Lanterne

The work of Claude Lalanne, and that of her late husband François Xavier, speaks a language that is at once unique yet instantly recognisable. Characterised by an infectious curiosity about the world around her, Claude’s work is inspired by an intense desire to re- enchant our experience of it, with her love of nature and sense of play combining to create functional artworks which are simultaneously elegant yet with a suggestion of ethereality. Still active today in her 90s at her studio in Ury, south of Paris, her work is often thought to be intertwined with that of her husband (both artists becoming known collectively as Les Lalannes) and yet they are best considered and recognised as two separate careers running in tandem. Whilst there are examples of collaboration inspired by their mutual love of nature, these are in reality co-creations, with the distinctness of Claude’s broad focus on vegetal works, incorporating organic and plants motifs, offsetting her husband’s playful reinterpretation of the animalistic world. Claude studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the École des Arts Décoratifs and later attended external classes in drawing, clay modelling and casting. The couple met in 1952 at François-Xavier’s first exhibition of paintings at Galerie Cimaise on Boulevard Raspail in Paris and, in their home on the Impasse Ronsin, now recognised as a legendary community of artists in this corner of Montparnasse, they became neighbours of sculptor Constantin Brancusi (who would pop by in the evenings bearing vodka, cigarettes and plums) and also befriended fellow artists Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Jean Tinguely, Niki de Saint Phalle and James Metcalf. Other close friends included René Magritte, Max Ernst and Victor Brauner and the duo constructed an art realm where Surrealism, Nouveau Réalisme and anthropomorphism conjoined, in a whimsical and poetic combination of the decorative and fine arts. Les Lalannes lived a life out of step with contemporary influences – the postwar art scene in Paris had long been dominated by abstraction – and joyfully embraced determining their own parallel paths. Les Lalanne developed a style, across an array of scales and purpose,
that defines inventive, poetic and surrealist sculpture. Having rediscovered the Renaissance art of casting forms from life Claude
also employing variants of electroplating techniques first discovered in the 18th century by Bolognese physicist Luigi Galvani (hence the term galvanisation). Objects she gathers in her garden are placed in a bath of sulphuric acid and copper sulphate, through which an electric current is flowed. In this process the copper clings to the organic material to create a perfect replica, and so challenges the boundaries between art and design in the process. She then refines the object through hours of hand tooling, achieving a careful balance of delicacy and sensitivity in her work. Their work was first shown by legendary gallerist Alexander Iolas in Paris (and in New York, Milan, Geneva, and Athens) from the mid- 1960s to 1979 and they soon began to attract serious art collectors. In 1969 Yves Saint Laurent – one of their most ardent supporters – commissioned Claude to take gilt-metal castings from the body of supermodel Verushka for his Empreintes collection of haute couture (shown above), and went to furnish his home in the rue de Babylone
between 1974 and 1985 with a series of twenty five of her mirrors. Claude gained further recognition in popular consciousness when Serge Gainsbourg chose her nude sculpture L’Homme à Tête de Chou (‘Man with the Head of a Cabbage’) for the cover of his 1976
album of the same name. Their long career was celebrated in a major retrospective, simply entitled “Les Lalannes”, at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2010, the exhibition itself designed by another notable patron and friend, Peter Marino.
The form of the current lot follows on from a smaller related model, simply entitled Lanterne, created by Claude Lalanne around 1990. A unique lantern of a more comparable scale to the present lot was executed by her in 1999 and was sold Christie’s Paris, Zeineb et JeanPierre Marcie-Rivière: Grand collectionneur et mécènes, 8 June 2016, lot 177. The work perfectly encapsulates the aspiration and scope of her vision. Through her eyes, a functional and integral element of daily life, is re-purposed and re-imagined by cross-pollinating the natural and the constructed, and as such is imbued with a subtle life of its own.