PARIS - The man about to sell the world's finest private art collection has cheerfully compared the experience to "attending your own funeral".
"It is an interesting experience, not sad," said Pierre Berge, the life-long business associate and romantic partner of the couturier Yves Saint Laurent, who diedlast year. "Everyone dreams of attending their own funeral. I am going to attend the funeral of my collection."
The art collection assembled by Berge and Saint Laurent over 30 years is so vast - 733 items, dating from the 1st to the 20th centuries - that it will be displayed to potential buyers for two days from February 21 in a Paris exhibition hall, not an auction showroom. There will be five catalogues.
The auction, already dubbed the "sale of the century", will include works by Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Leger, Brancusi, Warhol, Degas, Goya, Frans Hals and Ingres, old master drawings, Renaissance bronzes and Roman antiquities.
The sale of a collection will be the greatest test of the impact on the global recession on the art market. Estimates of the works' possible value range from 200 million ($493 million) to 500 million.
Berge, 79, announced the plan to sell the collection last September, three months after St Laurent's death. He told the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche at the weekend that the collection became "meaningless" to him after Saint Laurent died. "After his death,
I decided there was no longer any reason for it to exist. The works will never die. It is only the collection disappearing. The works will find other collectors, who will buy them and take care of them."
The philanthropic supporter of social and left-wing political causes plans to give most of the proceeds to charity, especially Aids research.
Only close friends were allowed to see what the pair had assembled at their apartment. The works will be shown at the Grand Palais, just off the Champs Elysees.
Highlights include a Picasso from his "analytical cubist" period in 1914: Instruments de Musique sur un Gueridon. This could fetch 30 million alone.
