PARIS | An auction of French actor Gérard Depardieu’s art collection is set to end in Paris on Wednesday evening after fetching $1.85 million on Tuesday, “in front of a packed room of collectors and the curious,” AFP auction house Ader said.
“To lighten it up a little,” said the auctioneer, the 74-year-old actor decided to scatter more than 250 works of great masters of the 20th century such as Calder or Rodin, the artist he played in the cinema alongside Isabelle Adjani. The whole thing was valued at more than $4.275 million.
AFP
On Tuesday, the first day of sales, a black patina bronze by Auguste Rodin, Paolo et Francesca, made in 12 examples, sold for $118,630 (with fees), exceeding its high estimate.
A 1922 Zadkine sculpture, Kneeling Woman, found a buyer after heated bidding for $150,000 including fees (high estimate at $114,000). A gouache and ink by Alexander Calder, Sun Shine (1974), reached $131,400 with fees, exceeding its estimate.
AFP
During the three days of the public exhibition, several thousand people followed each other in the three rooms of the Hôtel Drouot to present all the lots that decorated the actor’s Parisian mansion.
“This collection is a great surprise due to the importance of the works collected by Gérard Depardieu over more than forty years. He collected in a very good way and often allowed us to discover a completely new facet of the figure,” David Nordmann, auctioneer at Ader, told AFP.
AFP
Gérard Depardieu has been charged since 2021 on suspicion of raping and sexually assaulting actress Charlotte Arnould. For this reason, in May the actor was excluded from the promotion of the last film in which he starred, Umami, and several performances of his singing show about Barbara, a famous French singer who died in 1997, were disrupted by feminists.