At Fondation Louis Vuitton, Gustave Fayet Emerges as a Forerunner of the Modern Multi-Hyphenate
Observer · · g2988507
In Paris, a sweeping exhibition presents the Béziers-born collector, artist and entrepreneur through the lens of the Post-Impressionist works he acquired and the decorative objects he made. The result is an absorbing portrait of taste, ambition and creative range.
“Who has heard of Gustave Fayet?” asks the first line of the wall text for the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s autumn exhibition, “Gustave Fayet: Collector – Artist Designer.” The answer, for about a century, has been no one, but this exhaustive Parisian survey is giving Fayet’s dormant reputation a serious jolt. The show takes a two-pronged approach, examining the Frenchman both as a discerning collector and as a determined designer—someone who gravitated to art and had the cushion of wealth to experiment enthusiastically with creative endeavors of his own.
Over his lifetime, this turn-of-the-century figure (1865-1925) scored major coups: he owned, cumulatively, 10 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, 101 works by Paul Gauguin, including 54 paintings, and 128 works by Odilon Redon, including 84 paintings and pastels. He also owned works by Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Bonnard and Matisse. Drawn from institutions and private collections around the world, loans reunite these heterogeneous works (dispersed starting in 1928) and make Fayet’s eye manifest.
They are presented alongside 375 of Fayet’s own creations, restored for the occasion. One room is dedicated to his 72 reed-pen plates of craggy mountains and flat beaches, based on a Provençal poem by Frédéric Mistral, shown alongside a series of gnarled olive trees he had seen in Mallorca.
Fayet was born into a well-off family of winegrowers and landowners. The exhibition opens with extensive records of works he bought and resold, tracing the galleries and auction houses he frequented through original invoices and personal inventories. (Charmingly, he wrote out an individual card for each work, noting the artist, title and a brief description, sometimes annotated with the price and conditions of acquisition.) Fayet mingled with the prominent dealers of the day, such as Ambroise Vollard and Paul Rosenberg, and his notebooks from 1903-8 include sketches of paintings laid out in tightly packed rows. He corresponded directly with Paul Signac, Aristide Maillol and Gauguin, and their letters are displayed in the opening galleries.
“ Gustave Fayet: Collector – Artist Designer “ Artists: Various Venue: Fondation Louis Vuitton Address: 8 Av. du Mahatma Gandhi, 75116 Paris Through: March 3, 2027
Before he was a collector, Fayet had a painting practice, primarily plein air landscapes in the spirit of the Barbizon school. (These aren’t very exciting, but his India ink drawings of his family from around 1914-15 are lovely.) In 1910, Redon made a portrait of Fayet in red chalk, graphite and pastel mounted on cardboard: a whisper of a profile with a lush beard. Fayet returned the favor in 1911 with a graphite portrait of Redon on mechanical pulp paper, his spectacles slid down his nose and a weathered hat on his head. In his native Béziers, Fayet served as assistant curator, then director, of a local museum, where he showed an oil-on-cardboard work by Picasso ( Woman by the Sea , 1901)—only the second time the artist had been shown in France.
As a collector, Fayet gravitated toward Post-Impressionism. In an accompanying text, curator Sylvie Patry notes that a figure like Fayet was supporting artists “at the margins of institutional authorities or even in opposition to them.” He was something of a speculator, but unlike his Matisse paintings, his van Goghs were never traded. He owned van Gogh canvases of factories, thistles, plane trees and the hospital garden at the Saint-Rémy asylum. The artist’s 1889 Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear , in which the self-wounded Dutchman wears a green overcoat and blue hat against a two-tone orange and red backdrop, hung in Fayet’s bedroom.
Fayet owned work by only two women painters: Berthe Morisot and Jacqueline Marval , whose depiction of odalisques was the last purchase he made before his death. He was the most significant collector of Gauguin’s work during the artist’s lifetime, and the two corresponded between 1900 and 1903. When Fayet moved from Béziers to Paris in 1905, his salon-style hanging of Gauguin’s work filled the entire reception room of his 7th arrondissement apartment. The exhibition brings together the well-known The Yellow Christ (1889), canvases depicting cowherds and washerwomen and the wood-engraving series Noa Noa .
Fayet’s fervor for Redon is more surprising. Redon’s late 19th-century Noirs , a series of charcoal drawings of chimeras and floating astral eyeballs, confirms him as a magnetic weirdo. One work in the exhibition functions as a kind of “crossover episode”: Redon’s oil portrait of Gauguin from 1903-5 (though Fayet didn’t own this one).
Redon eventually moved from charcoal to color, and his vases of flowers feel riotously alive rather than quietly domestic. He made pastel portraits of the Fayet family, including nine-year-old Simone with a doll (1906) and the matriarch, Madeleine (1907). Redon’s splashiest link to the family was a commission for Fontfroide, a Cistercian abbey Fayet bought in 1908, then restored and filled with Asian Buddhas and Moorish furniture. Le Jour and La Nuit , which hang on two walls of the abbey library, and the overdoor panel Le Silence had never left Fontfroide before this exhibition. Classified as monuments historiques, the panels burst with color, their panorama of petals and leaves given a touch of mythology by the agitated horses pulling Apollo’s chariot.
The museum’s top floor is devoted to Fayet’s own work. In 1896, he founded a stoneware workshop in Béziers with sculptor Louis Paul , a former student of Rodin, and his vases, finished in matte glazes with an iridescent sheen, are shown here in a vitrine. Farther in are walls of blotting papers (buvards, which botanists use for herbariums) that Fayet filled with vivid floral motifs from 1912 onward. These served as designs for wallpaper and fabrics—and rugs. In 1920, Fayet founded the Atelier de la Dauphine in Paris to turn his drawings into housewares, attracting commissions from upmarket clients such as couturière Jeanne Lanvin , for whom he made four rugs for her townhouse on rue Barbet de Jouy.
Fayet’s notebooks from 1920-24 show how involved he was in production as well as design, surveying different wools and overseeing color palettes. Account ledgers and preparatory sketches make the entire creative process traceable, from first idea to finished product. Alongside the Atelier de la Dauphine, Fayet became a shareholder in Maison Della in 1920, where 15 women wove carpets based on his decorative watercolors using a symmetrical knotting technique. In this, Fayet modeled himself on the couturier Paul Poiret , who had set up Atelier Martine, a design studio for interiors separate from his opulent dressmaking business.
The exhibition’s real wow factor is reserved for Gallery 10, where a panoply of wool rugs—round, long, rectangular—hang tapestry-style in a dark, chapel-like space. The rugs were exhibited in Fayet’s lifetime and in 1926 at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs after his death. Fayet, quoting Edgar Allan Poe , considered the carpet “the soul of the apartment.” The gallery is lit by four stained-glass windows by Richard Burgsthal , inspired by Louis Comfort Tiffany and made using medieval techniques for Fontfroide’s music room and library.
In the final gallery, satin dresses, Grecian robes and embroidered coats by Paul Poiret, Jacques Doucet and Jeanne Lanvin make for a stunning display of 1920s glamour that reflects the Fayets’ wider tastes and lifestyle. In today’s world, where seemingly everyone considers themselves a multi-hyphenate, it’s striking to discover a precursor: someone whose interests and output ranged across disciplines well before having a hand in just about everything became de rigueur.