Pierre-Christian Brochet is a renowned philanthropist, owner of one of the largest collections of contemporary art. He has been living in Moscow for 22 years and has been actively supporting young and emerging artists all this time. 1989 was a turning point for Brochet - having moved to Russia, he acquired the first works for his Russian collection in the gallery Aidan Salakhova and then met the artist Anna Golitsyna (Annushka), who later became his wife - it was to her that the collector owes her acquaintance with the artists from Chistye Prudy (by Konstantin Zvezdochetov, the group "World Champions" and others). A year later, Brochet met with Leningraders Sergei Bugaev (Africa), Timur Novikov, Georgy Guryanov, Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe. In the early 1990s, the collector's apartment became a platform for the Moscow avant-garde, where artistic life was in full swing, exhibitions and discussions of contemporary art were held. Since then, Brochet's collection has grown significantly, so some of the art objects included in it had to settle in the office.
A new apartment in the well-known apartment building of the Rossiya insurance company on Sretensky Boulevard, where Pierre-Christian Brochet recently moved with his wife and two children, daughter Apollinaria and son Emmanuel, finally made it possible to assemble a collection on one territory: a suite of spacious rooms with high ceilings and the front double doors turned out to be an ideal haven for large-scale paintings and antique furniture of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Love for things with history prompted not to change the layout of a new apartment to please the fashion for open studio interiors: in such a home environment it is convenient from time to time to organize exhibitions and talks about art, following the tradition of French salons of the 18th century.
The long corridor is a constant of the classical exposition. The black and white worlds of conceptualists - Valery Chtak and Oleg Kulik, Anna Acorn and Pavel Pepperstein, Black Square by Nikolai Matsenko and Odalisque by Aidan Salakhova - set a strict tone here. The achromatic palette of artwork is supported by sterile white walls and doors, as well as black and white graphics of the floor, lined with ARCH-SKIN ceramics based on sketches by Ariadna Shmandurova and Anton Nesmelov. The whitewashed surface of the walls, on which canvases by Arsen Savadov, Alexei Kallima, Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov, Ivan Chuikov, Timur Novikov and the owner's wife are placed, creates an additional dimension in the apartment - a space of art superimposed on the living interior. It is even developing in the bathroom, the decoration of which is made up of paintings and furniture from the collection of Pierre-Christian Brochet. The general exposition principle is not observed only in the bedroom, where paintings are hung on the walls covered with wallpaper from the luxury brand "Donghia NY" (designers Paul Mathieu and Michael Ray). Otherwise, white dominates - according to the owner of the house, this color fills the space with energy and novelty, in which works of artists of the late XX - early XXI centuries coexist and antique furniture from Pushkin's times.
Pierre-Christian Brochet explains his equally deep love for works of modern art and antiquities by his desire, through collecting, on the one hand, to influence the formation of artistic taste, with which the present time will be associated tomorrow, and on the other, to preserve the culture of a country that has succeeded in two decades. to become his homeland: it is no coincidence that the collector linked his life with the family of the princes Golitsyn, who from generation to generation supported art, feeling themselves heirs of a great culture. “I see no reason to collect contemporary art, ignoring the past,” the collector sums up his reasoning.
