Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.My wife Laurence and I have been together for 37 years: we opened our Paris gallery Galerie Patrick Seguin, which specialises in 20th-century furniture by French architects, in 1989. We’ve been in this apartment in the Marais for about 16 years. The building dates back to 1610, with beautiful architecture reminiscent of the Place des Vosges, and a small garden that we use in summer and winter. We have high ceilings and wooden floors – the one in the living room is original, from the 17th century. We like patina, things with age, and also that the floors here are sometimes creaky. Our passion is to show the dialogue between art, architecture and design, and our house is designed as a canvas for this interaction.At Galerie Patrick Seguin we have concentrated on five names: Jean Prouvé, Jean Royère, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Our main passion is Prouvé, because he was a friend to artists, and many of the pieces in our home are testament to this. The Alexander Calder sculpture on the table beside the French doors in the living room was a gift from Calder to Prouvé. They became friends in the early 1950s and regularly exchanged ideas about sculpture and architecture. I have some of their correspondence in my office: one is a letter to Prouvé requesting the engineering of a base for one of Calder’s artworks. There are two arrows on the letter, and the space between them illustrates the exact thickness he wanted the steel.Laurence and I discovered Prouvé in the late ’80s, when we bought a Standard chair and Compass table from the Saint-Ouen flea market. We were instantly hooked. There was a long economic recession in Europe, and in 1992 we went to the refectory at the Cité Internationale Universitaire in Paris and bought 454 chairs and 87 Compass tables being sold by the French administration. We tried to convince our friends and the few collectors we had then to buy 10 chairs for 1,000 francs [about £120] each, without much success [an original now can cost from around £20,000]. Early on, I understood how important it was to keep pieces – to create an inventory.Prouvé is a wonderful anchor for art. He embodies a kind of minimalism that is not a fit for everyone, but when you put his work together with contemporary art an alchemy occurs between them. I started to collect contemporary art in the late ’80s, mesmerised by Warhol, Basquiat and Calder. Sadly, I never got to meet those artists, but have been lucky enough to forge amazing relationships with others. There’s been Damien Hirst, but I also established relationships with Cy Twombly, Richard Prince and Mark Grotjahn. Since then there’s also been Rudolf Stingel and Jonas Wood, among others. Their art is here, all around us. We are surrounded by friends. And Damien, Stingel, Grotjahn and Wood all have a passion for Prouvé and collect his furniture.Design also anchors the art in our apartment. So often we see beautiful houses with extraordinary art but the furniture lets them down, as it’s not the same level. Chairs are the portal to Prouvé’s work and the Standard chairs [also known as the Métropole 305 design] around our dining table tell you everything you need to know about his concept. The frame is 1.5mm of bent steel and the back legs are hollow to distribute the stress of weight throughout the floor. Prouvé was a great engineer. He applied technology from aviation and the motor industries to construct furniture and architecture. I love the Swing-Jib lamp in our living room for the same reason. It pivots from one side to the other at exactly 180 degrees and has small wings with rubber in case it touches the wall. It is sublime.Laurence and I are always moving pieces around the place, particularly the art. We live with a lot of Prouvé pieces in Paris, but there are more in our new house, built for us by the architect Jean Nouvel in the south of France. (I’ve known Jean for 40 years, he designed our gallery, and I’m godfather to his daughter.) We also have pieces in storage, including in a warehouse in Nancy, where Prouvé was born, because if we kept them at home we wouldn’t be able to move. Many are large architectural artefacts, such as his porthole doors. I also collect his Demountable Houses [prefab homes designed to house displaced people after the second world war]. We have 185 acres in the south of France and we’ve nestled seven Demountable Houses on the hill. Thirty years ago, when I first started buying Prouvé’s houses, people said to me: “Do you want to live in a barrack?” They didn’t understand, but it was the cabin of our dreams. One of the prototypes took more than 10 years to restore. They were built for emergencies or for schools in rural areas, the components shipped on site and mostly built in one day. Prouvé was way ahead of his time promoting an architecture that left no trace on the landscape. Sometimes we rotate the furniture and bring pieces out of storage. The two ’40s Visiteur armchairs beside the bookshelf are recent additions. The only art that will never move is the Warhol painting of Tina Freeman in the living room. I bought it 25 years ago and it’s the heart of our apartment. It’s so much more complex than people think: the silk screening overlays his painting. I first saw it in a gallery in Cologne; it took me five years to buy – the price kept going up, it was always just out of reach. My prospective brain was always searching for art, and it’s magnificent. We have other masters too. The painting on the opposite wall is Richard Prince’s Runaway Nurse and there are three Basquiat drawings adjacent to that. Even now I spend hours looking at them.My office is my sanctuary. I am surrounded by all the things I love – it’s a distillation of our lives. Among the photographs is one of our daughter Pauline, who has her own contemporary gallery in Berlin called Heidi, and there is a certificate with the medals I received when I was awarded Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2018), then Officier (2023), by the French Ministry of Culture. Both make us very proud. I love paper. I don’t own a computer, I read a newspaper every day and some of my most cherished collections are documents, including correspondence between Mr Brâncuși and Prouvé from 1927 proposing Prouvé’s atelier produce a steel cast test for Brâncuși’s 50m Oiseau dans l’espace, a sculpture intended for the garden of Villa Noailles. I also have a very special document marked 493 of 750 from 1971: part of the paperwork for the competition to design the Centre Pompidou. Prouvé was the chairman of the competition and supported these two young architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers. No one in Paris wanted their building, but thankfully this guy from Nancy was a visionary.Some of my favourite things are displayed on a table below our Jonas Wood painting. There’s an invitation-catalogue to the Andy Warhol exhibition Thirteen Most Wanted Men from 1967 marked “Dossier 2357”. You can imagine the excitement it ignited just looking at it! Among the vintage books is The Catcher in the Rye, not by Salinger but Richard Prince – his controversial reproduction of Salinger’s first edition from 2011. He dedicated this one to me. All the ephemera is personal, sentimental. I also have a Richard Prince book for his show at my gallery in 2008. He’s written inside: “Patrick and Laurence. Happy Wedding Day!” There’s also a very rare book by Stingel, the most conceptual book you will ever read – on DIY – which was published to coincide with his first exhibition in 1989 at the Massimo de Carlo Gallery. It’s genius.People often ask me how to start a collection. I tell them, start with books and learn – start with paper! But you must also have passion. There is a quote by Robert Filliou that sums up why Laurence and I have dedicated our lives to collecting. He said: “Art is what makes life better than art.” That’s our philosophy. A Passion For Jean Prouvé: From Furniture to Architecture is published in April by Galerie Patrick Seguin at €190
