Gustave Fayet, Collectionneur - Créateur. Icônes de l'art moderne

Following in the tradition of the “Icons of Modern Art” exhibitions devoted to great collectors such as Sergei Shchukin, the Morozov brothers Mikhail Morozov and Ivan Morozov, and Samuel Courtauld, the Fondation Louis Vuitton continues its exploration of the pioneering figures who shaped the history of modern art with the exhibition “Gustave Fayet, Collector—Creator,” on view from 9 October 2026 to 8 March 2027.

This project fills all of the Fondation Louis Vuitton’s spaces with a two‑part itinerary, “Gustave Fayet, Collector” and “Gustave Fayet, Creator,” revealing a path where collection, creation and artistic engagement respond to one another. The exhibition sketches the portrait of a central actor of modernity at the turn of the century, today largely forgotten.

The exhibition gathers more than 250 works from a collection now dispersed worldwide and 325 works by Gustave Fayet, most of which have never before been shown to the public and have been restored for the occasion.

The itinerary highlights a set of 10 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, 78 works by Paul Gauguin, 88 works by Odilon Redon, as well as paintings and pastels by Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse.

Fruit of several years of research, the exhibition benefits from the support of numerous international institutions and private collections. It reveals a figure of major prominence, gradually consigned to oblivion: Gustave Fayet (1865–1925), a passionate collector, artist and prolific creator, tireless entrepreneur and visionary in the field of decorative arts. Behind this little‑known name lies one of the champions and discoverers of the avant‑garde of his time, a man who contributed to bringing modern art to the fore in many forms. Gustave Fayet was among the first to collect van Gogh, to exhibit Picasso or to assemble at his Paris home a “Gauguin Museum” rich in nearly 200 works, where artists and major collectors of the era gathered. A friend and admirer of Redon, he gave him the opportunity to realize a grand decor, kept secret, in his Fontfroide Abbey in the Midi of France.

Gustave Fayet is not only a collector who gathered more than 740 works of modern art (excluding prints). He is also, in the second part of his life, a creator whose success marked the decorative arts of the early 20th century. Painter, watercolorist, ceramicist, decorator, designer of carpets, fabrics and wallpapers, illustrator of books, he embodies a generation for whom art saturates all aspects of life. His creations, distributed through the great galleries and salons of his time, attracted influential figures such as Paul Poiret, Jacques Doucet or Jeanne Lanvin. From Art Nouveau to Art Deco, Fayet participated in the invention of a new art of living where the fine arts and decorative arts converge. For Gustave Fayet, to collect and to create are united in a single impulse.

The exhibition, devoted to this singular and pioneering figure in several respects, reveals a flourishing universe and opens a new chapter in the history of modern art and decorative arts at the beginning of the 20th century. The project brings together a total of 740 works and documents distributed across the two halves of the exhibition.

More than 250 works by artists such as Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Odilon Redon, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Paul Signac, Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard and Henri Matisse are presented.

Among the works on display for the first time in France, Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear has not been shown in the Hexagon since 1937 and has never been lent for an exhibition since 1990. Painted after the rupture between Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh, this canvas shows an artist wounded but determined to continue painting. The Self-Portrait with Gauguin’s Palette echoes it: two visions of the modern artist respond to one another in an unprecedented dialogue.

The exhibition also brings together The Yellow Christ (1889, Buffalo AKG Art Museum), Portrait of the Artist with The Yellow Christ (1890–1891, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) and Le Calvaire Breton (1899, Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels), which had belonged to Gustave Fayet and to his close associates George Daniel de Monfreid and Maurice Fabre. Three paintings, three collectors from the Midi, united in their passion for Gauguin, three ways of self‑portrait form an ensemble bearing witness to Fayet’s role in Gauguin’s recognition.

The itinerary also presents the decor Odilon Redon painted for the Fontfroide Abbey library, which Fayet bought in 1908 to restore and transform into a total work of art. The panels are still preserved there. For the first time, Le Jour, La Nuit and Le Silence, Redon’s artistic testaments, are revealed to the public. For Fayet, the artist’s work and friendship open the path to an art that is suggestive and spiritual, which nourishes his own creation.

A broad set of creations is gathered: 55 ceramics, 19 mises en carte, 90 watercolors on blotting paper, 15 paintings, pastels and gouaches, and 18 illustrated books, including the 72 plates he drew after Mireille, Frédéric Mistral’s Provençal poem, and his testament album, Fleurs.

The second part of the exhibition explores the multiple facets of an artist‑creator and entrepreneur, whose work resists definition. A landscape painter, he discovers in the diversity of Art Nouveau and Art Deco a field of experimentation that nourishes his curiosity. Over the years, he becomes a creator and engages in the decorative arts. He is a ceramicist, decorator, designer of carpets, fabrics and wallpapers, and illustrator of books, founder of a fashion house, a profusion that Jean Cocteau likens to “touchatouisme.”

For a long time inaccessible, dispersed or forgotten, his creations are brought together for the first time. They reveal a vibrant, free and modern creative vitality, where color, pattern and invention dialogue with the currents of his time, revealing a little‑known dimension of the history of decorative arts.

Anchored in the heritage of late 19th‑century symbolism, Gustave Fayet helps reinvent modern interiors of the Roaring Twenties through his artistic enterprises, Maison Della and the Atelier de la Dauphine. Through commissions of stained glass to Richard Burgsthal for Fontfroide Abbey, as in his own creations for his residences at Igny, La Dragonne and Costebrune, Gustave Fayet develops a taste for whimsy that nuances the sober, geometric aesthetics of the 1920s. He is especially distinguished by a rich floral vocabulary, which he improvises on blotting paper before transferring it to fabrics, wallpapers or carpets.

In 1896, Gustave Fayet launched his first venture in the decorative arts. With painter and sculptor Louis Paul (1858–1922), a former pupil of Rodin, he founded in Béziers a stoneware workshop that produced more than a hundred ceramics until 1904, up to exhibiting at Siegfried Bing in Paris in June 1898.

Around 1912, after nearly ten years of interruption, Gustave Fayet resumed painting. The mastered world of his early languedocian landscapes gives way to strange forms in watercolor on blotting paper created daily, flowers emerging in an indeterminate world on the borders of abstraction. These works become his visual signature, which he later develops into wallpapers, fabrics and carpets.

In 1920, Gustave Fayet founded in Paris the Atelier de la Dauphine, intended to transform into carpets the motifs from his “buvards.” His carpets with vegetal motifs, devoid of geometry, were commissioned by Jeanne Lanvin, Jacques Doucet or Léon Losseau. Designed as paintings, they were exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, at the Pavillon de Marsan (Louvre) or at the 1925 International Exhibition.

On the occasion of the exhibition, restoration campaigns are carried out by Fondation Louis Vuitton, notably on the carpets made for the Léon Losseau house in Mons (Belgium), as well as on a set of preparatory mise en carte boards. About ten dresses inspired by his links with Paul Poiret, Jacques Doucet and Jeanne Lanvin have been identified and restored.

With the exhibition “Gustave Fayet, Collector—Creator,” Fondation Louis Vuitton highlights a neglected facet of the history of modern art and decorative arts: the universe of a man whose life seems to have been guided by the words of his friend André Suarès: “He did everything with art.”

Sylvie Patry, conservatrice générale du patrimoine and specialist in late 19th‑ and early 20th‑century art, is the general curator of the exhibition and directs the catalogue on Gustave Fayet’s collection. Angeline Scherf, conservatrice at Fondation Louis Vuitton, is the curator of the creator section and directs the publication of its catalogue.

To stage this universe, bringing together more than 767 works and archives spread across 28 sections throughout the galleries, Fondation Louis Vuitton has invited Robert Carsen to conceive a sensitive scenography, reviving the different worlds of Gustave Fayet. Through the interplay of atmospheres, colors and the architecture of the spaces, he brings to life his universes, his houses, his places of living, his collections and his creations. The itinerary unfolds as a succession of distinct sequences, offering a reading of the different facets of Fayet, collector, patron, creator, entrepreneur, while revealing the coherence of his vision.

Two volumes co-published with Gallimard will explore the facets of the collector and the creator, while a database will inventory the identified works and prints from Gustave Fayet’s collection. An international symposium will extend this research endeavor. The exhibition will also be accompanied by a musical program evoking the links between Fayet and the composers of his era.

Commissariat:
- Sylvie Patry, invited chief curator, assisted by Yulia Kokurkina and Michèle Kieffer
- Angeline Scherf, associate curator, Fondation Louis Vuitton, assisted by Cordélia de Brosses and Charlotte Lange

Scénographie:
- Robert Carsen, artistic director of the exhibition

The exhibition is produced in collaboration with the Association Musée d’Art Gustave Fayet Fontfroide, with the support of the Musée d’Orsay and the participation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.