The Roger Passeron Collection to be Sold at Drouot

Auctions of prints and engravings are often held at Drouot—a temple for those techniques—but the December 17 and 18 sale will likely go down in the annals on at least two counts, starting with its size and scope: 530 works from Dürer to Picasso, Miró, Matta, Gorky, Dufy and Dix. Second, there is the collector’s personality. The least one can say about Roger Passeron is that he was passionate. A few days before his recent death, the 100-year-old asked his children to buy a zincograph by Henri Michaux. “He was thinking of writing a book about calligrams and engraving that would have included works by André Masson, Max Ernst and Henri Michaux,” his children wrote in the auction catalog. One might say that Passeron was born into the profession: his father, Alfred, was a print dealer on rue de Seine in Paris. Yet at first, instead of going into the family business, he went to engineering school and became head of the Air-équipement plant in Blois. But the genes were there—one might say he was a chip off the block—and before long he started collecting “fine…