Revisiting and returning to the collection of a friend

January 21, 2022

Pierre Durand in the living room of his Fifth Avenue apartment, photographed by JH in 2008.

Social Diary• BY: David Patrick Columbia

Friday, January 21, 2022. Cold in New York, after a bright sunny day with temps reach up into the 40s, and dropping below freezing by mid-evening, heading into the mid-teens by late night.

Today our subject is Pierre Durand, a friend who died earlier last year after a long illness that at times seemed as if he had conquered it. Pierre was born in Lima, Peru to an Italian mother and a Peruvian father of French descent. If you were to meet him, he was very American in his manner and presence (and accent) but you also could imagine him being a Euro, particularly French.

I knew him the way we New Yorkers know a lot of people — casually through social activities and mutual friends and acquaintances. I knew he was basically a serious and scholarly sort of fellow who had a very successful Wall Street career. Although in the mid-1980s he and a friend and partner Khalil Rizk started the Chinese Porcelain Company, a prominent Park Avenue establishment on the corner of 58th Street. However, Rizk died prematurely in 2001 and although still a Wall Streeter, Pierre continued running the business.

He’d first come to America when he was 17 to study Industrial Engineering at Cornell and then went on to get his MBA at Columbia. He’d met Khalil when at Cornell and he became Pierre’s business and life partner, as well as a great influence in his collecting.

His sister Giselle said Pierre was born with a “unique eye” and was always “very cultivated. He would read a lot and get input from everywhere.”

Giselle loved when they would travel together “because Pierre could see what no one else saw, whether it was about an antique store or modern art,” adding, “When he was very young he collected stones, shells, fossils and stamps. As he got little older, Giselle recalled, he would buy ceramics with his pocket money.

He had a very calm personality. Always courteous and warmly friendly, although there was nothing about his social conduct to make you think he was wildly successful financially or that he had a strong artistic sensibility.

I knew him only as a social personality, someone with whom I shared mutual friends and would see at dinners and at galas. He was one of those men who was equally reserved as well as friendly and ran the Chinese Porcelain Company after Khalil died. I did not know that he had his own firm on Wall Street where he was highly successful. There was no ego about his accomplishments and achievements, and he was helpful to many others.

Back in the early 2000s, JH and I organized a show of JH’s city pictures for the Diary, and someone suggested to Pierre that he run it at the Chinese Porcelain Company. It opened with a cocktail receptions, bringing out well over a hundred visitors, and we sold many of the photographs with all of the tens of thousands of dollars in proceeds going to the Women’s Committee of Central Park Conservancy to assist their budget.

The scene at The Chinese Porcelain Company in 2008 for an invitational opening night of exhibition of photographs from JH to benefit the Women’s Committee of the Central Park Conservancy.

In 2011 Sian Ballen and Lesley Hauge interviewed Pierre at his Fifth Avenue apartment (on the southeast corner of 72nd Street) while Jeff photographed the apartment for the NYSD HOUSE series. I had never seen the apartment before their visit but the results defined Pierre completely. He had a sharp eye for quality, workmanship, elegance and history, and revered classic artistry. He also had an apartment in Paris and for a while, a hillside house on Sunset Plaza Drive overlooking Los Angeles in West Hollywood. But New York was his home and the center of his collecting. He was stable, he was secure, he was kind and he had a taste for artistry, elegance and history which was thoroughly exemplified as you will see when you read the HOUSE interview.

The Collection of Pierre Durand will be going up for sale at Christie’s on January 27th, 2022. The collection features the contents of Pierre’s New York apartment, which artistically combined walls of gallery-hung Old Master Drawings with contemporary glass by Yoichi Ohira, and contrasted Chinese paintings by Liu Dan with fine French and English decorative arts. Other highlights include important Old Master Paintings, Chinese works of art and Chinese Export porcelain, as well as entertaining porcelain and silver.

Here are a few of our favorite lots of more than 24o that will be offered.