French Actor Gérard Depardieu’s Collection Nets €4M

The two-day pre-auction public exhibition confirmed what everybody already knew: Gérard Depardieu’s collection was museum quality. He did not go in for easy pieces or surrender to the siren’s songs of a certain form of contemporary art. The collection was based on very high standards, as the auction house likes to say. The actor knew each of the works perfectly and could talk about them authoritatively. Even if it was his decision to sell the pieces to circulate them, his fondness for them was palpable. That must be why, while he had confidence in the estimates for the other 250 or so lots, he insisted on a particularly high one for his major piece, Germaine Richier’s L’Homme qui marche ( Walking Man ), which he had refused to loan to the Centre Pompidou for last spring’s retrospective and preferred keeping…