121 FIG. 3: Sculpture. Tellem, Mali. Wood. H: 59 cm. Photo: Alex Arthur. FIG. 4: Figure of a musician. Bamana, Mali. Wood. H: 89 cm. Ex Pierre Harter. Photo: Alex Arthur. M. L.: Not really. As a matter of fact, I think of myself more as an “aficionado” than a “collector.” In the 1960s, I navigated the waters of “primitive art” quite moderately and cautiously. I bought a Tellem figure, again from Kamer, who was married to Hélène Leloup at the time, and she recently selected it for exhibition at her Dogon show at the Musée du Quai Branly. My first wife acquired a very old Bamana figure with remarkably prominent buttocks, and I also bought a small Lega at the flea market. It’s not ivory, but bone. When I first started acquiring art, I bought mostly nonfigurative paintings and furniture. Fortunately, there was no old family furniture in the first apartment that my wife and I lived in, but we did have a Poliakoff, the Vieria da Silva, and two works by Simon Hantaï on the walls already. It was really as a function of the paintings we acquired that I purchased Spanish and French Haute Époque furniture, which still gives me great pleasure today. My eye sees harmony between this kind of furniture, modern painting, and tribal art objects. There’s a coherence there that there wouldn’t be with Louis XV or XVI furniture. We find that our objects integrate nicely into the landscape of our apartment. In the course of my trajectory as an art lover, there came a time when painting became out of reach. I turned my attention to the tribal art I liked because it was more affordable at the time. In the last twenty years, my purchases in this area have outnumbered those in other fields even though I still often fall in love with paintings. I can make these acquisitions thanks to the sale of a Dubuffet that I bought with great difficulty in the early years, relying on the loan of a friend, whom I paid back over a period of five years. I kept the painting for forty years before I could let it go, but that allowed me to procure several choice objects, for example, this male Bamana musician figure, which is among the most beautiful of its kind known. It formerly belonged to Pierre Harter. T. A. M.: These objects are very different from one another. What attracts you to them? M. L.: I don’t like the term “collection.” My wife Natacha and I buy what we fall in love with, object by object. It is not our ambition to have five different kinds of Jaliscos or all the main types of Tellem sculptures. What we have put together is certainly heterogeneous, but it’s coherent to us. We’re attracted by various treatments of forms in tribal art but particularly the
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