Born Collect - Montabonel · of the firm were both serious collectors, ... R. Kravis, has a Manhattan home on the Upper East Side ... to be a physical presence, ...

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Born to CollectNicolas Cattelain’s collection ranges from outstanding French decorative arts to large post-war installations. He talks to Apollo about spending his time wisely, meeting the right people, and having an organised approach to collecting

By Christopher Turner Photography by Kate Peters

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NICOLAS CAT TELAINNICOLAS CAT TELAIN

APOLLO JUNE 2015JUNE 2015 APOLLO

In a large house in Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Harrods, three young children can be heard running up and down the stairs outside the living room in

which their father and I meet. The house is pristine but full of life… and expensive art. It contains a considered collection that mixes the old with the new. On a neoclas-sical table in front of the window is a bronze of the Borghese gladiator wielding his sword. A triptych of fluorescent tubing by Robert Irwin illuminates a corner of the room. Two Chinese Cong vases on a glass coffee table have elaborate brackets, fitted in the 18th century by the leg-endary bronze makers of Mons. A black and white photo series by Lewis Baltz, showing the American land grab of the 1970s, hangs over a grand piano decorated with silver-framed family photos. A porcelain clock, fashioned in the Wedgwood style, chimes every half hour.

Frenchman Nicolas Cattelain came to London from Paris two decades ago to work for KKR, an American pri-vate equity company that buys and sells companies (in the mid 1990s the capital was so full of business opportu-nity it was ‘like the wild west’, he says). The two founders of the firm were both serious collectors, which perhaps inspired Cattelain to emulate them when he achieved success. One of his former bosses, the billionaire Henry R. Kravis, has a Manhattan home on the Upper East Side

decorated exquisitely in the 18th-century style, the walls crammed with paintings by François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard. Kravis later moved into collecting contemporary art. ‘He has particularly good taste,’ Cat-telain says admiringly.

‘I started collecting photography at the end of the 1990s, when I began making some money. And then I got more into collecting photography like this, which is much more conceptual,’ Cattelain explains, gesturing to the Baltz. ‘I got more into Conceptual art, and Minimal art in general.’ The first pieces he bought were pictures taken in Afghanistan by photographer Simon Norfolk; his most recent acquisition is a sizeable 1969 plexiglass sculpture by Jesús Rafael Soto. When Cattelain turned 40, he retired to devote himself full-time to his growing art collection, which he felt more passionate about than finance. He started buying museum pieces of increas-ingly ambitious scale. One such installation, by Korean artist Do Ho Suh (who had a recent retrospective in Aus-tin, Texas), is a ghostly mock-up of the artist’s Berlin apartment. Made from nylon gauze stretched over a wire frame, it is so large that you can walk through it (Fig. 8).

‘I’m really privileged in that I’ve not only got the means to collect but the time,’ Cattelain explains. ‘A lot of people have one or the other, but not both. You need

to travel, to meet artists, gallerists and curators, to sit at lunch and have a drink, to be a physical presence, to lis-ten to what they have to say. I went to visit some artists four or five times before they agreed to give me the pieces I really wanted. You need to spend the time, to belong to that world, because when things come up people call you. And if you’ve got a full-time job you just can’t do that.’

Cattelain brings the rigour of his earlier career in finance to the art market: ‘There is a thought process and a reflex that I’ve learned in the professional world,’ he admits, as if to collect were to build a share portfolio. He has built a team around him, who do research and write reports on pieces before he commits to buying them (he describes the desired object as, therefore, ‘very de-risked…Between the moment I decide I love something and the moment when I decide to put it into my collection, a lot of things happen’). ‘Collecting for me has been very much about meeting the right people, who think like I think, and like what I like,’ Cattelain adds. ‘I collect in a fairly organised way and I really don’t do it by myself.’

He employs the art advisor Sebastien Montabonel, who in turn has two people working for him. ‘They spend a third, maybe half of their time just working for me,’ Cat-telain says. ‘And they have a very art-historical approach to things. With the 18th-century works it’s the same.

I started collecting really seriously when I found the right person.’ The man who advises him on French decorative arts is American, but based in Paris, where Cattelain is in the process of buying a new house. ‘I tend to choose one or two pieces by an important artist, so you have to choose the masterpiece. You ask yourself a lot of questions. Is it the right year? Do I like it that much? They can also be finan-cially important investments, so you can’t make mistakes.’

Cattelain says that he and Montabonel ‘started with the theory to some extent and then built up the collec-tion from that, a little bit like a cathedral.’ He describes his post-war collection as architectural (the only impor-tant painting that he owns, he tells me, is Homage to the Square by Josef Albers [1968; Fig. 7]). ‘Almost everything is about architecture and the occupation of space, and how we interact with space,’ Cattelain explains. ‘What interests me is that from the 1930s to the ‘60s you have a kind of tabula rasa in the art world. You start again from scratch with shapes and colours and light [Lucy Lippard described this dematerialisation of the art object in Mini-malist art as a strategy of ‘escape attempts’]. Everything in my collection relates to that: from Minimalism and Conceptual art, to the Zero Group, the Light and Space artists…’ Montabonel has produced a sumptuous catalogue of Cattelain’s collection to illustrate this logic.

2. View of the dining room showing Reliefs Serie B (1967) by Charlotte Posenenske (1930–85)

3. View from the dining room into the hallway, showing Portraits from 1983–86 by Thomas Ruff (b. 1958)

4. 22 Constructions (1982) by Fred Sandback (1943–2003), displayed on the dining room wall

1. Nicolas Cattelain photographed at his home in London, May 2015. To his right, is Robert Irwin’s # 3 x 6’D Four Fold (2013–14) and on the table are two 18th-century Chinese Cong vases

‘I went to visit some artists four or five times before they agreed to give me the pieces I really wanted’

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The core of Cattelain’s collection consists of landmark works from the 1960s and ’70s, and traces the influence and aftershocks of this period to the present. He has important pieces by Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Charlotte Posenenske (Fig. 2), Robert Irwin (Fig. 1), Jesús Rafael Soto, François Morellet, Fred Sandback (Fig. 4) and Anthony McCall. Highlights will be exhibited later this year in an exhibition in Sheffield, which will illustrate the links between American and European art; and at any one time several pieces from the collection are out on loan to other shows. ‘You have to work quite hard to make sure that works are displayed and that museums know you have them,’ he says. He is the co-chairman of the pho-tography committee at the Tate, to whom he recently donated a film installation by Rineke Dijkstra, and he is also a patron of two emerging artists: the Mexican sculp-tor Stefan Brüggemann, from whom he recently bought an enormous installation (a boarded structure covered in graffiti), and Dan Holdsworth, the British photographer known for his topographical studies, whose upcoming show Cattelain has financed.

In the last few years, Cattelain has begun to buy French decorative arts with the same passion and rigour as his post-war collection. When I put it to him that his two inter-ests seem schizophrenic, and wonder out loud what the connections between them might be, if any, he justifiably takes offence. ‘I really don’t like that term,’ he says. ‘Fun-damentally they are things that I like. They are all quite architectural, and about materials as well. I think they work very well together when you have them in a room. It’s like brothers and sisters: They are different but they are in the same family.’ He first started collecting 18th-century pieces to furnish his houses. ‘And then I started

5. Bureau plat, c. 1720, André-Charles Boulle (1642–1732), width: 198cm, inlaid with ebony, tortoiseshell and brass; gilt-bronze mounts

to realise how incredibly beautiful the museum pieces were,’ he says. Cattelain speaks with enthusiasm about this particular moment in time, before industrialisation and when rare materials were flooding in to France from the colonies, as ‘the summit of the decorative arts any-where in the history of humanity.’

Cattelain shows me photographs of a bureau plat, or writing desk, he recently acquired at auction in Zurich by André-Charles Boulle, one of the most important furniture makers of the 18th century (Fig. 5). It was com-missioned by French finance minister Charles Henry Malon de Bercy in the 1720s and is made of ebony and tortoiseshell, inlaid with engraved brass fillets of flow-ers and leaves. The corners have gilt-bronze mounts with satyr heads and a central mascaron contains the bust of Democritus. Such desks are extremely rare; the only similar examples are in the Getty and the Royal Collec-tion in Windsor Castle. This example was particularly interesting to Cattelain because it was ‘dans son jus, as we say in French’, and had never been modified. It had been kept in a Swiss castle for generations. Cattelain bought it last year, paying a record price for a piece of furniture at auction in Switzerland, and it is destined to take pride of place in his new house in Paris.

Cattelain describes his collecting as ‘an exploration’, and says that this sense of adventure is probably even more prevalent in 18th century art, where there is so much still to learn. Shocked to discover that there was no catalogue raisonné of the work of the most important furniture makers of that period – such as Boulle, Ber-nard II van Risenburgh, or Jean-Henri Riesener – he has begun to fund research and publications on the artisans of that era. He shows me a folder of research on an early

6. Table, c. 1775–80, Attr. to Jean-Henri Riesener (1734–1806), oak veneered with amaranth, rosewood, stained and unstained holly, maple and stained burr maple, bois satiné, and barberry, gilt-bronze, leather, mercury-gilt mirror, ht 77cm

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table by Riesener, which he bought in 2013, and which was exhibited last year at the Palace of Versailles (Fig. 6). After the French Revolution of 1789, much of Ries-ener’s work, associated with the aristocratic regime, was sold by the revolutionary government. Riesener bought some of it back himself, and died in poverty, while most of it was snapped up by the English (Cattelain found his table here). Then, in the 20th century, it was bought by American collectors: ‘Which is why the best collections today, apart from the ones in France, are those belong-ing to the Queen and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.’

Looking at this finery, I wonder if Cattelain collected things as a child. He laughs, embarrassed. ‘I’m not sure I want to tell you what I collected,’ he says. ‘Pictures of cars,’ he admits, when pushed. ‘I was fascinated by all these customised cars – I loved them, it was a very niche thing. I used to go to the Salon de l’Automobile in Paris with my father and buy kilos of old car magazines for a few francs to find them.’ He admits that to collect is addictive. ‘I’ve visited galleries and museums very seri-ously for the past 20 years,’ he says, ‘and I’ve seen a lot, but the act of collecting is very important because when you decide to put something in your house, or spend the money, and you decide that something is going to be important, it’s really the true acid test. You have to make a decision.’

I ask Cattelain if, considering the architectural scale of the work he collects, he’s ever had the ambition to house it all in a piece of contemporary architecture. ‘If I had the means I’d go to Peter Zumthor and ask him to build a museum for me,’ Cattelain says, having been impressed with the Swiss architect’s Kunsthaus Bregenz in Austria – a minimalist lightbox that absorbs and reflects the chang-ing sky of Lake Constance. Zumthor is currently working on plans to expand the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) with an elevated 400,000 sq ft structure whose blobby plan alludes to Hans Arp’s paintings and echoes the surrounding La Brea Tar Pits. He is notoriously difficult to work with, thinking of himself more as an independent artist than an architect working for a client, and he takes years to complete each project. ‘You can’t set the budget and you don’t know when it’ll be done,’ Cattelain shrugs.

Acknowledging that art is getting more expensive, while museums have increasingly constricted budgets, Cattelain muses about a less static and grandiose scheme to democratise the art held in private hands. He envis-ages a shared space, co-owned by multiple collectors, who would come together to curate public shows of the work they own. It is a vague idea, but one that, when faced with a world of closed collections in which the major-ity of pieces are consigned to storage, holds a logical appeal. Meanwhile, collecting remains for him a way of life. ‘I enjoy it, and I’m really lucky,’ Cattelain concludes. ‘I’ve met a lot of really interesting people, a lot of really crazy people, and I’ve made some good friends. And my col-lection is getting a great response. I guess it’s what I was born to do.’ o

Christopher Turner is the author of Adventures in the Orgasmatron (Fourth Estate) and an editor at Cabinet magazine.

8. Wielandstr. 18, 12159 Berlin, 2011, Do Ho Suh (b. 1962), polyester fabric, 352 × 210 × 656cm

7. Homage to the Square, 1968, Josef Albers (1888–1976), oil on masonite, 102 × 102cm