Would You Pay $2 Million for a Trio of Bronze Sheep?
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“Art is like life,” the late French sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne said. “It shouldn’t be taken seriously.” Collectors, however, are poised to go seriously wild for an upcoming sale of his work, along with that of his wife, Claude Lalanne, at Christie’s Wednesday.
“Sculpting Paradise: The Collection of Marie Lalanne” brings together 157 works created by the pair, popularly known as Les Lalanne, to the auction block in New York City. The sale, drawn from the personal collection of the artists’ daughter Marie, contains dozens of earthly delights plucked directly from the Les Lalanne oeuvre, including a gilt bronze bull with a bar embedded in its midsection, designed by François-Xavier in 1994, a delightfully surreal sculpture of a cabbage sprouting chicken legs, created by Claude in 2014, and dozens of decorative objects, drawings, jewelry, and never-before-seen rarities. “Sculpting Paradise” marks the largest collection of the beloved duo’s work to ever be sold in the United States.
The work is also likely to command some very serious prices in a blazing-hot market for all things Les Lalanne: Just last year in a sale at Sotheby’s in Paris, another family-owned collection (this one from Claude’s daughter Dorothée) brought in an eye-watering $92.6 million, more than five times the initial auction estimate. Les Lalanne’s work has also been the subject of major exhibitions, most recently at the Clark Art Institute and Paris’s Museé des Arts Décoratifs.
“Sculpting Paradise,” then, seems set to be another record smasher. “What’s exciting with this group is that you see some really unique, impressive pieces in terms of scale,” says Christie’s Daphné Riou. “It’s too soon to point to specific objects, but certainly if you look at Les Trois Grands Moutons de Peter [a collection of three gilt bronze sheep designed by François-Xavier in 2007], these have made $6 million in the past,” Riou says. “Our estimate of $1.5 to $2 million is definitely conservative.”
But there are also opportunities for non-one-percenters to bring some of the Lalanne magic home for themselves, Riou points out: While some pieces, say a seven-foot-tall bear designed by François-Xavier, are expected to easily clear the $1 million mark, other items, including whimsical works on paper and delicate, nature-inspired jewelry, have initial estimates of under $2,000, one adorable boar etching as low as $300.
“I think, frankly, that [Les Lalanne] are getting the recognition they deserve,” Riou says. “I think they were neglected in their lifetime because, and they said it themselves, museums didn’t know how to classify them.”
Today, that classification, without a doubt, lives under “design icon.”
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