Each day of the week its color, orange, blue or yellow like the ray of sunshine that was, in a profession of auctioneer whose dark suits and ties he knocked off, at the Hotel Drouot, half a century ago! Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr, a figure as much respected as jealous, by his stature as a playboy, his sportsmanship (water ski champion in Morocco, fuel in the iced water bath every day!) and his outspokenness, enchanted the world of art and that of auctions. “He was joy itself. His positivism, his desire to always move forward, his generosity, his love of others, his courtesy that he never raised one word higher than another, were more than a social code. It was his way of life. His reading grid which he shared with us in English was the three “I’s”: inventors, imitators, idiots!” Sums up his son Arnaud.
This native of Meknes, Morocco, born on January 1, 1939 to a surgeon father, father of four children from two marriages, grandfather of eleven grandchildren, died peacefully on Sunday in his nursing home in Saint-Tropez, of a neurological disease. He retired there while still closely following the activities of his auction house founded in 1973 and sold, in June 2022, to Bonhams. Three of his children, Pierre, Arnaud (as president) and Bertrand (director of inventories and collections) were committed to keeping the house alive. And there was always his office filled with hundreds of objects including the tarp in which Yves Klein had made his leap into the void and his black judoka belt, the large flag of Jean-Pierre Raynaud, the marble plaque of the Hôtel Claridge, whose contents he had dispersed, and his Japanese robots from the 1950s, of which he was the biggest fan.
These sons had not failed to associate him with the sale, on June 22, of the collections of Alain Delon, his great friend since the 1960s, in whom he had instilled a passion for old drawings, of which he was himself. even a connoisseur and amateur. Under his hammer, Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr had already dispersed, in 2007, his collection of the second school of Paris (Riopelle, Soulages, de Staël, Dubuffet, Degottex …), then his wines (2011), his watches , such as the Royal Oak worn during his filming (2012) and, finally, his weapons, such as the sawed-off Winchester from the series In the Name of the Law, a personal gift from Steve McQueen (2014). Only his Rembrandt Bugatti bronzes were sold at Christie’s for 4 million euros in 2016.
Until the end, Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr will have been at the end of his passions – from art, to literature, through music -, with enthusiasm and determination. Old drawings (his first crush; a 17th century sheet by François-Alexandre Verdier de Verdier, a pupil of Charles Lebrun), he converted to photography, vintages from the 1970s, alongside Agathe Gaillard and of the duo and Alain and Françoise Paviot, to create a collection resold by mutual agreement to the Getty museum. Then came, with its era, in the 1980s, contemporary art, whose instigators were Pierre Restany, the founder of the New Realists group, César (whom he called almost every day on the telephone until his death in 1998), Arman, Raynaud, Combas, Bernar Venet and many others. He was an ardent defender of the French scene which he considered “so unloved and not sufficiently defended by his own country, France” which he criticized extensively. But also that of America, which quickly overtook us in terms of its financial power. He bought Jean-Michel Basquiat before his time: three drawings for 450 dollars! In 1994, during the post-Gulf war crisis, Pierre had to sell his collection (including a Marylin by Warhol and a fire by Klein) to sustain his business.
He had started very young, as an auctioneer, alongside Pierre Loudmer and Hervé Poulain. The latter had brought him into the association, loving the character “charismatic, seductive, elegant, with a pretty name, with an unparalleled eye”. “When I did my first car races, I went under his windows, boulevard de Gouvion Saint Cyr. He opened the curtains and I showed him my cuts. Our carefree years after meeting at the auctioneer’s exam where we were the only two to have taken the same subject on the relationship between Toulouse Lautrec and Jérôme Bosch. From there, was our attraction, which became a real friendship, ”recalls Hervé Poulain.
Preferring to be close to his clients rather than his colleagues who often got in trouble with him (how many times has he not been cited before the Disciplinary Board of the National Chamber of Auctioneers to get out of the hexagonal framework banned at the time or for its failing cash flow?), Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr settled in avenue Georges V, then avenue Kléber, before avenue Hoche (and in recent years in Brussels). “It was a hammer pattern: same pace, same smile, same enthusiasm, when the bidding wasn’t taking. He knew how to liven up the room, whatever happened, with crazy talent and to save the day, ”recalls his younger brother, Rémy Le Fur, also one of the best hammers in Paris.
Due to his media coverage in contemporary art, Pierre Cornette de Saint-Cyr was made president of the Palais de Tokyo association from 2003 to 2014 and a member of its board of directors. “He knew how to pick up his phone to find sponsors, called the Élysée if necessary for good causes, he blindly trusted me for projects, including the crazy one by Christoph Buchel, in 2008, an installation of 23 tons of rubbish in which you had to crawl to get in, hence the wrath of the security commission,” recalls Marc Olivier Walher, who headed the institution from 2006 to 2012. “With mad enthusiasm, this adventurer of the Art was constantly projecting itself into the future and death was a taboo. “He believed more in artists than in God,” adds Stéphane Corréard, partner of gallery owner Hervé Lœvenbruck who, with his help, created the Montrouge salon for the young contemporary scene. The works were his holy relics. All of them had a deep meaning for him”. They will remain, forever, attached to his name.
