Raymond Peynet's Prints and Me
Montpellier, the capital of the Languedoc region in southern France, is famous as a university city. Its medical school in particular has a long history, and the medieval literary figure François Rabelais, who wrote the Tale of Cargantua, and Nostradamus, who wrote Le Siecle, a great prophecy that caused quite a stir in Japan in the latter half of the 20th century, all studied at the medical school of the University of Montpellier. I spent several years in Montpellier in the 1970s.
It was not a traditional medical or law faculty near the city center, but a newly established literature faculty on the outskirts of town. A large campus and student dormitories were built to be somewhat isolated from the city, and students from inside and outside France lived a life detached from the world. I was one of them, a student in a department called sociology, which seemed unlikely to lead to employment even if I returned to Japan. I had no idea what the future would be like. All I could think about were the promotion exam and how to travel without spending money during my next vacation. I spent my time carefree in this southern French city with blue skies and fresh air until I went to Paris for my master's degree. There were quite a few international students from Japan. There were people from trading companies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs who were there for a short-term study abroad program of one year, people who were attending university or graduate school like me, and people who had graduated from university and were here for a short period of time.
A few years after I started working as a painter, around 1990, I received a letter from a French friend from that time. He said that a junior from the same university had started working in printmaking and asked me to help him. The junior print dealer was Alexander Tokar, about 10 years younger than me, so I had never met him when I was a student. When I went to Paris, Tokar came to see me. We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant in a hotel called Mont Thabor, next to the Tuileries Gardens, which was still run by a Japanese local production group at the time. He was not good at using chopsticks and spilled his food many times. Tokar practiced judo, so he understood the Japanese order between seniors and juniors well, and I treated him to meals every time we ate together after that. It couldn't be helped, since he was my senior from university. The following year, he said he wanted to introduce me to his uncle, Mr. Muret, who lives in Nice, so we went to Nice. In the winter, there were only a few tourists in Nice, and the town and the beach were deserted. It was a different world from summer, and the yellow mimosa flowers blooming here and there gave me a slight feeling of southern France. Fronde from the hotel said that there was a flower war. Apparently it was an event to attract tourists, and they were bringing in a lot of flowers from somewhere and throwing them at each other. Mr. Muret lives on a hilltop in Nice, and is quite wealthy. Apparently, Mr. Muret made his money from correspondence education materials. When he had made quite a bit of money, the law changed, and that business became less profitable, so he started making prints.
The prints of Peynet were done by Muret. There are about 40 lithographs and 12 etchings. Muret is a kind person who came to pick me up with Tokar at the airport in Nice and treated me to lunch at an expensive restaurant on the hill. After we had opened the champagne and drank a lot of wine in the middle of the day, he took me to his house in his big Mercedes. On the way there, we were caught speeding and Muret was given a ticket. Strangely, or maybe it's normal in France, drunk driving is not investigated. As an aside, when I was a student, I had a used Fuillet. As expected, it broke down a lot because it was used, and I often had to run to a gas station or garage. One time, I saw someone smoking a cigarette while filling up the gas tank. For a moment I couldn't believe my eyes. Then I wondered if gasoline in France doesn't burn. The French live happily and healthily, drinking wine to their heart's content in the middle of the day, driving their cars and smoking cigarettes next to the gas tank. In France, the pedestrian signals are green, yellow, and red. When I was standing at a red light, someone called out to me, wondering if I was sick. The French are a kind people.
Muret passed away around 1992. I went back to Nice and did business with Tokar in his warehouse. At that time, there were about 10,000 lithographs by Peynet with about 40 designs lying around in the warehouse. I scraped together all the money I had, borrowed money from the bank, and bought about 4,000. I bought all the designs that looked likely to sell, and promised to buy the remaining 6,000 pieces little by little. Tokar continued to sell the less popular designs little by little to Japanese and American dealers. When Peynet passed away in 1999, I bought another 1,000 pieces. The remaining prints that Tokar had were also sold out in about six months. Tokar seems to have made a profit by selling them at a very high price. After that, Tokar and French dealers asked me to buy them for a much higher price than I had paid for them.
I sold them little by little at our own store, Gallery Vingt de France, in Karuizawa Prince Shopping Plaza (later in Karuizawa Prince Hotel), and did not wholesale to other companies. In 2015, we closed Gallery Vingt de France, but we still have a considerable number of prints. The prints by Peynet that we sell are genuine original prints purchased from the publisher, and are brand new with the artist's autograph and number. I am now the collector who owns the most prints by Peynet in the world. Peynet's original prints are completely out of stock in France and the United States, and there seem to be many people who want to buy them. In Japan, there are Peynet museums in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, and Mimasaka City, Okayama Prefecture, but there is also a museum in Antibes, a corner of the Cote d'Azur. The city of Antibes operates the Peynet Museum and the Picasso Museum as tourist resources for the city. Peynet's lovers are idols around the world. I continue to sell them little by little to people who really love Peynet, at around 120,000 to 150,000 yen, without raising the prices.