Session I, Live Auction: 16 March 2021 • 2:00 PM CET • Paris

“I knew very early on that this was it for me and nothing else: drawing and my art collection.”

“Intensely, without hiding behind the primacy of great Art with a very capital A, and without false modesty, Pierre Le-Tan claimed his work as a “dessinateur”, a magnificent word, which refers as much to Plutarch as to the golden age of magazines…”

“For an artist, nothing is innocent, above all one’s roots, a filial compassion for one’s father, a mixture of the Asian respect for family and the classical image of the Lares deities: his father Lê Phô was a painter who was born in Vietnam and died in Paris, a beloved city where he settled permanently in 1937. A major painter, far too little known in Europe, already revered in China, he alone carried a nostalgia in which Pierre Le Tan’s ancestry was steeped, both the real and the imaginary ones that would nurture his life and his work.”

"Pierre loved fragments: 16th century Oushak carpets, Roman bas-reliefs, tiles, vases, sculptures…Free, idle, freed from the task that fell to them when they were part of a whole, they were just themselves, magnificent layabouts. Together we could have founded a secret society, the secret society of the good-for-nothing fragments."

“I was interested, also at that time, in other "neo-romantic" artists, as the critic Waldemar George had called them; aside from Bérard, the principal ones were the brothers Eugène and Leonid Berman, as well as Pavel Tchelitchew, all three of Russian origin. In parallel (…) the poet-drawer-filmmaker Jean Cocteau, and many others shared in this same aesthetic, both melancholic and surreal.”