Pierre Le-Tan (1950–2019)

Original and appealing series of brief descriptions of a number of collectors that Le-Tan knew and visited, illustrated with his own dry, quiet, meticulous drawings. Le-Tan was a much-admired illustrator producing covers for The New Yorker, Vogue and other high-end magazines. He was also himself a collector of arts of all kinds, inhabiting an exalted world of artists, French nobility, fashion designers, and eccentrics who share his passion for seeking, owning, buying and selling objects of their particular passions.

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.… (mer)