When the name Guerlain comes to mind, we are often transported to a flourishing garden of flowers where enchanting scents delight our senses and draw us in, much like a bee to nectar. Beyond scents and craftsmanship, the Guerlain family has a long history of supporting contemporary talent.
For this interview, Daniel and Florence Guerlain welcomed us inside their home, sharing their collection, the history of their art foundation, and untold stories of how their passion grew over the last decades.
The family has a history of collecting artists of their time.
The grandfather collected the impressionists. Today, Daniel and Florence Guerlain “keep the family’s tradition, not by collecting impressionists, but rather by keeping the family’s values: collecting the artists of today”. Since the 1990s, the couple built a multidisciplinary collection of institutional standard, with a focus on contemporary drawing.
They defend that drawing is a historically underrepresented medium with a fascinating discourse. “Preparatory sketches are an open door into artists’ minds, since centuries. But drawings are also and often artworks on their own, disconnected from any sketch or preparatory drawing. It’s such works that we wish to defend and shed light on” notes Daniel.
For the couple, each acquisition is driven by the instantaneous allure they experience when they encounter works of art, the “coup de coeur”. Following the growing number of acquisitions they made, they decided to take their collection to the next step.
A bit of history on the Florence and Daniel Guerlain Foundation
In 1996, the couple established the Daniel and Florence Guerlain Contemporary Art Foundation. An exhibition space was created in Mesnuls, a small town an hour away from Paris, and was opened to the public for nearly a decade.
In 2006, after a slow development of the exhibition space’s reach, the couple decided to build a program that would more actively support contemporary talent. The foundation shifted its focus, closing the exhibition space, and dedicated its team to a Drawing Prize.
Artists, recommended by an expert committee of collectors, hail from diverse international backgrounds. Three artists are nominated in total, with the winner receiving a €15,000 award and the two runners-up receiving €5,000 respectively. Additionally, a piece (sometimes multiple) by the winner is donated by the Foundation to the Prints and Drawings department at the Musée National d’Art Moderne-Centre Pompidou. These annual contributions enrich France’s national collection, and adds to the couple’s generous donation of 1,200 graphic works by over 200 artists in 2012, out of which approximately 30 are permanently exhibited in a dedicated room.
Claudia Deike “Tell us more about your collection. What do all the works in your collection have in common?” “Each collection corresponds to peoples’ characters,” the couple noted, “When someone curates an exhibition featuring art of our collection, we want them to place themselves in our shoes”.
“We don’t collect with a specific angle, we look for works that give us a certain feeling” said the couple. But “looking retrospectively at the acquisitions, some themes stand out. The body, Humor, Abstraction...” The collection is shown in segments every year or two in exhibitions curated at the Centre Pompidou.
“Collect what gives you an emotion, a feeling. Trust your eyes. If an artwork bothers you, look harder and understand what brings you this feeling,”
“Collect what gives you an emotion, a feeling. Trust your eyes. If an artwork bothers you, look harder and understand what brings you this feeling,” said Florence. When asking if such ‘bothering’ works usually entered their collection, Florence smiled and answered: “We do have works that you might find bothering, but I tend to like them and find them quite beautiful and fascinating. I think the beauty in a work lies deeper, and I love living with them”.
Live adventures through your collection
To Florence and Daniel, collecting is a life adventure. Their quest for cultural enrichment drives them to travel the world, where they have encountered numerous artists from varied backgrounds, each with a compelling narrative.
What is a collecting experience you will never forget?
The first one Florence Guerlain shared was a beautiful and poetic moment they experienced.“A couple of years ago, we lived the scene depicted in a drawing.” During one of their trips to Sweden, the couple visited artist Jockum Nordström. In the studio, they discovered a beautiful drawing of a road leading to a church, two individuals walking and a dog on their side. The following day, the artist took them on a walk when all of sudden “I saw the church. We were on that same road we had seen the day before. And like this was not poetic enough already, a dog wandered in the street and came next to us. The drawing we had seen became reality.” Is this not a dream for any collector discovering the world of an artist?
“The impact these works had on us was too powerful. We thought for a little bit... and acquired all 52 works.”
The day we acquired an entire room inside a museum
Daniel Guerlain then shared with us a unique moment in a collector’s life that they were able to live. He said: “One day, we walked inside a museum with its curator, for a tour of drawing exhibition. When we came out, we had acquired an entire room.”
In 2007, the couple visited the Musée de Rouen, where Spanish artist Javier Perez received a solo exhibition. Along with the curator Sylvain Amic - now Director of the Orsay and Orangerie Museums in Paris - they toured the show and entered a large room filled with 52 drawings. Daniel shares, “The drawings were covering the entire room, all hung in a row, quite close together. Plants, skulls, figures... all of these works were fascinating. We were hooked and wondered: Can we buy works in a museum?”The couple politely asked if the artist had any galleries and if, by any chance, some of the drawings could be purchased following the exhibition. The museum’s teams, flattered to see a couple wanting to support the artist, said they would contact the artist and its galleries. After calling the galleries, the answer was quite unexpected: the works are an installation and to keep coherence, the works should either be acquired all together, or not at all.
Florence added, “The impact these works had on us was too powerful. We thought for a little bit... and acquired all 52 works.”A year later, with the desire to keep supporting the artist, the couple awarded Javier Perez their art prize and
donated some of his pieces to the Centre Pompidou.
Today, the Guerlain couple devotes the majority of their time to their foundation, discovering contemporary artists from around the world while nurturing their cherished friendships within the artistic community.
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