The eyes have it

He has worked with the greatest film directors and held the most beautiful women in his arms. But he has also gazed, face to face, at drawings, sculpture and paintings that he alone has chosen. The collection of art that Alain Delon has patiently assembled over nearly 60 years is the expression of his own vision – with, at most, assistance from just a few specialists who would go on to become his friends. Now, in Paris in June, he will part with it.

This particular production by Delon features an all-star cast: Delacroix, Géricault and Millet, and also Guercino, Beccafumi and Veronese. And Raoul Dufy is on camera too, with his gem of a painting La Baie de Sainte-Adresse.

Delon’s collection has never been about speculation – nor did he have any desire to be ‘fashionable’, to concern himself with those up-and-coming contemporary artists that he could easily have bought at the opportune moment. No: as in everything he has done in his life, the actor simply followed his instincts and personal tastes – in short, he was guided by his own individual personality. And, with the benefit of hindsight, his choices have turned out to be very sound.

As soon as he became successful – that is to say, very early in his life – Alain Delon began collecting. Even as a child in the suburbs of Paris, people turned to look when he walked by. While Delon was still a teenager, he joined the French navy to get away from his family, and he spent several years fighting in Indochina. When he returned, beneath his youthful features, he was already a man.

In 1957, Delon was 22 years old and happened to be in Cannes, on the French Riviera. There a talent scout for 20th Century Fox, struck by his good looks, offered him a contract in Hollywood. But the young man, who knew nothing about acting, hesitated. And so his destiny was sealed: ultimately it would be from Paris that he conquered the world.

Fortuitous encounters with a number of women helped him during his early forays in the world of film. During the shooting of his third film, Christine, he fell for his co-star Romy Schneider, Delon’s first great love, whom he pursued with charm and characteristic determination. The latter also came to the fore when Delon had to fight with the producers to land the title role in Plein Soleil, René Clément’s adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr Ripley.

His sensual interpretation, with his character being the epitome of duplicity, was Delon’s breakthrough role. After that, the actor went on to appear in a string of masterpieces, proving that his talent went beyond his astonishing beauty.

The Sixties, a Golden Age for film, saw him scale the heights of the cinematic art, starring in Rocco and His Brothers and The Leopard – both directed by Visconti – and Antonioni’s The Eclipse, as well as Clément’s Les Félins (alongside Jane Fonda), Any Number Can Win by Henri Verneuil and, above all, Le Samouraï, a chilling thriller directed by Jean-Pierre Melville. And then there was La Piscine, by Jacques Deray, another film noir, but this time shot under the blazing sun of the French Riviera and co-starring Romy Schneider. In the following decade, Delon continued to excel, taking lead roles in Melville’s Le Cercle Rouge and Deray’s Borsalino & Co., among many others.

From South America to Japan, Delon was recognised as a star – and his stellar qualities still shine. As late as 1986, British indie pioneers The Smiths were putting his photograph on an album cover, while in 2012 Madonna released a song called ‘Beautiful Killer’ that was inspired by Delon’s performance in Le Samouraï. And just a few years ago, to advertise its perfume Eau Sauvage, Dior reached for the timeless image of this 1960s icon as the symbol of a mythical bygone era.

All this while, Delon has been buying works of art. It became an all-consuming private passion, which he pursued with the same intensity that he showed in Molinaro’s film Man in a Hurry, where he virtually plays his double.

But he collected with discernment. He became interested in drawings at a time when that market was still undervalued. In 1964, a year after The Leopard, he bought his first drawing, a sketch by the Neapolitan Baroque artist Micco Spadaro. With his friend, the Parisian auctioneer Pierre Cornette de Saint Cyr, Delon would fly to London almost every week to follow the auctions. He also heeded the advice of dealers Yvonne Tan Bunzl, in London, and Claude Aubry, whose gallery was on rue de Seine in Paris, and who introduced him to 19th-century drawings and paintings.

When Alain Delon wants something, he usually makes sure that he gets it. This was true of his collecting, even when it meant paying what were very high prices at the time. That is how he once acquired a drawing of a beetle by Dürer, after facing off with a banker in a bidding war. He later sold the drawing to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. “I never had even half of a tenth of what the big bankers bidding at auction had. But I did have one advantage: the will to get what I wanted. I would go over the estimate and then think, ‘How am I going to do this?’ Fortunately, in the 1960s, I was one of the highest-paid actors. I was filming and filming in order to buy them. All my money went into it,” he said in 2010. With Delon, it was about determination, always.

Fascinated by the first sketches made by artists, he acquired a double-sided sheet from the 15th century by Beccafumi, a St George Slaying the Dragon by Veronese from the following century, and a small Christ on the Cross by Guercino from the 17th century, a treasure acquired in 1972 at the Ellesmere Collection sale in London. In 2010, when Delon’s collection of drawings was exhibited at the Salon du Dessin at the Palais Brongniart in Paris, it revealed his exquisite taste.

“For a long time, I only had sketches, which fascinated me. The artist takes this as the starting point to make the canvas. Then I discovered the Impressionists, the Post-Impressionists, the Fauves…”, the actor recalls. In this, his choices reflect the interests of collectors in the 1960s and 1970s, long before contemporary art was making a name for itself. Unfailingly loyal to his ‘masters’ in cinema, Delon is equally in thrall to master artists.

His tastes have changed little, apart from a foray into the lyrical abstraction of the Second School of Paris. In 2007, he sold 40 abstract paintings by artists including Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Pierre Soulages, Hans Hartung and Jean Dubuffet at Cornette de Saint Cyr (now Bonhams Cornette de Saint Cyr) in Paris.

Now in his eighties, this giant of cinema is parting with 85 of his most beloved works, art that has accompanied him through his daily life for almost 60 years. The last time he revealed the extent of his collection was in Paris in 1990, with an exhibition at the Didier Imbert gallery. Since then, Delon has continued to collect, loaning certain pieces for museum exhibitions.

His love of animals – particularly horses and cats of all sizes – is reflected in some of his favourite works, among them Cheval arabe attaché à un piquet, a painting by Delacroix, which Delon bought at the Drouot auction house in Paris in 2001. But it is also there in sculptures such as a Cheval turc in bronze by Antoine-Louis Barye, acquired in Paris from the gallery run by François Fabius, one of the great specialist dealers, as well as a series of cats by Georges Guyot and, above all, three pieces signed by Rembrandt Bugatti, including Panthère grognant et feulant. Delon’s passion for the Italian animal sculptor, sparked by Parisian dealer Alain Lesieutre, inspired him to assemble what is probably the world’s largest collection of work by Bugatti, whose lively style he particularly admires.

Apart from sculpture, Delon’s favourites are still, as he confided to us, Delacroix, Millet and Géricault, whose double-sided study for the famous Raft of the ‘Medusa’, one of the highlights of the Louvre’s extraordinary collection, should interest museums. But it is perhaps in the dozen works by Jean-François Millet, champion of an authentic rural life, owned by Delon that we get a glimpse of their owner. Delon has amassed a collection of refinement, the very image of its owner – and his collection would undoubtedly be almost impossible to put together today.

Alexandre Crochet is Associate Editor of The Art Newspaper France.

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