Fondation Louis Vuitton Reunites Hundreds of Masterpieces Once Owned by One France’s Most Important, Though Now Forgotten, Collectors

Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, January 1889 emerges like a vaguely familiar, climactic apparition about a third of the way through the new blockbuster exhibition at the Fondation Louis Vuitton (FLV) in Paris. Here, we find “poor Vincent,” as he is occasionally referred to in the exhibition catalog, smoking a pipe, an activity he associated with calm contemplation. Behind him, swaths of orange and red form a bold contrast to his green jacket and matching green eyes, which steadily look back at us. As the painting’s title notes, we see the artist with his left ear in a white dressing; the work is one of two self-portraits he made after cutting off his earlobe following a fight with Paul Gauguin.

While van Gogh, painted in his now iconic style, is immediately recognizable, this particular portrait, like so many paintings in this exhibition of modern art icons, feels almost new.

Indeed, few have seen Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe for decades. The last time it was loaned to a public exhibition by its owners, reportedly the Greek shipping billionaire Niarchos family, was in 1990. The van Gogh self-portrait is not the only rare masterpiece to be discovered in “Gustave Fayet, Collector-Designer: Icons of Modern Art,” which is dedicated to resurrecting Fayet, the nearly forgotten, but influential French art collector and designer, who was dazzlingly connected to the French avant-garde at the dawn of the 20th century. He was among a critical handful who helped build their international renown when few others were willing. “[Fayet] was important, because he was one of the first in France to understand van Gogh, Gauguin, and to support Odilon Redon,” exhibition cocurator Sylvie Patry told ARTnews, adding that he was “adventurous in a really positive sense, and had a form of audacity in his choices.”

Since its opening in 2014, the Fondation Louis Vuitton has become known for mounting major surveys for blue-chip artists, from Mark Rothko to Gerhard Richter. Devoting its fall exhibition to a relatively unknown individual and his collection might seem like a risky choice, but “exhibitions on subjects that haven’t been addressed fall squarely within our remit,” FLV artistic director Suzanne Pagé told ARTnews. “Especially when it offers an opportunity to present major works of modernity that have never been shown in France.”

That opportunity was not wasted. The Fondation has managed to gather over 250 artworks that once belonged to Fayet’s collection, rich in Post-Impressionism. Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe is just one of the many treasures that have rarely, if ever, been seen by the wider public that make up this must-see exhibition, spanning the entire museum (on view through March 8).

In addition to regrouping much of his collection, the museum has devoted a few galleries to Fayet’s own artistic creations, which are a delightful discovery that does not compete with the iconic works, from Gauguin’s Yellow Christ (1889) to Paul Cezanne’s The Great Pine (1887–89), hanging elsewhere. Fayet’s own paintings range from naturalist landscapes to more modern, color-rich experiments, their synthesized forms clearly influenced by the artists he collected. Elsewhere are almost psychedelic, floral watercolors in more direct homage to Redon, as well as book illustrations, fabrics, ceramics, and carpets that were a hit in chic Parisian homes of the day. (The carpets unfortunately still appear faded, despite the Fondation’s painstaking restoration efforts.) The entire show culminates in a spectacular chapel-like scenography, featuring color-bursting stained glass by artist Richard Burgsthal that Fayet commissioned for the medieval Fontfroide Abbey in southwest France, which Fayet painstakingly restored and made into his own total artwork.

Another striking example of rarely exhibited art is Odilon Redon’s monumental ensemble of Symbolist paintings, commissioned by Fayet in 1908 for the abbey’s library. Though the medieval landmark is open to visitors, the library, where these three paintings (Day, Night, and Silence) are housed, has not typically been part of regular public tours. The Redon series is all the more fascinating because they seem to combine his earlier body of works known as “Noirs”—dreamlike charcoal drawings, prints, and lithographs, where eyeballs or heads might float into the sky—with his shift into luminous color and even forms of abstraction that use fantastical floral and figurative motifs.

Fayet was a close friend of Redon’s and is thought to have owned over 300 works by him, along with dozens more by Nabis artists. The sheer numbers and names featured in this exhibit speak for themselves. On view are 86 works by Redon, 78 by Gauguin, 10 by van Gogh, and multiple by Cezanne, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and Henri Matisse.

During his lifetime, Fayet is thought to have owned about 750 artworks at one point, but his collection was constantly changing, due to the many exchanges and sales he made. This was known to happen when a sizeable chance for resale profit presented itself—though this was more the exception than the rule.

“He made a few nice deals with some Gauguins, but if he was really collecting in order to speculate, he’d have done it more systematically,” said Patry. “Instead, when the opportunity presented itself, he sometimes jumped. He didn’t like losing money and tended to come out even in the end.”

Fayet inherited his fortune from his family of wealthy winegrowers, who also loved art, his father and uncle being amateur painters. He too tried his hand at it, painting in the nature-inspired realist style of the Barbizon School. That perceptive eye would be a critical guide to his collecting, which “gave him a particular sensitivity” toward other artists, said cocurator Angeline Scherf. Fayet eventually developed a deep interest in art that exalted color and drew from nature to inspire the imagination, fantasy and mysticism.

In Paris, he became famous at the turn of the century for his so-called Gauguin museum, which included as many as about 200 works across all mediums, as well as for his room of van Goghs. At the time, few others were exhibiting or buying these two artists, so to see their work, one typically had to visit private collections like Fayet’s. To that end, illustrious visitors to his multiple, lavish homes included artists Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, André Lhote, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Édouard Vuillard; writers Edith Wharton, André Suarès, and Colette; and collectors Sergei Shchukin and the Morozov brothers. (The more well-known Shchukin and Morozov collections have also been the subjects of FLV exhibitions.)

The prescience of Fayet’s vision as a collector takes a deeper turn on the floor dedicated to Gauguin, on the scale of a small survey. Here, the Fondation has reunited three connected paintings about Christ: Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ (1890–91), Le Calvaire Breton (1889), The Yellow Christ (1889), the latter, considered a manifesto on Synthetism. They have never been exhibited together in France before. Later come Gauguin’s Tahitian works, in which he “sought to penetrate what he called the ‘Māori soul,’ [though] Gauguin himself was part of the colonial world he denounced,” per a wall label, which describes him as living “with underage vahines,” or local girls. It is the furthest the show goes in addressing the controversial aspect of Gauguin’s oeuvre. The text adds that he was “one of the first European artists to view Polynesian forms and culture in aesthetic rather than ethnographic terms, as equal to European traditions.”

Fayet, however, wasn’t an entirely original, taste-defining thinker for his time. He relied on the advice and cultivated opinions of his closest friends, who were often exceptional themselves, a quality Fayet appears skilled at identifying. Artists like George Daniel de Monfreid and Emile Schuffenecker were crucial in turning Fayet’s attention toward Gauguin and van Gogh, respectively. His childhood friend, the art critic and collector Maurice Fabre, was perhaps most pivotal in introducing Fayet to the art world, as well as helping him form his own taste. The two did have their disagreements, as Fayet wasn’t always as convinced about Cezanne’s prowess. Though he collected Cezanne, and once declared him “as great a painter as Rembrandt,” he resold several of those works, too.

The constant churn of his collection and his relative frugalness with his art purchases—he preferred to buy mid- to lower-priced artworks by less-recognized, living artists—showed Fayet to be as shrewd a collector as he was a businessman in the family company. For how important his collection was, it is surprising to learn that he only ever donated two paintings to the Louvre, both by 19th-century artist Adolphe Monticelli. After he died, Fayet’s family did not work to preserve his legacy, all of which contributed to his eventual near disappearance from art history.

This exhibition certainly rectifies that—and then some, giving a window into how a network of groundbreaking, mostly misunderstood artists became the icons we know today. “The masses in France were completely against this kind of French avant-garde art” at the time, “because the most important artists break the rules,” Pagé said. Fayet seemed to lavish in that norm-breaking, but he also understood the importance of listening to the artists themselves, who were among the greatest revealers of new talent. She added, “It’s first and foremost through other artists, that other [avant-garde] are discovered.”