, Modern and Old Master paintings, Greek and Roman sculptures, Renaissance ivories, Ming and Qing porcelain and 16th century silver.
From Lot Two on Monday, when a Gauguin pastel doubled its estimate, Christie's knew it had a major success on its hands.

Record prices studded the bidding, above all for pictures. A bidder paid £31,955,450 for a Matisse, the painter who haunted St Laurent's fashion creations, a 1911 still life of vase on pink and purple rug; £25,974,650 for a Brancusi group of four 1914-17 wooden table sculptures with strong African feeling; £19,196,410 and £12,816,890 for two Mondrian early abstract grids; and £9,826,490 for Giorgio de Chirico's moving Surrealist dream in 1918 of the return of his dead father.

Most astonishing was the nine-times estimate of £7,932,570 produced in fierce competition for the founder of Dada, Marcel Duchamp. It was lavished on his tiny "Beautiful Breath" perfume bottle which he unveiled as art in 1921, the label bearing the name of his false identity as a woman, Rrose Sélavy.

Bond Street dealers broke open the champagne last night in hope that art's brief crisis in New York last November — when 20th century picture prices slumped 20 per cent in a week — was over.

A fear on Monday that bidders might be deranged by the architectural madness of the Grand Palais on the Ave Winston Churchill — a marriage of the Palm House at Kew with Crystal Palace and St Pancras Station — gave way last night to a conviction that the art market is viewed as a superior place to grow money in 2009, 2010 and 2011 than in banks and bonds paying less than one per cent.

"A lot of investors are terrified of cash and distrustful of equities and are already planning for the great inflation that lies two years ahead," said the multi-billionaire Mayfair, New York and Monte Carlo dealer David Nahmad, who is the world number one in terms of sales.

"They would rather own masterpieces of art. It is very simple and also very safe. If the world collapses in 2009 but you own a Picasso, then amid the ruins you still own a Picasso.

"But if the world collapses and your money is in a bank or a company that no longer exists, what you now own is a worthless piece of paper.

"Savings earn nothing and there is a flight out of money into tangibles. This is why art's bad moment is over. St Laurent represents a flight into quality."