Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé - Christie's

oom had been knowingly arranged as a setting in
which its proprietor’s existence and personality
could most dramatically be displayed. It was, in a
word, her stage.’
So who was Marie-Laure de Noailles? And how
had she created such a splendid setting for
herself? Her maternal grandmother, the Comtesse
de Chevigne, was the recipient of many admiring
letters from Proust, most of which she tore up,
saying ‘another letter from that bore Proust’.
Proust used her as a model for the Duchesse de
Guermantes in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu.
Marie-Laure’s paternal grandfather was an
immensely rich Jewish banker, Frederic-Raphael
Bischoffsheim who had built the house in the
Place des Etats-Unis. Her mother was a great
friend of Cocteau. Her husband, the Vicomte de
Noailles was the scion of an extremely ancient
French family and the brother of the 6th duc de
Mouchy. The Vicomtesse herself was proud to be
able to trace her ancestry back to both Petrarch’s
Laura and the Marquis de Sade.
Marrying in 1923, the ‘Charleses’ as they were
known, lost no time in cultivating the avant-garde
of the day. Picasso, Braque and the Surrealist
group were all welcomed, their art commissioned
or acquired. Going even further, in 1929 the
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Vicomte gave Buñuel and Dalí one million francs
to make their surrealist masterpiece L’Age d’Or’,
several scenes of which were filmed in the de
Noailles’ salon and the garden. This caused a
scandal at the time and led to the Vicomte resigning
from the Jockey Club and a threat (never carried
out) of excommunication.
History, literary references, art from many cultures
and eras, swirled around the de Noailles’ salon –
an avant-garde 20th-century Kunstkammer which
created a richly exotic visual and intellectual
hinterland of references to Marie-Laure’s times
past and time present; a superb and intricate stage
setting displaying her quirks, her preoccupations
and her passions.
As Pierre Bergé has said, he and Yves Saint Laurent
were great admirers of the Vicomtesse. She was the
touch-paper, the muse in forming the complexities
and harmonies of their own, magnificent collection.
– Meredith Etherington-Smith
Author of The Persistence of Memory:
The Biography of Salvador Dali, Random House, 1991