Art Is Where the Home Is

Photographs by Philip Sinden

As a medical student in Paris in the 1970s, Terry de Gunzburg supported herself with a variety of casual jobs: working for a florist, wrapping presents in a department store, supervising playtime at a school. What spare money she earned she would spend in Paris’s flea markets, buying on instinct and honing her eye. Her first stellar purchase, made when she was 20, was a Picasso plate, made in Vallauris in the south of France and purchased for 10 francs – not much more than a dollar, “but a lot of money for me,” she recalls. “At that time, you could find all sorts of things in the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen. I also remember buying a piece by [the great ceramicist Georges] Jouve for about $15,” she continues. “It was nothing!” Especially when you consider that his vases now tend to change hands for five figures. But art should never be thought of as an investment, she insists. “It’s a feeling, a sensibilité. That’s the first rule of buying. If you don’t love it, forget it! You should never buy anything just because you think it’s undervalued.”

It’s clear she was destined to become a collector. She and her husband, the eminent molecular and cell biologist Jean de Gunzburg, went on to acquire paintings and sculpture by many artists, including Francis Bacon, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, Antony Gormley, Anselm Kiefer, Agnes Martin, Henri Matisse, Amedeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, Robert Ryman and Pierre Soulages. And she soon developed a passion for furniture. Witness her museum-quality assemblage of Art Deco by designers such as Jean Dunand, Paul Dupré-Lafon, André Groult, Marc du Plantier, Eugène Printz and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, as well as several fine pieces by Jean-Michel Frank and a Polar bear sofa by Jean Royère.

She loves decorative objects too. On the shagreen-covered top of one of the Frank tables, she displays a collection of cigarette cases and powder compacts by the likes of Cartier and Boucheron, among them a rarity designed by Salvador Dalí for Schiaparelli to look like a telephone dial. She inherited these from her grandmother, an English national of Jewish, Turkish and Syrian descent who was forced to leave Egypt, where de Gunzburg was born, for Paris after the Suez Crisis in 1956 with the rest of the family. Apart from her diamonds, they were all she could carry.

“My grandfather never got over the fact he was reduced to living in a one-bedroom apartment,” she says, though her grandmother did her best to keep up appearances, always exquisitely attired and living as though “she was still in Cairo. She was very alive and fun and had very good manners. She would say: ‘Keep your bonne humeur.’” And pay attention to your maquillage, advice that de Gunzburg took to heart when, much to her father’s chagrin, she quit medical school. Her plan was to study architecture at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, but in the intervening vacation she enrolled on a four-week course at Carita’s Maison de Beauté. This led to an opportunity to work as a make-up artist during the couture fashion shows, an experience she so enjoyed that she abandoned academia for fashion and beauty. By the time she was 30, she was working for Yves Saint Laurent, where she invented the miraculous reflective under-eye concealer Touche Éclat and rose to become creative director of its beauty division. In 1998, she founded her own nowglobal skincare and fragrance brand, By Terry.

Meanwhile, she continued to collect, though lately she has begun to focus on ceramics again. “I’ve always loved them,” she says, speaking from her sea-facing house near Tel Aviv. “Ceramics and porcelain of all kinds.” Recently back from New York, where another of her five homes designed by Jacques Grange is located, she’d been specially struck by the ancient Egyptian galleries at the Metropolitan Museum. (She is an avid museum-goer.) “Everything comes from there!” she exclaims. Picasso, Constantin Brâncuși. “It’s amazing. It’s so contemporary! But it’s very difficult to buy [antiquities] now because the good pieces are all in museums.”

If her collection began with Picasso and Paul Jouve, its other highlights number “some extraordinary pieces by Lucio Fontana and Maurice de Vlaminck. But now I’m buying works by living artists,” both emerging and established. She singles out two French ceramicists: Nelly Bonnard and Stéphanie Larène. “I’ve been pushing” – she checks herself – “advising them to go beyond their boundaries, to do [in Larène’s case] tables and more furniture.” Just as Jouve did. (Earlier this year, Christie’s sold a Jouve table with a ceramic top for €1.06m.) “It’s super-interesting and it’s also a way for me to support artists. That is part of the joy of collecting.”

She particularly praises the dealer Louis Lefèbvre of Paris’s Galerie Lefebvre for the artist residency he runs in Versailles. There, artists can spend up to three months working in a studio – in what was once a music pavilion built for Louis XVI’s sister Élisabeth – after which they are given a solo show. “It’s wonderful!” she says. “I’m following several of them.”

And it’s this that has given her an idea for a philanthropic venture of her own. “My dream is not to open a museum just to flatter my ego. But maybe one day I will sell my company and part of my collection and open one, along with a place where ceramicists can train – education is so important – and make work undisturbed. Maybe in Provence [where she has another home]. It’s a little bit pretentious to say it, but we could transform our house into a residence for artists, something like the Villa Medici. Provence has such a wonderful ceramics culture. And the colors… And the clay… I’d love to do something like that.”

Even after more than 40 years of collecting “not compulsively, but if I like a piece and I can afford it, I buy it,” she has yet to sell a work of art. “Though I’m thinking of it to fund my project. Jean and I started collecting Les Lalanne 30 years ago and we have stores full of it. It’s ridiculous.” (And though she doesn’t say as much, hot, as far as the market is concerned.) “So maybe one day we’ll part with that.”

Having had to leave almost everything they owned in Egypt, “my mother always told me ‘never get attached to any object or anything material’.” The place for art, she always said, is in a museum. “That is where real art lovers go.” As a child, there were regular family visits to the Louvre. And, to this day, de Gunzburg is “moved by the sight of people queuing to see art. I’m sure they adore Picasso much more than any wealthy collector. You don’t have to have one at home to appreciate it,” she says. This perhaps explains the equanimity with which she overcame the breakage, by one of her nephews, of that first Picasso plate. She doesn’t deny that it hurt. “But these things happen! One shouldn’t over-dramatise!”