Image: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear, January 1889, oil on canvas, 49.5 x 44.2 cm, private collection. Photo: © Peter Schälchli | Paul Gauguin, Three Tahitians, 1899, oil on canvas, 73 x 94 cm, National Galleries of Scotland. Photo: © National Galleries of Scotland, Dist. GrandPalaisRmn
The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris is devoting its entire building, from 9 October 2026 to 8 March 2027, to Gustave Fayet (1865–1925), a collector, artist and designer whom the Fondation presents as a long-overlooked figure of early modernism. The exhibition continues its "Icons of Modern Art" series, which has previously focused on the collectors Sergei Shchukin, Mikhail and Ivan Morozov, and Samuel Courtauld.
Organised in two parts, the show gathers 728 works and documents. More than 250 come from Fayet's own collection, long since scattered around the world and reunited here for the first time in a century. They are shown beside 374 of Fayet's own creations, most of which have never been exhibited and were restored for the occasion. According to the Fondation, loans come from 64 international institutions and 71 private collections.
Fayet was among the earliest buyers of Vincent van Gogh, one of the first to exhibit Pablo Picasso, and kept a Gauguin "museum" of nearly 200 works in his Paris home. Over his lifetime he assembled more than 750 major works of modern art, not counting prints. The collection section, spread over three floors, includes 10 paintings by Van Gogh, 78 works by Paul Gauguin and 86 by Odilon Redon, alongside paintings and pastels by Degas, Cézanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Morisot, Signac, Bonnard, Vuillard and Matisse.
Several loans stand out. Van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, not shown in France since 1937, hangs beside Gauguin's Self-Portrait with a Palette. Three Gauguin paintings once owned by Fayet and two fellow collectors from southern France – The Yellow Christ, Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ and Le Calvaire breton – are brought together in France for the first time. Redon's decorative panels Day, Night and Silence, painted for the library of the Abbaye de Fontfroide that Fayet bought in 1908, are being presented to the general public for the first time.
The top floor turns to Fayet as a maker: stoneware produced with the sculptor Louis Paul in Béziers from 1896, watercolours on blotting paper begun around 1912, and carpets from his Atelier de la Dauphine, founded in 1920, whose clients included Jeanne Lanvin and Jacques Doucet. The Fondation has also restored carpets made for the Maison Léon Losseau in Mons and about ten dresses linked to Paul Poiret, Doucet and Lanvin.
Sylvie Patry, chief curator at the Musée d'Orsay, is the guest chief curator, while Angeline Scherf of the Fondation oversees the design section. Robert Carsen created the exhibition design. The project was produced with the Association Musée d'Art Gustave Fayet Fontfroide, with support from the Musée d'Orsay and the participation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and two catalogues are co-published with Gallimard.
