Lost to the Louvre

"Don't make any gestures, madame," the auctioneer cautioned sharply. "We catch them all." In Paris' jammed Galerie Charpentier last week, 1,500 people watched breathlessly as the finest collection in years went under the hammer. The merest raising of a pencil could jump the price 100,000 francs. The first painting was Fragonard's The Dreamer, in five minutes it was sold for 3,100,000 francs (about $9,000). Then, one by one, 63 paintings and drawings and six sculptures from the Cognacq collection went to new owners. The sales total three hours later: 302 million francs, more than $860,000.

France's wealthiest dealers and collectors battled it out. Renoir's Young Girl with Flowers in Her Hat went for $64,000, Van Gogh's The Thistles for $47,000, Fragonard's The Girl with the Dogs for $30,000. The prize piece: Cezanne's simple still life, Apples and Biscuits. When the auctioneer finally banged down his hammer, a French leadmine millionaire wrote out a check for 33 million francs ($94,281), the highest auction price ever paid for a Cezanne.

Businessman's Investment. The collection was the work of a pair of hardheaded Paris businessmen, Department Store Owner (La Samaritaine) Ernest Conacq and his nephew Gabriel. Ernest, who started out in 1851 as a twelve-year-old calico salesman and 30 years later owned a $4,000,000 business, was a man with little interest in Paris artistic life. ("It's fine until the music starts," he would say of opera comique. "Then I fall asleep.") But he did have a bargain-hunter's eye for valuable painting. Shopping around, he put some of his wealth into the rising crop of French moderns while they were still inexpensive. By the time he died in 1928, the Cognacq collection could boast some 300 masterpieces worth nearly $600,000.

Gabriel took up where his uncle left off. Buying sparely but wisely, and using his money to sponsor rising artists, he soon became a widely respected patron of the arts. Then World War II came along, and

Gabriel got into trouble. As president of the council which ran the Louvre, Frenchmen said, he had kowtowed to Petain and the Nazis. His friends said that, if so, it was for the sake of art. But the taint of Vichy was on him, and after the war he was fired from the museum council.

French Pride. Old and embittered, Gabriel Cognacq was too proud to defend himself. His revenge, before he died last year, was to rewrite his will, cutting off the Louvre without a single painting, and stipulating that the Cognacq collection be sold at public auction.

At the Galerie Charpentier, the representatives of the Louvre sat stiff-backed in their chairs while the Cezannes, Renoirs and Van Goghs went by. At any point, under French law, the Louvre men could have stood up, cited a financial act of 1926, and bought any painting by simply matching the final bid. But the Louvre had just as much pride as old Gabriel Cognacq. They never so much as raised a pencil.

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