The Impossible Collection of Art

The Library Essay

A Museum Assembled on Paper

Philippe Ségalot and Franck Giraud, art advisers who ran the contemporary and modern departments of the auction world before advising its biggest buyers, were asked to imagine collecting without constraint: the hundred works of twentieth-century art they would assemble if money, museums and history raised no objection. Their choices run from Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon forward, and nearly all now hang in institutions that will never sell.

That impossibility is the founding conceit of Assouline's Ultimate Collection, which this 2012 volume inaugurated in its hand-bound, large-format dress. The book is best read as connoisseurship exposed, two professional eyes ranking a century with real conviction, and inviting the reader's argument on every page.