It began, of all things, with blotting paper. Around 1912, Gustave Fayet, a collector who had been among the first to buy Van Gogh, sat down and started painting flowers in watercolor on the humblest paper in the house. Within a decade, those flowers were rugs on the floors of Jeanne Lanvin and Jacques Doucet. This fall the Fondation Louis Vuitton, where I saw the monumental Rothko retrospective a few years ago, devotes every gallery to Gustave Fayet: Collector – Designer, and it’s high time.

Born in Béziers in 1865, Fayet inherited both considerable means and a taste for art, but his collecting instincts were entirely his own. At a time when Van Gogh and Gauguin were hardly established names, he was buying their work in remarkable quantities. His Paris home became something of a private Gauguin museum, housing nearly 200 works, while his collection of Van Goghs included the celebrated Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. He was also an early champion of Picasso, helping to exhibit his work when the young Spaniard was still largely unknown.

What makes the exhibition particularly compelling is the chance to see so much of that collection reunited. More than 250 works, dispersed long ago, have been brought together for the first time in a century. The larger pleasure is discovering the eye behind the collection, and just how far ahead of prevailing taste Fayet was prepared to venture.

Fayet was also an artist in his own right, and the top floor is devoted to his remarkably varied output. His blotting-paper watercolors were anything but conventional botanical studies. He let the watercolor spread and settle into unexpected shapes, creating flowers that were as much abstraction as botanical study. The designs eventually found their way onto wallpapers, fabrics, and rugs, produced at the Atelier de la Dauphine, which he established in Paris in 1920.

There are ceramics too, from the stoneware workshop he founded in Béziers in 1896 with Louis Paul, a former student of Rodin, as well as illustrated books, including his interpretations of Frédéric Mistral’s Mireille. In all, the exhibition includes 374 of Fayet’s own creations, many rarely or never seen before.

 

Then he bought an abbey.

In 1908, Fayet acquired Fontfroide, a medieval Cistercian monastery near Narbonne, and set about restoring it. For the library, he commissioned his friend Odilon Redon, another artist whose work he had collected and championed, to create a series of monumental decorative panels. Day, Night, and Silence, with their mysterious figures and saturated color, must have been rather spectacular against the ancient stone walls.

 

The Redon panels, rarely seen outside Fontfroide, are another highlight of an exhibition that reveals not only what Fayet collected, but how much his patronage meant to the artists he admired. More than a century later, his choices look remarkably prescient.

 

Gustave Fayet: Collector – Designer. Icons of Modern Art, designed by Robert Carsen, is at the Fondation Louis Vuittonin Paris through March 8, 2027.