In a sun-dappled townhouse on the Left Bank of the Seine, Lucien Ardoin begins his mornings not with coffee, but with contemplation. The air is silent but for the distant hum of Paris waking. Ardoin, a man of sixty-two with the poise of a scholar and the eyes of a hawk, spends the first hour of his day precisely as he believes all cultivated men should: in dialogue with beauty.
Lucien is not simply an art collector; he is a steward of aesthetic memory. With a doctorate in comparative literature from the Sorbonne and a career as a private advisor to European estates and museums, Ardoin curates not just works, but cultural inheritance. His métier is complex—part historian, part curator, part therapist to the anxious elite who wish to convert wealth into legacy.
His collection—held partly in situ at his Paris residence, and partly in secure climate-controlled storage outside Geneva—numbers just over 430 pieces. It is not vast, but it is precise. “A collection is not a warehouse of acquisition,” he often says. “It is a sentence in a larger philosophical argument.”
Lucien’s passion, and indeed his defining obsession, is Symbolism—a late 19th-century movement whose dreamy obscurities and metaphysical yearnings resonate with his own distrust of empirical modernity. Odilon Redon, Gustave Moreau, and Fernand Khnopff are his tutelary spirits. He possesses what is perhaps the finest privately held Redon pastel in France, which he refers to not by title but by its effect: “It silences me.”
By 9:00 AM, Ardoin is at his desk, a 19th-century Boulle bureau cluttered not with papers, but with magnifying glasses, linen gloves, and a small but lethal-looking ultraviolet torch. He spends several hours reviewing auction catalogues, corresponding with curators, and consulting conservators. He is, at this hour, equal parts archivist and sleuth.
By midday, Ardoin strolls to Café de Flore, where he meets his circle—a loosely assembled group of philosophers, critics, and one rogue psychoanalyst—for what they call their déjeuner de l’oubli, a lunch of “forgetting” in which they discuss anything but art. This paradoxical sabbatical from passion, Ardoin insists, is crucial to sustaining it.
Afternoons are devoted to either travel or scholarship. On days at home, he spends hours in his personal viewing room, a subdued chamber lit only by diffuse natural light. Here, Ardoin communes with selected works. “You must look until the image begins to look back. Then—and only then—do you own it.”
On travel days, he may fly to Brussels, Milan, or occasionally New York, to view potential acquisitions, advise on exhibitions, or lecture on topics such as “The Aesthetic of Reverie in Post-Romantic Europe.” He is a sought-after speaker, though he maintains a guarded mystique, often refusing interviews.
Evenings are reserved for quiet. Ardoin practices Japanese calligraphy—an unusual hobby for a Frenchman. The discipline, he says, “suspends the chaos of interpretation.” He does not own a television. He does, however, possess a 1920s phonograph and an extensive collection of early Debussy and Ravel recordings.
At night, beneath a painting by Arnold Böcklin, Lucien Ardoin retires to bed with a book—usually philosophy or poetry, never art history. “I have lived the catalogues,” he smiles. “Now I prefer the enigmas.”
And thus ends a typical day—not merely in the life of a collector, but in the carefully orchestrated existence of a man for whom art is not an accessory to living, but the very atmosphere in which life can properly occur.