Mr Sollers has swung from Maoism through post-modernism to Catholicism, relishing a reputation for intellectual dandyism (which he would accept) and for inconsistency (which he denies).
Drawings of James McNeill Whistler, Charles Baudelaire and Max Beerbohm, followed by 20th-century photographs of Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright and Andy Warhol, make the case for dandyism as an aesthetic stance, the domain of artists.