André Kostolany (1906-1999) had a famous credo when it came - Lot 0

André Kostolany (1906-1999) had a famous credo when it came to financial investments, which he called "The 4 Gs": money ("Geld"), luck ("Glück"), patience ("Geduld") and good ideas ("Gute Gedanken"). A figure as media-savvy as he is mysterious, our man exhibits here - through his personal collection and that of his wife, née François Roussel (1937-2025) - his "4 G's": there's no doubt that they each demonstrated these four qualities in assembling a collection, one of the jewels of which is its chapter dedicated to Hungarian artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Born in Hungary into a family of Jewish distillers and collectors, young André initially set his sights on philosophy and art history, studies which he pursued in parallel with his passion for classical music. But in 1924, his father sent him to Paris to work as a stockbroker. The artistic passions of his youth became his "violin d'Ingres", and he dedicated his career to finance. And so began the "Roaring Twenties" in Paris, where the young Kostolany led a brilliant rise through the crash of 1929. The Second World War put an end to this first period, and our financier chose to flee to the United States to escape persecution. A year later, in 1941, he was appointed Managing Director and President of G. Ballai and Co Financing Company, New York became his new home, with the Wall Street stock exchange at its epicenter, and this for 10 years. The 1950s and European reconstruction gave him the opportunity to return to Paris and set up an office in Munich, Germany. This marked the beginning of a new chapter in his life as an international financier, in which he made a number of investments and experienced both fortune and ruin. From the 1960s onwards, he began to write for the press, and soon began publishing popular economic works that met with great success, with the help of his wife Françoise (La Grande confrontation in 1959; Si la bourse m'était contée in 1960 and L'aventure de l'argent in 1973). He died at the age of 93 at his wife's side in Paris, the city that saw his first stock market "coups" between the wars. Françoise Kostolany had accompanied her flamboyant husband on all his travels, and was the author of several books, including one dedicated to diamonds (1992). Looking after their collection until her death in 2025, she decided to donate the proceeds from its sale to charity. André Kostolany's family was already well versed in the arts when he was born, notably his paternal uncle Gyula Kostolányi Kann (1868-1946). The figure of this trained architect who became a painter looms large over the ensemble presented here. Indeed, some of the paintings in André's collection come from his uncle Gyula, and undoubtedly formed an initial nucleus that our financier took care to enrich throughout his life. The artistic friendships of Kostolányi Kann, a pupil of Bertalan Karlovszky (1858-1938) and Simon Hollósy (1857-1918), were as rich as they were numerous. He built the Kelenhegyi-úti Studio-Berház in Budapest, where József Rippl-Rónai (1861-1927) and Béla Adalbert Czóbel (1883-1976), among other painters, set up their studios. Rippl-Rónai painted several portraits of his friend, one of which, dated 1913, is preserved in the Rippl-Rónai Museum in Kaposvár (inv. no. MT_K_55.76.). Last but not least, Kostolányi Kann was one of the seventeen founding members of the Hungarian Impressionist and Naturalist Circle (MIÉNK) in 1908. The collection presented here shines through its eclecticism and reflects the hectic life of the Kostolany couple: from Madame's jewel cases to Monsieur's objects on the theme of the stock exchange, the connoisseur will marvel at the masterly ensemble built up around Hungarian painting of the late 19th century. József Rippl-Rónai rubbed shoulders with Vilmos Aba-Novák (1894-1941) and Károly Ferenczy (1862-1917), to name but a few, on the walls of their apartment, recreating the delicate, intellectual atmosphere of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire in which these artists lived. André Kostolany's library is a rare testimony to the insatiable curiosity of a mind that blends finance, history, satire and humanist culture. Far from being limited to classic stock market treatises, this collection reflects a deep passion for the moral, political and psychological origins of commerce and money, approached through old works, often rare, sometimes iconoclastic, always revealing of their time. The collection covers a wide range of subjects, including the history of commerce and the great