This is one of the event books this fall. The publication of L’Image à venir. Mémoires d’un collectionneur by Pierre Apraxine, aux Éditions courtes et longues. This is how it is presented:
Pierre Apraxine (1934-2023) is one of the greatest collectors of the century. Throughout his life, he embraced the world of art with his absolute eye. Although he is best known for the creation of the Gilman collection, still considered today as the largest, most beautiful and most prestigious collection of old photographs in private hands in the world and which were included into the collection in 2005 of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, Pierre Apraxine was also a tireless discoverer and passer of art.
Pierre Apraxine was born in 1934 in Estonia. At the dawn of the war, in 1939, his family emigrated to Brussels. Once his art history studies were completed, Apraxine met Baron Léon Lambert, head of the largest European investment bank (today ING). Lambert wanted, like Rockefeller and Stuyvesant, to develop his collection of conceptual and minimalist art to decorate the offices of his bank. Apraxine helped him in this task for more than three years of research and purchases of masterpieces. But he soon answered the call of New York where he went to live in 1969 and which he never left until his death. First a curator at MoMA, then a collaborator at the Marlborough Gallery, he was approached in 1975 by Howard Gilman (1924-1998), an American paper magnate, who also wanted to decorate his company with works of art.
Gilman and Apraxine constituted three collections: one of conceptual and minimalist art which was sold at Christie’s in 1987 and established first records in the field.
A second of utopian architectural drawings which was bequeathed to MoMA in 2003 and gave birth to the memorable exhibition “The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the Howard Gilman Collection”.
The third of old photographs. It is this which will determine the destiny of Pierre Apraxine. Between 1976 and 1998, he brought together more than 8,000 images (prints and albums) whose quality, variety, originality and the bridges they create between them created a unique collection, envied by museums around the world and which came finally to enrich the funds of the photographic department of the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.
Pierre Apraxine shaped the Gilman collection like a work, rich in masterpieces by Nadar, Édouard Baldus, Eugène Atget, William Henry Fox Talbot, Gustave Le Gray, JB Green, Carleton E. Watkins, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton , etc. and remarkable photographs by lesser-known authors. During all these years and finally until his death, he advised the most important dealers in the world, auction houses and especially institutions which have the most beautiful collections of old photographs in the world, including the National Library. of France and the Musée d’Orsay.
Pierre Apraxine was also the curator of exhibitions that have marked their time. In 1993, he presented, at the Metropolitan Museum with Maria Morris Hamburg, director of the photography department, a selection of works from the Gilman collection(1) in the most prestigious rooms of the museum. In 1999, he organized a revolutionary exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay, the Metropolitan Museum and in Turin, dedicated to Castiglione, an admired socialite of the Second Empire who, for 40 years, dictated to the same photographer her vision of the self-portrait. In 2001, he co-organized a very beautiful exhibition on the Nile at the Metropolitan with Jeff Rosenheim. Then, in 2005, he showed “The Third Eye” at the European House and at the Metropolitan, an exhibition on occult photography which sparked multiple debates and fascinated its visitors.
The memoirs, which Pierre Apraxine wrote between 2019 and 2023 with Jean Poderos, reveal both the life of a man whose nobility lay well beyond his aristocratic ancestry and the professional trajectory of a unique collector who crossed the century and was admired by all.
Friend of Mikhail Barychnikov, Isabella Rossellini, François-Marie Banier, Jean-Michel Othoniel, he was the collecting partner of Maria Morris Hamburg, André Jammes, the Texbrauns (François Brunschwig and Hugues Autexier) and even Harry Lunn, and the inspiration for curators such as Jeff Rosenheim (Metropolitan Museum), Malcolm Daniel (Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas), Matthieu Humery (advisor for photography, Pinault Foundation), Clément Chéroux (Cartier-Bresson Foundation) and Quentin Bajac ( Palm Game).
But, more than anything, Pierre Apraxine shows in his memoirs how we spectators shape the work of art through our gaze, how we infuse it with its aesthetic value.
A great collector, Pierre Apraxine knew how to look. This is the power he left to us.
(1)The exhibition was also presented at the National Gallery in Washington DC and the Museum of Fine Arts in Edinburgh.
Introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg
When Jean Poderos met Pierre Apraxine in 2005 in New York, he could not imagine that behind this discreet character was one of the greatest art collectors of the 20th century. Discovering his journey through meetings, but also through museum curators, artists and personalities from the art world who all speak of him with respect and admiration, Jean Poderos was fascinated by this extraordinary trajectory. In 2016, he suggested that Pierre Apraxine write his memoirs. When he relaunched the idea in 2019, Pierre Apraxine had time to mature the idea and only took three weeks to give it a favorable response. Thus begins the adventure of this book in the middle of a pandemic, between Paris and New York made of intense, sometimes elliptical exchanges, of confidences punctuated by long silences in the legendary apartment on 12th Street. It is the modest intimacy, the fascinating career of this character behind the scenes of the art market that this book tells us with the sobriety and accuracy of tone that often animates that of great men.
This 324-page book traces the life of Pierre Apraxine: his childhood in Estonia, his youth in Brussels, the break with his family and the choice of a life of adventure.
Pierre Apraxine left the comfort of a future mapped out with Baron Lambert who appreciated his talent and assured him a career as assistant curator of his collection in Brussels. He definitively broke with the reputation given to him by the name of Count Apraxine and the relationships he had built in Europe to embark on the American adventure. Not for the lure of gain, nor of glory, but for the desire for discovery, the true one, the one which pushes us to clear territories still unknown. It is far from the prejudices and archetypes in which old, exhausted Europe is stuck that he senses that everything is at stake. Arriving in New York in 1969, he started from scratch.
We cannot understand the radical nature of this rupture if we do not know the weight of the world he was leaving. We cannot understand the importance of the research work, the novelty of his enterprise, the pioneering nature of the collection he created if we do not put things in the context of the art world in the 1960s, if we do not perceive the part of personal commitment that it implied.
This is the issue of this book. It unravels the thread of the life of the man who created the largest collection of old photography in the world and his involvement in the market of photography as art. He reveals how it can only be the work of one man: Pierre Apraxine, because it is the result of his total involvement, both personal and professional.
This is why the book follows the chronology of the collector’s life. It is in this rupture that the fabric of this collector is forged.
It begins with the story of childhood in a family of White Russians who escaped the Revolution without being spared. These various family properties, where values, traditions and childhood memories are rooted and forever present.
Then, exile in Belgium, the lack of money for this uprooted nobility and the responsibility of bearing a name inherited from a long line of great servants of the Russian Empire. A complicated adolescence caught between the moral family heritage and the presentiment of carrying within oneself other, contradictory, incompatible aspirations. His studies at the Beaux-Arts, the revelation of the pleasure of exploring a work, of touching it, of dissecting it in its smallest details like a mechanic dismantling an engine. With the underlying idea, the growing desire for somewhere else, for an open, vast world where you can be yourself and hope to leave a mark.
In these memoirs, Jean Poderos restores the voice of Pierre Apraxine with astonishing fidelity. We discover his mode of expression through correspondences of thoughts which intertwine and respond to each other. We glimpse in Pierre Apraxine the need to bear witness to his work, to his essential encounters, the desire to leave a trace like a “little scratch on the glass of the world”.
For the reader, the fascinating story of this life trajectory is also that of the formation of an expert gaze, the way in which over the years and his encounters, Pierre Apraxine had forged a unique eye that all have envied. It also allows us to understand the legacy he gives us, that of seeing in a work what the artist did not put there. This is where the masterpiece lies, “in the correspondences that we find for it”. And “if I look at art and the art is not changed by my looking on, what is the point of looking at art? “, he asks. This is why he was on the lookout for “the image to come” all his life.
Maria Morris Hambourg
L’Image à venir
Mémoires d’un collectionneur
Pierre Apraxine with Jean Poderos
Éditions courtes et longues
Introduction by Maria Morris Hambourg
- Collection: Les Grands
- Dimensions: 17 x 24 cm
- Number of pages: 352
- ISBN: 978-2-35290-430-4
- Public price: €24
- Distribution: Harmonia Mundi book
- Printed in Europe
