Everything seems to have been said and written about Simone Veil (1927-2017), a key figure of the post-war French right, a survivor of the Holocaust, an icon of the fight for abortion rights and a committed European. Christie's auction house is unveiling a more intimate side of this exceptional woman and her husband, Antoine, on December 4 in Paris. Seven years after the death of their mother, her two sons, Jean and Pierre-François Veil, have chosen to sell part of the collection that their parents had built up over their long life together. The 60 or so works, estimated at two to three million euros, reveal a distinctly French and classical aesthetic – bourgeois, you might even say.

In her autobiography, A Life, Veil recounted how, as early as the 1970s, when she was minister of health under President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, she would escape on Saturday mornings to visit the galleries of Paris' Left Bank in the company of a friend. These galleries were the homes of characters forged by hardship, such as Karl Flinker, an Austrian-born scholar who owned a store on Rue de Tournon and whose mother died in the Holocaust. Or Claude Bernard, a dandy of unbridled elegance, the first French dealer to exhibit Francis Bacon, on Rue des Beaux-Arts.

From the 1980s onward, Veil also forged a close friendship with Catherine Thieck. This scholar had left the Paris Museum of Modern Art to go into the art business, taking over the Galerie de France on Rue de la Verrerie. Here, Veil was reunited with an artist close to her heart, Gilles Aillaud, known for his animal allegories that critiqued both the prison system and capitalism. "She had already bought his work at Flinker and was seduced by its visual delicacy, despite the underlying violence. She had a tender relationship with painting," said Thieck.

In 1987, at the Galerie de France, Veil fell in love with a large landscape painting of a beach at low tide by Aillaud. However, the size was far too large for his apartment on Place Vauban, which faces the dome of Les Invalides. No matter; the artist painted another, smaller version, estimated by Christie's at between €50,000 and €70,000.

In the same years, Veil became close with Bernard Prazan, a fervent advocate of post-war gestural abstraction. Veil and her husband bought a small oil by Gérard Schneider from Prazan, now estimated at between €7,000 and €10,000 as well as a small format by the Canadian Jean-Paul Riopelle, valued at between €20,000 and €30,000. "My father used to say that Simone Veil loved color, a painting that reflected the joy of life rather than the darker side of informal art, which he also defended," explained Frank Prazan, who has taken up his father's torch.

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