YSL'S $28 MILLION CLUB CHAIR
Originally published June 27, 2011 for The Gentleman Tramp
I’m going to tell you a story about a chair, a very special chair, indeed the most expensive chair in the world. It’s not made of gold and diamonds. Jesus never sat in it, nor did Warhol piss on it. (Actually, I don’t know that for sure.) It doesn’t do anything special and wouldn’t want to. No this odd little arm chair, nicknamed “The Dragon Chair,” emerged from the ashes of The Great War. It passed from one glamourous home to the next, cushioning the bottoms of many a shining star before finally landing on the block where it fetched its staggering $28M sum. So how did this dragon get it’s fire?
The story begins with a girl from Ireland, a rich and titled girl, but one with no patience for that Aristocratic rubbish. She wanted to be a painter like her dad so she went to art school in Paris, cut her hair short, slept with women. Alas, painting turned out to be a bore. Writing wasn’t her thing. (I don’t think women really were either.) For the longest time she couldn’t find her voice, couldn’t find her calling. And then one day she came across a lacquer repair shop in London. There was something about that black, beautiful, toxic substance; perhaps it was the dragon awaking inside her.
She moved to Paris and mentored with a penniless Japanese boy who taught her the art of lacquer like a Sensei trains a Ninja. She worked and worked. For months on end she did nothing else. Her skin grew the horrible lacquer disease from the toxic chemicals, but she didn’t care. She had the fire in her heart and nothing would stop her, except perhaps if the world ended. And so it did, for a few years anyway, during the great and terrible war. She fled to London and did her best to help with the effort, but the fire inside her still burned and it wasn’t long before she was back in the studio. She would make a chair this time, not some pretty thing for her rich patrons, but a chair that would capture all the horror of the past years. She wanted it to be beautiful and hideous; stylish, but subversive; inviting, but frightening. And so it came to be: The Dragon Chair. The year was 1918. The girl was Eileen Gray.
A famous collector and admirer of Gray’s, a Miss Susanne Talbot, snapped it right up. Many years passed. The world no longer had an appetite for such bulky, varnished things. Eileen Gray was forgotten. It was then that a pair of passionate young furniture dealers saw the potential in the odd looking seat. They were right. Only a few years later, in 1971, a gay couple shopping for their new apartment saw the chair at auction and knew it was meant to be theirs.
And so it came to rest for the next 40 years in the living room of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé. Oh the things it saw. The butts it squeezed. The traces of cocaine and semen that must still be lined in its seams. When M. Saint Laurent died in 2008, his lover Pierre sold everything, the apartment, all their art and furniture, lock, stock and barrel in one massive sale, so large, so wildly popular it had to be housed in the Grand Palais. The chair would fetch a high price. Everyone knew that. Eileen Gray had gone on to create many famous pieces of furniture and architecture, but the highest price ever attained for a 20th Century piece of decorative art was $3.8 million. Christie’s hoped for five. What fools they look now. If it was a war that inspired its creation, then it would be a war to mark its place in history. Two bidders with seemingly limitless bank accounts fought to the bitter, $28 million end, placing it as the second most expensive piece of furniture ever sold at auction. Was it a perfect storm of rarity, provenance, Providence, circumstance and money? I for one, like to think it was the power of the dragon.