Yves Saint Laurent Pierre Bergé - Christie's

The German architect Eckart Muthesius was 25
when he met the equally young man who was to
be his most illustrious patron, the Maharaja of
Indore, Yeswant Rao Holkar Bahadur. In 1930, the
Maharaja commissioned Muthesius to design a
modern palace that became his most prestigious
achievement – the Palace of Manik Bagh (Jewel
Gardens), in the central Indian state of Mahratta.
The son of the already renowned architect
Hermann Muthesius, founder of the German
Werkbund, Eckart Muthesius shared with the
young Maharaja a taste for the clean lines and
purity of the Modernist style.
During his educational sojourns in Europe, the
Maharaja developed a passionate commitment to
European avant-garde art and ideas. Adopting
Eckart Muthesius’s mantra, ‘Comfort, elegance
and simplicity’, his palace perfectly illustrated the
International Style of the time, adapted to a
tropical climate. Here, Eckart Muthesius
integrated his own furniture designs with
creations by other leading contemporary
modernist architects and designers, many of them
members of the Union des Artistes Modernes.
They included the German architects Wassily and
Hans Luckhart and Marcel Breuer; the French
architect Le Corbusier, working in collaboration
with Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret;
designers Charlotte Alix and Louis Sognot, Eileen
Gray and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann, the latter
contributing pieces in a new pared-down style.
Carpets by Ivan da Silva Bruhns and silver by
Jean Puiforcat complemented the furniture.
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Eckart Muthesius
For the Maharaja of Indore
The Maharaja of Indore
After the Maharaja’s death in 1956, his widow,
children and heirs maintained the spirit of the
palace until it was eventually sold and much of the
furniture found its way to auction in a historic sale
in Monte Carlo in 1980, among which were the
exceptional lightings by Muthesius presented here.
Executed in alpaca, a silver alloy with a distinctive
muted surface, the wall-mounted floor lamps were
from a set of six installed around the dining room,
while the unique pair of standing lamps featured as
luminous sentinels in the entrance hall. The
sophistication of these pure and elegant designs by
Muthesius subtly echoes the fine aesthetic
exigencies that characterise the choices made by
Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, while their
distinguished provenance reflects the collectors’
fascination with cultural history.
S.G.
ECKART MUTHESIUS (1904–1989)
A pair of wall-mounted standard lamps, 1930, alpaca, 83 5 ⁄8 in. (212.5 cm.) high. Estimate: 3400,000–600,000