Francois Halard

Fran Ç ois Halard

PrEFaCE by PiErrE bErGÉ 5

inTrodUCTion by MayEr rUs 7

JEan CoCTEaU 14

Villa KÉrylos 20

Casa MalaParTE 32

robErT raUsCHEnbErG 50

THE dUCHEss oF dEVonsHirE 58

MiQUEl barCElÓ 70

Villa noaillEs 84

ViEnna 92

CoCo CHanEl 100

la MalConTEnTa 106

GoGo sCHiaParElli 114

aXEl VErVoordT 124

anH dUonG 130

FranÇois Halard 136

albErT FrEy 146

EllioTT PUCKETTE 154

Grand CHalET dE rossiniÈrE 160

FrEnCH CoMMUnisT ParTy HEadQUarTErs 167

JEroME ZErbE / JoHn diCKinson 170

daVid HoCKnEy 174

Pilar and Joan MirÓ FoUndaTion 182

sCHindlEr HoUsE 190

Casa lUiGi GHirri 197

JUlian sCHnabEl 204

riCHard aVEdon 214

JaMEs broWn 226

soUTH WraXall Manor 234

l’ErMiTaGE 242

Villa MEdiCi 252

roGEr ViViEr 260

CHarlEsTon FarM 266

la Maison dE VErrE 274

THE sKETCHbooKs oF Pablo PiCasso 290

barCElona PaVilion 298

HoUGHTon Hall 304

PaUl CÉZannE 314

HÔTEl laMbErT 324

Villa PanZa 334

Cy TWoMbly 344

yVEs sainT laUrEnT & PiErrE bErGÉ 360

Carlo Mollino 370

The meticulous writings and collections of the italian art critic Mario Praz, which have benefited and inspired so many decorators, are well known. His illustrated History of interior decoration: From Pompeii to art nouveau (1964) shaped and informed design and decoration studies, and his collection of paintings and watercolors of eighteenthand nineteenth-century interiors teaches us far more about the world and society than a shelf of history books could. Thanks to him we know how the grand people of the world lived, the princes and bankers, but we also gain insight into the lives of anonymous individuals. at the time period of these paintings in his collection, nicéphore niépce had not yet invented photography, so it is all the more commendable that they have been collected, preserved and published by Mario Praz.

Today we face a different situation. The painstaking work of artists who spent hours carefully poring over their canvases has been replaced alas, how much faster!— by that of photographers who click the shutter release on their camera with lightning speed. let us not be mistaken, however. before taking the photo, the master photographer has spent years learning and mastering his craft. François Halard is of that kind. one has only to see his house in arles, in the south of France, to

understand that he is a true decorator, a friend of the object, a lover of spaces. Thanks to his infallible eye, Halard’s photographs establish a place for themselves. They are witnesses to our times. it would be wrong to claim that these photographs, like the books of Mario Praz, are futile. To do so would be to forget that the works ask questions and reveal truths about society. in the same way that a still life by lubin baugin allows us to understand the seventeenth century better than long explanations, Halard’s photographs reveal to us the hidden underside of a world that is our own and which we do not always know how to see.

Collage, montage, assemblage describing François Halard’s compendium of intensely personal, idiosyncratic images is no easy feat. This monograph distills the photographer’s life and work in a series of pictures that traces the formation of his aesthetic sensibility, the education of his eye, his remarkable encounters with many of the past century’s artistic titans, and his peregrinations through the beau monde. yet this is no mere scrapbook or travelogue of a life well lived. The collected images unfold like an intoxicating reverie, a poetic meditation on the themes of memory, history, inspiration, and the elusive, ecstatic epiphany of coming face-to-face with true beauty and genius.

Those familiar with Halard’s long and fertile career as a magazine photographer chronicling the great tastemakers of our time may be surprised to find relatively little in the way of traditional, editorial image-making. There is, to be sure, a wealth of magnificent interiors and stunning architectural vistas, but the essence of Halard’s vision comes through most eloquently in the strangely seductive vignettes and details that gather strength through exquisitely subtle insight. Their revelatory power is more evocative than descriptive, conjuring Halard’s own sense of wonder at his exhilarating en-

counters. Perhaps every photograph betrays something about the person behind the lens, but these self-reflective images have a remarkable generosity of spirit—to borrow a phrase from the classic Chanel no. 5 advertisement, they are Halard’s invitation to share the fantasy.

The photographer’s brief texts on his various subjects capture the stream-of-consciousness quality that makes this project so poignant. Consider the description that accompanies his haunting images of the Villa noailles, empty and crumbling yet still sedately dignified:

“it’s the discovery of the architect robert Mallet-stevens and a film by Man ray, les Mystères du Château de dé [The Mysteries of the Château de dé], shot in the villa. it’s the life, taste, and freedom of the art patrons and collectors Charles and Marie-laure de noailles. The memory of the swimming pool published in a photographic collection of the 1930s and the Cubist garden ... it’s the open-air room designed by Chareau and the beginning of my interest in furniture by architects, design, and modernist photography. it’s the attraction to a worldly life where Miró, balthus, the Giacometti brothers, buñuel, salvador dalí, and darius Milhaud crossed paths. it’s the power of the Polaroid to make the past come alive.”

one gets the sense that Halard is constantly searching

for ghosts, using his camera to summon the spirits of people and places that left an indelible imprint not only on the history of art and design but also, in some profound way, on the photographer himself. surveying his spectral images, one strains to hear the music of Chopin and liszt fill the hallowed salons of the Hôtel lambert; to catch the wafting scent of wild flowers at Charleston Farmhouse; and to glimpse the phantoms of ingres and balthus at the Villa Medici.

“all photographs are memento mori,” susan sontag wrote in her seminal collection of essays on Photography. “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality ... Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.”

For Halard, this relentless melt of time is something to be celebrated. despite the elegiac tone of, say, his Casa Malaparte images, Halard never approaches his subjects through the lens of nostalgia. His interest is the here and now, the soul of people and buildings at the moment he encounters them, and their enduring power to inspire and challenge.

This fascination comes to life with stirring effect in his pictorial odes to great houses that continue to serve as private family residences centuries after their conception.

in his loving photographs of the duchess of devonshire and her ancestral home, Chatsworth, we sense Halard’s delight at the collision of the heroic and the quotidian – paintings by rembrandt and Gainsborough alongside ribbons for the duchess’s prize-winning poultry; the bejeweled devonshire Parure and a basket of eggs; monumental roman statuary and a desk piled high with paperwork. These kinds of juxtapositions, by turns jarring and discreet, provide a window into the mind of a photographer spellbound by antiquity and the imbrication of successive historical epochs. His pictures of Palladio’s masterpiece la Malcontenta and its unexpectedly sympathetic embrace of sinuous, alien sculptures by the avant-garde architect Zaha Hadid attest to the raw energy of confrontations between the classical and the contemporary. The same can be said for Halard’s photographs of the Villa Panza in Varese, where masterful manipulations of light, space, and color by dan Flavin, James Turrell, and other renowned artists transport the eighteenth century into the modern world with sublime impact.

These are places where eminent patrons and artists have conspired across a sea of time to consecrate the pursuit of beauty and transcendence. Halard’s image of an ancient Egyptian canopic jar perched beneath a twentieth-century monochrome at axel Vervoordt’s

Kanaal complex in antwerp tells the story with quiet power.

Given his obsession with the nature of artistic inspiration, it comes as no surprise that Halard has trained his camera frequently on visionary painters and sculptors, the homes they’ve made for themselves, and the studios and landscapes where they’ve courted their muses. His artist portraits are more humanizing than mythologizing: robert rauschenberg and Cy Twombly looking directly into the camera, one stern and inscrutable, the other flashing a sly, knowing grin; a slightly blurred image of Julian schnabel, his princely hauteur dwarfed by the operatic scale of his own creations; david Hockney at ease under the California sunshine; and James brown, elegant and subdued, gazing pensively through a window at something unseen.

Halard’s twin portraits of richard avedon — half of the photographer’s face cropped out of the frame in the first; his visage obscured behind glass in the second — seem to confess that there is something ultimately unknowable about such lofty subjects. yet Halard demonstrates the ample rewards inherent in the quest to grasp even those things that can never be fully understood. one senses the persistent longing in his own odyssey of knowledge and inspiration in his pictures of fanciful forms and pentimenti inscribed on the walls of Joan Miró’s studio in Mallorca; the kaleidoscopic

brilliance of Picasso’s sketchbooks; Jean Cocteau’s droll, egomaniacal collages; and the glorious agglutinations of color, texture, material, and form in the work of Miquel barceló. in all of these, the photographer discovers deep reservoirs of meaning amidst the minutiae.

Halard captures the spirit of great masterworks of twentiethcentury architecture with the same penetrating gaze that illuminates his pictures of the art world. His enthralling images of the Maison de Verre move beyond predictable beauty shots of the urban jewel box, showcasing details of cracked Pirelli rubber floor tiles, metal veils and grilles, and other tools of Pierre Chareau’s alchemy. Through close scrutiny of these once-radical materials and the ways in which they were deployed, Halard restores a visceral sense of awe to our appreciation of the architect’s startling ode to modernity.

in California, the photographer discovered a bold frontier of modern design far removed from the stale social and cultural traditions of the old World. His ennobling pictures of the schindler House in West Hollywood, in luminous blackand-white and color, betray a deep respect for both the pioneering architect and his revolutionary approach to domestic life. Halard treats the modest structure with the respect one might accord a much older, more imposing monument of civilization.

His photographs of swiss-born architect albert Frey relaxing at home in Palm springs suggest a healthy curiosity about the descendants of Chareau and the other trailblazers of European modernism. before moving to the United states, Frey spent time in the Paris atelier of le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret, working alongside the likes of Charlotte Perriand and Josep lluís sert. Halard follows the diaspora of modernism to the remote desert oasis in California with the precision of a genealogist and the ardor of a true acolyte.

of course, many of Halard’s photographs simply rejoice at the dizzying splendor of homes crafted by the great mandarins of twentieth-century taste — people like Coco Chanel, yves saint laurent and Pierre bergé, and Théodore reinach, the French archaeologist who commissioned Villa Kérylos. all had a preternatural gift for tracing aesthetic lineage and cultural cross-pollination through millennia of art and architecture a kind of genius that Halard not only reveres but ably demonstrates at his own ravishing home in arles.

Fittingly situated in the Camargue, a fertile region of Provence that dates to roman times, Halard’s dreamy domus functions as both house and studio, a place that synthesizes all the various threads that run through his photographic oeuvre. There is his love of antiquity and neoclassicism, epitomized by Cy

Twombly’s roman notes, engravings by Piranesi, lithographs by Julian schnabel, and centuries-old tributes to athena in paint and marble. There is his infatuation with Giacometti, brancusi, and other stalwarts of the twentieth-century avant-garde who fashioned a new, daring vision of the modern world. There is his paean to the ethereal poetry of a single peony in bloom.

Finally, there is a sweetness and charm in the air of Halard’s bewitching refuge that reflect nothing so much as the gentle, humane spirit of the photographer himself. While all houses can be seen as autobiographical exercises that offer insight into the character and motivations of the people who created them, certain homes communicate with a particular clarity and candor. This is one of those places.

Henri Cartier-bresson described the camera as “a sketchbook, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity.”

Francois Halard has spent his life honing that instrument in order to discern more deeply the myriad wonders of art and nature. The results speak for themselves, in the most lyrical language imaginable.

it’s the folly of Théodore reinach, the archeologist. it’s my passion for antiquity. it’s orpheus, the mythical figure of Jean Cocteau’s plays. it’s a mosaic on the floor at the entrance of the villa, bearing the inscription “Χαιρε” (rejoice); the Carrara marble,

the statue of sophocles, a memento of Herculaneum; the frescos of Karbowsky and Paulmes, pupils of Puvis de Chavannes. it’s the Venus of arles in the gallery of the aphrodites and the furniture designed by Pontremoli. This is a rock in the Mediterranean ...

it’s the self-portrait of the author Curzio Malaparte: Casa come me [a House like me]; the last chapters of his book Kaputt were written here. it’s the architect adalberto libera, a figure of Fascist architecture; Cape Masullo; and the childhood memory of my friend beatrice Monti della Corte. it’s alberto Moravia, le Mépris [Contempt], Godard, the cinematography of raoul Coutard, the music of Georges delerue, and brigitte bardot bathing nude. it’s Homer’s odyssey, as envisioned by Fritz

lang; the film Paparazzi of Jacques rozier; a sofa by alberto savinio, brother of Giorgio di Chirico. it’s the view of the Faraglioni, the rocky pinnacles upon which the Emperor Tiberius threw down his prisoners. it’s the lyre motif on the tiled floors, the fireplace, and the windows opened out to the sea. These images represent the ten years of patience exercised in order to gain entry to the villa. it’s my first photographic work carried out in complete freedom.

it’s debo, the dowager duchess of devonshire, the youngest daughter of lord redesdale, grandmother of my friend stella, and younger sister of lady Mosley, whom i had photographed at her home, le Temple de la Gloire. it’s a stroll in the rain on the grounds of Chatsworth and in the garden, the domain of her light sussex and Welsummer chickens, who were awarded prizes by the royal agricultural society of England. The still life Eggs, a Christmas present from the duchess’s friend lucian Freud; and the portraits of the duke and duchess, also by Freud, that hold court in the yellow drawing room. The acheson sisters, painted in 1902 by John singer sargent, portraying

the granddaughters of louise, duchess of devonshire. The photograph of Emperor Haile selassie, the descendant of the Queen of sheba and King solomon, saluting the portrait of King Henry Viii. The colossal foot, acquired by lord Cavendish in rome, displayed in the aisle of the chapel; and the portrait of deborah wearing the ceremonial diadem of the devonshires in complete simplicity. it’s the grandeur of a stately home; the charm, humor, and intelligence of the duchess, the last representative of the six legendary Mitford sisters; and the regret of not having had enough time to accomplish a more complete photographic work of Chatsworth.

it’s the painter’s love of Mallorca, his pictorial force, and the power of his sculpture. The exhibition Terra Mare [land and sea] at the Popes’ Palace in avignon, organized by the Collection lambert; and the monumental ceramic fresco in the Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca. a postcard, a

portrait of Marguerite duras, pinned on the wall; and a chair by Carlo Mollino in the corner of the studio. it’s the artist’s passion for Cézanne, african masks, the Mallorcan sobrasada, and the days spent in the rain, the winter, in the ceramics workshop of Villafranca.

it’s the discovery of the architect robert Mallet-stevens and a film by Man ray, les Mystères du Château de dé [The Mysteries of the Château de dé], shot in the villa. it’s the life, taste, and freedom of the art patrons and collectors Charles and Marie-laure de noailles. The memory of the swimming pool published in a photographic collection of the 1930s and the Cubist garden, called the “Jardin triangulaire”

[Triangular Garden], which was designed by Gabriel Guevrekian. it’s the open-air room designed by Chareau and the beginning of my interest in furniture by architects, design, and modernist photography. it’s the attraction to a worldly life where Miró, balthus, the Giacometti brothers, buñuel, salvador dalí, and darius Milhaud crossed paths. it’s the power of the Polaroid to make the past come alive…

it’s the Villa Foscari, andrea Palladio’s masterpiece; and my friendship with antonio Foscari, barbara del Vicario and their daughter, Giulia. it’s the rebirth of a building that was reacquired in the 1970s by the family descended from a doge of Venice. it’s the fresco by Giovanni battista Zelotti in the sitting room and the modernity of the villa’s design. it’s Zaha Hadid’s sculpture installation presented on the occasion of the

five-hundred-year anniversary of Palladio’s birth; the impassioned discussions about architecture, seated around the table. it’s a gift from antonio, a portrait of Palladio; and antonio’s book Tumult and order, in which we meet bertie and yvonne landsberg, Chanel, Picasso, diaghilev, le Corbusier, Paul Morand, Cy Twombly, and rauschenberg. it’s the memory of my room in the attic and the view of the brenta Canal.

it’s Paris, Maria luisa yvonne rahda, Marchesa Cacciapuoti di Giugliano, nicknamed Gogo. it’s the memory of her mother, Elsa, and the mixing of genres: le roy soleil, the perfume bottle designed by salvador dalí, the decorative screens by Christian bérard. an eighteenth-century painting sitting on a louis XV table.

it’s alberto Giacometti, Jean Cocteau, and Jean-Michel Frank. it’s a Chinese statue; an Egyptian mask; the memory of her grandfather, an Egyptologist.

it’s a book by her uncle bernard berenson, le Voyageur Passionné [The Passionate sightseer], a work that always accompanied me on my trips to sicily.

it’s the house, in arles, the Camargue. it’s the mark of rome that extends along both banks of the rhône. it’s nostalgia for the eighteenth-century house where i grew up. it’s a photograph of Cy Twombly’s house by deborah Turbeville, bullfights and Picasso’s picadors, the roman notes of Twombly, a collage by James brown, a photograph by brancusi, a lamp by Giacometti, Julian schnabel’s lithographs, engravings by Piranesi. it’s the large sitting

room, the Hommage à athéna [Homage to athena], painted by an artist at the court of the King of Genoa. The snow on the palm trees in winter, the red color of a bouquet of peonies, the yellow of a Provençal bedspread, the pink of the grand staircase. The gray of Marie-antoinette on the walls of my room, an accumulation of books and objects. it’s a house that is transformed into a studio, and this is the idea of a reinvented family home.

it’s Palm springs, California. it’s the dialogue between architecture and the desert: rock, cement, and steel. it’s the chaise longue lC4, designed with Charlotte Perriand for le Corbusier. it’s the license plate of his car, stamped with the letters alUMi. it’s his perched house and yoga sessions, his bedroom amongst the rocks

and the pure light of the desert. it’s the Tramway Gas station that he designed and the discovery of the Case study House Program. it’s his red shirt and the stories he told me of his love affairs. it’s a breakfast tête-à-tête at the Hilton during a rain shower and the calm power of a passionate architect.

it’s balthus, setsuko, and their daughter, Harumi Klossowska de rola. it’s snow on the facade of the Grand Chalet. it’s a childhood dream and the memory of the Colle sisters, les Trois soeurs [The Three sisters], the body of the young girl in nu devant la cheminée [nude in Front of the Fireplace]. The closed door of the studio of the Chats au miroir [Cats with Mirror] and the open

door of setsuko’s studio. it’s coming to better understand the mystery of balthus and his homes: Château de Chassy and the Castello di Montecalvello.

it’s the bird room, the portrait of balthus signed by Henri Cartier-bresson. it’s a book by James lord, some remarkable Men, and the exchange of correspondence with Fellini.

it’s Malraux and Giacometti, Japan and italy.

it’s 11th street in new york City. it’s the painter, the sculptor, the filmmaker. it’s the former horse stable that he has renovated and now uses as a studio. The pink and Pompeian red of the Palazzo Chupi, the spanish baroque chairs, and the marble bathtub in the middle of the room. it’s Picasso, Picabia, and Cy Twombly. it’s Julian schnabel

and david bowie listening to “life on Mars?” in the living room, the films before night Falls and basquiat. a photograph of the sculpture Tomb for Joseph beuys, taken at the Galerie yvon lambert. it’s nîmes, the Camargue, and bullfighting. it’s a lithograph, Tango, in my study in arles and the power that blends with emotion.

it’s a wooden house perched on a bluff and a weekend alone with avedon. it’s the emotion of sharing his intimacy. The making of the photos of his cat, his pigs, his goat, his billy goat, and his chickens on the kitchen table. it’s the autumn light in Montauk. it’s

avedon’s charm and the dinner that he prepared for me, and the wines that we savored. it’s the sound of his voice on my answering machine: “it’s a triumph!” while he looks at my photographs of his menagerie…

it’s a large drawing on the wall of my friend Jacques dehornois’s apartment. The visit to his studio in the rue des Plantes. it’s Greece, Patmos, Mexico, and oaxaca. it’s his wife, alexandra, and

their three children, degenhart, Cosmas, and dagmar. it’s the cactus garden and the rubens tapestry behind his bed. it’s a friendship that has lasted for many years.

it’s rome, the journey to italy, the Grand Tour. it’s the del bosco studio and the desire to rediscover traces of balthus. it’s a photograph by Jacques dirand, and one by Evelyn Hofer. The memory of the Turkish room that i never had the opportunity to photograph. The yellow, ocher, and red patina of the walls, and the abstract view that i wanted to convey. it’s a portion of the library of Jean leymarie, a past

director of the French academy in rome, that i found at the flea market in Paris. it’s ingres and his studio, the view of rome from the window of my room, the square of the niobids, the Mercury Fountain, and the garden of pines, holm oaks, and cypresses. in the Villa’s silence, it’s rome, on august 15th, and, come nightfall, the hidden entryway. it’s the regret of not having stayed longer.

it’s the beauty of the portrait of Virginia Woolf. it’s Vanessa bell, duncan Grant, and roger Eliot Fry of the omega Workshops. it’s a sussex farmhouse and the charm of the English countryside, duncan’s studio and bohemian life during the Edwardian era. it’s a communal life, freedom of

body and spirit. it’s the influence of Matisse and dufy, the house painted from floor to ceiling: the table, the bathtub, the decorative screen, the beds, and at the corner of the fireplace, a teapot, a work by Quentin bell, Vanessa’s younger son.

This is the house constructed by Pierre Chareau for the dalsace family. it’s the welcome given to me by a later generation of that family, Pierre and aline Vellay and their children. it’s the memory of my thirtieth birthday celebrated here, surrounded by the furniture of Pierre Chareau and Jean lurcat’s decorative screens. it’s the bronze bust of annie dalsace by Jacques lipschitz, the piano in the middle of the living room where, i am told, darius Milhaud often played. The butterfly lamp sitting on the bedside table, the bookplates

designed by Max Ernst, the book covers painted by Joan Miró. it’s the confrontation of materials: steel, glass, Pirelli rubber flooring, duraluminium in the bathroom, and the precious woods of the furniture; all of these elements gathered in a “box of light.” it’s the reflection of the glass-block wall on the sM 14 table. it’s a book, my first book, la Maison de Verre, written by dominique Vellay, annie’s granddaughter. it’s living for a dozen years with the architectural masterpiece of Pierre Chareau beneath my windows.

it’s a quotation, which Picasso wrote on the back of sketchbook 171: “Painting is stronger than i am, it makes me do what it wants.” it’s the 1986 Pace Gallery exhibition, Je suis le cahier [i am the notebook] that allowed me, while enclosed in the space, to photograph the artist’s sketchbooks with complete freedom: sketchbook 163, l’Enlèvement des sabines [The rape of the sabine Women]; number 42, les demoiselles d’avignon [The young ladies of avignon]; sketchbook 57, from

1915, in which appear the written names of apollinaire and andré salmon, as well as the preparatory sketch for l’Homme à la pipe [The Man with a Pipe]. in book 76, we find the preparatory sketch for la Mère et l’enfant [Mother and Child]. it’s the erotic charge of sketchbook 171 and the emotional experience of holding in one’s hands these artifacts covered by the notes, drafts, and sketches of Picasso that testify to his genius.

it’s david, 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley. it’s the power and unity of the Palladian architecture of William Kent that one discovers in every detail: the stone Great Hall, the two chairs in front of the brussels tapestry Venus and adonis, the bedroom, and the bed with a canopy of green silk velvet. it’s Thomas Gainsborough’s self-portrait

in the yellow sitting room and the water tower, designed by lord Henry Herbert, 9th Earl of Pembroke, in the park. it’s david’s taste for contemporary art James Turrell, richard long, stephen Cox that he has succeeded in integrating into this high point of the past. it’s the vision of a herd of white deer crossing the park at nightfall.

it’s aix, the Provence, the studio. it’s a Polaroid, a reflection of the Jas de bouffan, in the style of an autochrome. it’s the idea of appropriating these familiar objects that had become his models: three skulls that are featured in the vanitas, on the corner of the dresser;the table of the Joueurs de cartes [Card Players]; the vases;

some pieces of earthenware; and fruit, particularly apples. it’s a stolen moment, a summer day, for photographing the studio and for the memory of the baigneuses [The bathers], which i was able to view and admire later at the barnes Collection. it’s the exhibition at the Collection lambert, il faut rendre à Cézanne…

it’s my hero. it’s the vision of his apartment in the Via Monserato in rome, photographed by Horst, and the house in bassano as seen by deborah Turbeville. it’s a visit to Gaeta with beatrice Monti della Corte at the start of summer. it’s waiting for years to be able to enter, and a meeting that i did not want to miss. it’s the urgency of capturing the essence of his studio and house, sources of inspiration: a portrait of Matisse, signed by Cartier-bresson and placed upon a louis XV chair

in his bedroom; roman busts; delft pottery; his bathroom covered in sicilian tiles. it’s his gaze in the studio and the series The Four seasons. it’s the influence of his photography: Flowers i, Flowers ii, and Flowers iii, Peonies, and lemons. it’s the exhibition blooming, organized by Eric Mezil for the Collection lambert, and the catalogue’s text by roland barthes, “non Multa sed Multum.” it’s the lemon that he gave me. i kept that lemon, and after all these years, it has become a relic.

it’s Turin, Futurism, and the baroque. it’s Carlo Mollino, the photographer who published il messaggio della camera oscura [Message from the darkroom], a treatise that became a classic of photography. it’s the tender eroticism of his plates, negatives, and Polaroids; the “theater of poses”; the nude body of a woman with streaked skin stretched out on a sheet. it’s the enhancement of objects and his colorful palette: red for erotic passion, yellow for friendship, blue for mistrust, green

for sympathy, and black for infidelity. it’s the woman who transforms herself into a butterfly. it’s Carlo Mollino who draws: the sports car, the seat, frivolity. it’s his passion for Man ray and Piranesi. it’s Fulvio and napoleone Ferrari. it’s the ambulance that picked me up in Turin to begin three months of immobility. it’s his words that i was able to adopt:

“nemo Propheta in Patria” [no prophet is accepted in his own country].

beda achermann / richard avedon Foundation / Fondation balthus

Miquel barceló / Fabien baron / Pierre bergé / sylvie blin

noemi bonazzi / Hamish bowles / dominique browning

Miranda brooks / James brown / Casa brutus / Markus bucher

Jean-Paul Capitani and Francoise nyssen / atelier Cezanne

david Cholmondeley / Charles Churchward / Condé nast

suzanne demisch / deborah devonshire / anh duong

isabelle dupuy Chavanat / Fulvio and napoleone Ferrari at the

Casa Mollino / Francesco Forti / the Foscari family

Cynthia Frank / yves Gerteis / Paola Ghirri / Jacques Grange

lucy Gilmour / yves and Michele Halard / david Hockney

House and Garden / institut de France / Carolina irving

laboratoire Voies off, Christophe laloi / yvon lambert

atelier sung Hee lee / alexander liberman / Cecil Mathieu

Charles Miers / Eric Mezil / Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró

beatrice Monti della Corte von rezzori / Franca Moor

Marie le Mounier / John and Gela nash-Taylor / dung ngo

Panza di biumo Foundation / Marie-Paule Pelle / Carlo Perrone

Fondation Picasso / Victor Picon / alberto Pinto

Elliott Puckette / Mayer rus / robert rauschenberg Foundation

Cy Twombly Foundation / dominique Vellay / axel Vervoordt

yves saint-laurent / Tina schalow / Julian schnabel

Mary shanahan / ivan shaw / irene silvagni / Joelle simon

Trish south / Clément Vayssieres / Vogue / anna Wintour.

First published in the United states of america in 2013 by riZZoli inTErnaTional PUbliCaTions

300 Park avenue south new york, ny 10010 www.rizzoliusa.com

© 2013 rizzoli international Publications

© 2013 François Halard

Preface © Pierre bergé

introduction © Mayer rus

EdiTEd by beda achermann and François Halard

EdiTor: dung ngo

ConCEPT/ dEsiGn: studio achermann, Zürich

TranslaTion: alan G. Paddle

ProdUCTion: Maria Pia Gramaglia

PrinTEr: Europrint medien GmbH

all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior consent of the publisher.

isbn-13: 978-0-8478-4136-3

library of Congress Control number: 2013942856

JEan CoCTEaU

Villa KÉrylos

Casa MalaParTE

robErT raUsCHEnbErG

THE dUCHEss oF dEVonsHirE

MiQUEl barCElÓ

Villa noaillEs

ViEnna

CoCo CHanEl

la MalConTEnTa

GoGo sCHiaParElli

aXEl VErVoordT

anH dUonG

FranÇois Halard

albErT FrEy

EllioTT PUCKETTE

Grand CHalET dE rossiniÈrE

FrEnCH CoMMUnisT ParTy HEadQUarTErs

JEroME ZErbE / JoHn diCKinson

daVid HoCKnEy

Pilar and Joan MirÓ FoUndaTion

sCHindlEr HoUsE

Casa lUiGi GHirri

JUlian sCHnabEl

riCHard aVEdon

JaMEs broWn

soUTH WraXall Manor

l’ErMiTaGE

Villa MEdiCi

roGEr ViViEr

CHarlEsTon FarM

la Maison dE VErrE

Pablo PiCasso

barCElona PaVilion

PaUl CÉZannE

HoUGHTon Hall

HÔTEl laMbErT

Villa PanZa

Cy TWoMbly

yVEs sainT laUrEnT & PiErrE bErGÉ

Carlo Mollino