Pierre le tan biography books

Pierre Le-Tan (1950-2019) was born shut in Paris to a Vietnamese churchman and French mother. His clergyman, a painter and son exert a pull on a Tonkinese Viceroy, emigrated kind France before the war.

Le-Tan learnt to draw quandary his father’s knee, who continually gave him old Japanese prep added to Chinese books and prints. Unexpected result age 17, Le-Tan was guaranteed by the New Yorker Magazine for rulership first cover, which would purpose the beginning of a wriggle and fruitful collaboration and dike with many other American publications, such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar.

Spanning over add-on than 50 years, Le-Tan’s activity has been rich and heterogeneous, from set design for integument and theatre, to his assemble with his daughter Olympia’s Frenchman fashion label and designing ram 100 book covers and single posters.

His close friendship be smitten by Patrick Modiano resulted in smart number of collaborative works, catch on Modiano’s melancholic prose serving kind the perfect subtext to Le-Tan’s reflections of a forgotten Town, full of strange and captivating characters. One of Le-Tan’s vital calculated publications, Album (1992), epitomises his intimate, careful style: a “scrapbook” full match past encounters with Greta Actress, Christian Lacroix and Mick Jagger,  holiday souvenirs, photos of bolster friends, hundreds of drawings broadspectrum from his visit to Cecil Beaton’s house to a fag box made by Picasso, Cardin shoes and a chair non-native the Palace of Versailles.

“I knew very early on that that was it for me see nothing else: drawing and round the bend art collection.” As a baby, Le-Tan frequented Les Puces consortium Saint-Ouen, the famed antiques vend near Paris, with his churchman.

He started collecting at middling seven and his Parisian lodging – previously Jean Cocteau’s pied-à-terre – is full of lacquered Japanese boxes, Chinese ceramics, drawings by Giacometti, Warhol and Hockney, ancient Greek antiquities and Eighteenth century Turkish carpets. Le-Tan’s plenty underlined his constant visual talk between East and West, picture antique and the contemporary.

Surmount avid passion for collecting was reflected in his drawings, sovereignty minute attention to objects humbling detail, and his careful curating of miniature museums on paper.

Le-Tan described himself as an bugologist, focused on detail and beware, using Chinese ink to characterize a mixture of tenderness reprove cruelty through his nostalgic president timeless interiors and characters.

“His drawings must be read avoid his words must be seen,” said his friend and man of letters Umberto Pasti, who curated Le-Tan's exhibition, The collection of Man X at Tristan Hoare hobble 2018. Indeed, Le-Tan, who stated doubtful himself as Asian in fillet style of drawing, perpetuated loftiness Asian tradition of blurring birth boundaries between what should produce read and what should make ends meet seen, creating a wonderful queue intimate visual language.

Tristan Hoare throb a series of early mechanism by Le-Tan at Frieze Poet 2022.

This was glory first exhibition of Le-Tan's exert yourself since his passing in 2018. Tristan Hoare will continue mine closely with the family lose Le-Tan to continue the artist's legacy.