Gustave Fayet: Collector - Designer. Icons of Modern Art

Why it is worth going

The Fondation continues its Icons of Modern Art series, after Shchukin, the Morozovs and Courtauld, with Gustave Fayet (1865–1925), one of the first collectors of van Gogh and the owner of close to 200 works by Gauguin.¹ More than 250 works from his dispersed collection are shown together for the first time in a century, lent by 64 institutions and 71 private collections: 10 paintings by van Gogh, 78 works by Gauguin and 88 by Redon, with Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Morisot, Signac, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse.¹ Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear is in France for the first time since 1937 and has not been lent since 1990.¹ Gauguin's The Yellow Christ, Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ and Le Calvaire Breton hang together, and Redon's panels Day and Night, painted for the library of the Abbaye de Fontfroide, are shown to the public for the first time.¹ The top floor holds 375 of Fayet's own ceramics, watercolours, rugs, fabrics and books, most never exhibited and restored for the show.¹ Sylvie Patry is chief curator, with Angeline Scherf, and Robert Carsen designed the exhibition.¹