Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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\u00a0opened our Paris gallery Galerie Patrick Seguin, which specialises in 20th-century furniture by French architects, in 1989. We\u2019ve been in this apartment in the Marais for\u00a0about 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 \u2013 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\u00a0show 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 Prouv\u00e9, Jean Roy\u00e8re, Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. Our main passion is Prouv\u00e9, 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 Prouv\u00e9. 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\u00a0to Prouv\u00e9 requesting the engineering of a base for one of\u00a0Calder\u2019s 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 Prouv\u00e9 in the late \u201980s, 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\u00a01992 we went to the refectory at the Cit\u00e9 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 \u00a3120] each, without much success [an original now can cost from around \u00a320,000]. Early on, I understood how important it was to keep pieces \u2013 to create an inventory.Prouv\u00e9 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\u00a0an alchemy occurs between them. I\u00a0started to collect contemporary art in the late \u201980s, 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\u2019s been Damien Hirst, but I also established relationships with Cy Twombly, Richard Prince and Mark Grotjahn. Since then there\u2019s 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 Prouv\u00e9 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\u2019s not the same level. Chairs are the portal to Prouv\u00e9\u2019s work and the Standard chairs [also known as the M\u00e9tropole 305 design] around our dining table tell you everything you need to know about his\u00a0concept. The frame is 1.5mm of bent steel and the back\u00a0legs are hollow to distribute the stress of weight throughout the floor. Prouv\u00e9 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 Prouv\u00e9 pieces in Paris, but there are more in our new house, built for us by\u00a0the architect Jean Nouvel in the south of France. (I\u2019ve known Jean for 40 years, he designed our gallery, and I\u2019m godfather to his daughter.) We also have pieces in storage, including in a warehouse in Nancy, where Prouv\u00e9 was born,\u00a0because if we kept them at home we wouldn\u2019t be able to move. Many are large architectural artefacts, such as his\u00a0porthole doors. I also collect his Demountable Houses [prefab homes designed to house displaced people after the\u00a0second world war]. We have 185 acres in the south of France and we\u2019ve nestled seven Demountable Houses on the hill. Thirty years ago, when I first started buying Prouv\u00e9\u2019s houses, people said to me: \u201cDo you want to live in a barrack?\u201d They didn\u2019t 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\u00a0rural areas, the components shipped on site and mostly built in one day. Prouv\u00e9 was way ahead of his time promoting an architecture that left no trace on the landscape.\u00a0Sometimes we rotate the furniture and bring pieces out of storage. The two \u201940s Visiteur armchairs beside the\u00a0bookshelf 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\u2019s the heart of our apartment. It\u2019s 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 \u2013 the price kept going up, it was always just out of reach. My prospective brain was always searching for art, and it\u2019s magnificent. We have other masters too. The painting on the opposite wall is Richard Prince\u2019s 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\u00a0things I love \u2013 it\u2019s 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\u00a0was awarded Chevalier de l\u2019Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2018), then Officier (2023), by the French Ministry of Culture. Both make us very proud.\u00a0I love paper. I don\u2019t own a computer, I read a\u00a0newspaper every day and some of my most cherished collections are documents, including correspondence between Mr Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i and Prouv\u00e9 from 1927 proposing Prouv\u00e9\u2019s atelier produce a\u00a0steel cast test for Br\u00e2ncu\u0219i\u2019s 50m Oiseau dans l\u2019espace, a sculpture intended for the garden of Villa\u00a0Noailles. 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. Prouv\u00e9 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\u2019s an invitation-catalogue to the Andy Warhol exhibition Thirteen Most Wanted Men from 1967 marked \u201cDossier 2357\u201d. 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 \u2013 his controversial reproduction of Salinger\u2019s first edition from 2011. He dedicated this one to me. All the ephemera is personal, sentimental. I also have a\u00a0Richard Prince book for his show at my gallery in 2008. He\u2019s written inside: \u201cPatrick and Laurence. Happy Wedding Day!\u201d There\u2019s also a very rare book by Stingel, the most conceptual book you will ever read \u2013 on DIY \u2013 which was\u00a0published to coincide with his first exhibition in 1989 at the Massimo de Carlo Gallery. It\u2019s genius.People often ask me how to start a collection. I tell them, start with books and learn \u2013 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: \u201cArt is what makes life better than art.\u201d That\u2019s our philosophy.\u00a0A Passion For Jean Prouv\u00e9: From Furniture to Architecture is published in April by Galerie Patrick Seguin at \u20ac190\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor\u2019s 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\u00a0opened our Paris gallery Galerie Patrick Seguin, which specialises in 20th-century furniture by French architects,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":248788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-248787","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=248787"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248787\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":248789,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/248787\/revisions\/248789"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/248788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=248787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=248787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}