Fondation Louis Vuitton Brings Together Masterpieces by Van Gogh, Renoir, Cézanne, and More for Blockbuster Exhibition
“Gustave Fayet: Collector - Artist Designer” sheds light on a previously unknown collection featuring over 600 works by the art world’s biggest names
The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is known for staging some of the world’s biggest and most complicated museum exhibitions, and the leadership team is extremely confident in its tastes. To wit, the latest Fondation Louis Vuitton blockbuster of more than 600 works is devoted to a collector whose name will not ring a bell to most people, Gustave Fayet (1865–1925)—something of a gamble most museums would not take.
But once this show opens on Friday, just ahead of the big Art Basel Paris week, he will be the toast of the town once again, just over 100 years after his death. “Gustave Fayet: Collector – Artist Designer” will be on view until March 8.
Fayet had a career making art—ceramics, drawings, paintings, pastels and more—which is richly detailed in the show.
The first order of business for most visitors will be seeing the staggering treasures by other artists that he collected: 10 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, 78 works by Paul Gauguin, 88 works by Odilon Redon, as well as those by Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, and Henri Matisse (and many more).
Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait With Bandaged Ear from 1889, painted at the high point of his late brilliance, will be one of the most talked-about works, as will a classic Cézanne landscape, The Great Pine from 1887–89. The many Gauguins include 1899’s Three Tahitians.
“He collected with the eye of a painter,” says Fayet’s great-grandson Alexandre d’Andoque. And many of the famous artists were Fayet’s friends, as he moved in rarefied circles.
The works he gathered had been scattered to the four winds after his passing, and so the show borrows from more than 100 lenders, both private and public. Just assembling them is a feat in and of itself. The exhibition is part of Fondation Louis Vuitton’s “Icons of Modern Art” exhibition series, with Sylvie Patry acting as lead curator.
So it’s a masterpiece show wrapped inside of an enigma. Who was this gentleman?
D’Andoque is happy to shed light on his brilliant relative, and in fact just published a deeply researched book on the topic last week, Gustave Fayet: Artist and Collector. As he tells me, Fayet was even more than a connoisseur and a maker; he was also a peripatetic businessman.
“He was an owner of vineyards, he created a private bank, was in charge of mines in the Pyrenees, and he opened a factory for making carpets at the end of his life,” says d’Andoque. “He was very busy. I don’t know how many hours he was sleeping a day.”
Fayet was born in Béziers, in southwestern France, and spent a lot of his life shuttling between there, Paris and elsewhere, tending to his many projects and businesses.
Both Fayet’s father and grandfather were painters, so it was not a huge surprise that he began making art, starting with classical local landscapes. “He painted the countryside around Béziers, and the shore at Marseille, but he evolved quite quickly,” says d’Andoque.
The Fondation Louis Vuitton show includes his wonderful decorative pieces—lovely stoneware with an Art Nouveau edge—and Monet-esque marine paintings, plus watercolors.
But he was the rare case of someone with an eye and a talent who also had a deep self-knowledge.
“I think he stopped painting because he started collecting, and so he was just living in front of the paintings of Cézanne, Gauguin, and Van Gogh,” says d’Andoque.
“He thought, ‘They’re just much better, they do more than I can do.” (Though he also adds that his great-grandfather never stopped drawing.)
One of the many projects that consumed Fayet in his busy life was buying a Cistercian abbey dating to 1093, the Abbaye de Fontfroide, located between Béziers and France’s border with Spain.
Fayet and his wife used it as an art hub and restored it; now, d’Andoque manages and works to conserve the abbey and property (which can be visited), and lives there among treasures that include murals by Odilon Redon. Fontfroide even produces well-regarded wines.
As for why Fayet’s achievements have not been prominent until now, d’Andoque notes that after Fayet’s sudden passing at age 60, the works were split up among his four children. They were sold off piecemeal and privately, instead of being given to a museum or even auctioned as a single, named collection. His wife, who outlived him by decades, also kept a tight lock on his papers and archives.
“It’s a shame,” says d’Andoque. But it has presented him with the chance to work to resurface Fayet’s many achievements. (His nephew Barthélémy d’Andoque runs the Association du Musée d’Art Gustave Fayet à Fontfroide, making the legacy-burnishing a true family affair. )
As for the scale, scope, and prestige of the Fondation Louis Vuitton show being so long in coming, d’Andoque says simply, “It produces a great emotion in all of us.”
“Gustave Fayet: Collector – Artist Designer” at Fondation Louis Vuitton will be on view from October 9 through March 8, 2027.