Down to a fine art

"What can I do for you?" asks Pierre Berge urbanely.

Does he really not know why I am in his Paris office?

Earlier this year the extraordinary art collection he built up with his late partner Yves Saint Laurent - a collection that ran from the Renaissance to Picasso and Matisse, from French enamels to African wood carvings - was put under the hammer by Christie's, Paris.

Berge and Saint Laurent built up this collection over half a century. Its creation was one of the motors of their relationship.

Selling it in the teeth of an economic gale that has been buffeting the art world was Berge's decision.

"I'm here to write about the collection," I tell him.

"Of course," he says, serenely.

The office, which is dominated by a 1962 Andy Warhol portrait of Saint Laurent in profile, is on the first floor of 5 avenue Marceau, in the VIIIeme arrondissement.

It is where the Yves Saint Laurent couture house used to be and is now occupied by the foundation set up to secure his legacy.

But it was Berge who turned an enormous, sometimes excruciatingly fragile talent into an empire.

He was the couturier's partner in life as well as business, and together they built an art collection which is unusual compared to almost any other great modern collection in that the objects and artworks came from widely different periods, places and categories. And also unusual in that these unlike pieces worked together brilliantly.

Joan Juliet Buck, a Paris-based writer and former editor of French Vogue, describes the grouping of the work in Saint Laurent's Paris flat in the rue de Babylone as "a conversation".

Saint Laurent died last year. Not long after, Berge announced he was putting the fruit of 50 years of amassing art on the block, that he was working with Christie's and that half the proceeds were to go to the foundation and half into Aids research.

Berge didn't sell everything, he kept the contemporary art and an African piece he loves.

The 800 items that did go under the hammer, however, included paintings by Gericault, David and Ingres - but not the Goya of the boy in the red sash, which Berge has donated to the Louvre.

There were works by Cezanne, Gauguin, Munch, Brancusi, Mondrian, Giacometti, Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Vuillard, Leger, Gris and Paul Klee, and terrific pieces of art deco by Jean Dunand, Eileen Gray and Emile-Jacques Ruhlmann.

Then there were the Greek vases, the Qing dynasty bronzes, the icons, the Renaissance bronzes, the mirrors - without which Saint Laurent said a room was "dead" - and rock crystal pieces of a quality which he said was becoming hard to find because they were being used for rocketry.

Pierre Berge is the son of a tax official and a Montessori teacher, both anarchists, from near Bordeaux.

In 1958, Berge, who was 28, met Saint Laurent, who was six years younger. They became lovers. The year before, Saint Laurent had taken over as head designer at the house of Dior after Dior's unexpected death at the age of 51. Saint Laurent's spring collection made him a star.

But his subsequent collections did less well. Then, in 1960, he anticipated the way he would embrace culture and cultural politics in his work by up-marketing the beatnik styles of the Left Bank - Angry Young Man turtlenecks, Brando-esque black leather jackets - and the mockery of the bon ton of haute couture and the fashion media was savage.

According to the gossip it was at the urging of the owner of Dior, Marcel Boussac, that Saint Laurent was almost immediately conscripted into the army, then fighting the Algerian war.

He endured 20 days of brutal treatment before winding up in a military hospital. This was where he got the news that he had been sacked from Dior. He wound up in a mental hospital, where he was given electric shock therapy and pumped full of psycho-active drugs. Saint Laurent never doubted that his later mental problems, and his drug dependence, began then and there.

In November 1960 he was discharged from hospital. Berge secured financing from J Mack Robinson, an entrepreneur from Atlanta, Georgia, and they launched the Saint Laurent couture house the following year.

"Yves was funny and he was witty. But he wasn't gifted for happiness. He was very depressed," says a woman close to them.

"Pierre was the father figure. He was the one who kept things together. He got him support."

In 1969 Saint Laurent and Berge bought a flat at 55 rue de Babylone, a two-storey space with a garden, relatively unchanged since it had been decorated in 1927 by the minimalist Jean-Michel Frank. Restoring it took two years. Berge and Saint Laurent set to buying furniture, objets d'art, sculpture and paintings.

In Saint Laurent, Berge found a collecting partner like no other. Few have come close to the obsessiveness of Saint Laurent, whose hunger for art was also a strategy for survival.

"He really needed beauty. Ugliness hurt his eyes," says Valerie Lalonde, a Parisian member of the tight Saint Laurent circle.

At first Berge and Saint Laurent would go on their art hunts together. Did they ever disagree on an acquisition? "No. About art? Never. In life, from time to time, yes. But about art? Never!" says Berge.

The launch of the YSL scent Opium in 1977 was a turning point: Saint Laurent was a superstar. At the end of the 1970s, he came as close to being a public presence as he would ever be. Then, at the beginning of the 80s, his long process of withdrawal from the public eye began and he would lose himself increasingly in art.

Berge and Saint Laurent separated as a couple in the mid-70s but remained united in friendship and in business. In 1983 they bought the Chateau Gabriel in Normandy, near Deauville.

"In Marrakech they had a village," a friend says.

"Well, two or three houses ... and they had a place in Tangier. And Pierre kept his old apartment in the [Hotel] Lutecia for years."

A home on Paris' rue Bonaparte also housed part of their collection.

Collecting kept them glued together as they acquired pieces by Matisse, Picasso, Klee and Mondrian ... Much of this visual energy went directly into charging Saint Laurent's work.

"Yes," agrees Berge, "But he designed his famous Mondrian collection in 1965. And we bought our first Mondrian in 1972."

Did Saint Laurent have a specific Mondrian in mind when he designed the famous dress?

"Yes, yes, yes. Because he bought a Mondrian book at that time. And you have to understand, the Mondrian on which he designed that collection is a real Mondrian. I mean, he copied it line for line, almost."

Joan Juliet Buck visited many of the Berge-Saint Laurent domiciles.

"The last time I was in Babylone they had the Goya boy in red there and in the living room they had the Juan Gris. It had astonishing stuff.

"Deauville was totally within the period, totally an 1890 house," she says.

Proust was the governing spirit there with different guest rooms named for different characters.

"I don't think they took one step out of period with that house.

"In Morocco they were quite clever. The Villa Majorelle, their house in Marrakech, was all about wall panels ... the raw crystal candelabras ... the banquettes ... the snakeskin marquetry ... the tortoise-shaped clock ... It was all very decorative."

There was nothing remotely methodical about the way the pair collected.

"I don't collect. I accumulate," Saint Laurent told Joan Juliet Buck in 1987.

He noted that he sometimes made major discoveries by peering into shop windows on late-night walks. This reliance on serendipity shaped the collection.

By the 1990s Saint Laurent was becoming increasingly shut-in.

"He would use any kind of drug that was available. But he mainly used alcohol," says a friend. He would potter around his various properties. He had hardly poked his nose into the garden in Babylone in 20 years.

"It's either too hot or too cold," he said. Still, Berge managed to keep the business thriving.

The collecting continued unabated. But there were no more mutual jaunts nor late-night peerings into shop windows.

"As you know, he was not very ... How would you say? Mobile," Berge says.

Saint Laurent's social life had all but ceased.

"At the end you never saw him," mourns a once-close friend.

"He had withdrawn. He hated the media, he hated the attention."

It was rumoured that he had broken both arms, perhaps because he was on medication. A brain tumour was spoken of. A friend says, "He didn't want to live."

Berge and Saint Laurent entered into a formal civil union shortly before the couturier's death. Berge is his legal heir.

I ask Berge whether Saint Laurent ever expressed any intentions over the future of the collection.

"No," he says. "Never."

"Those apartments made complete sense as long as they were occupied," Philippe Garner of Christie's says.

"But with Saint Laurent himself gone, I'm sure the last thing Berge would have wanted to see is them become a mausoleum. They could not be frozen in time and roped off with velvet ropes. There's something so intensely personal about those rooms. It was not for display. It was to satisfy personal needs. And there's an intimacy to that. It was Saint Laurent and Berge."

* The Yves Saint Laurent-Pierre Berge Collection. The Sale of the Century, published by Flammarion in collaboration with Christie's, and distributed by Thames & Hudson, goes on sale next month for $195.

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