Known for Her Amusing Surreal Sculptures, This French Artist's Sinuous Set of Mirrors Just Shattered Auction Records

Mary Randolph | Correspondent

Claude Lalanne created the Ensemble of 15 Mirrors for Yves Saint-Laurent’s Paris apartment. Sotheby's

After a bidding war at Sotheby’s last week, Claude Lalanne’s Ensemble of 15 Mirrors drew $33.5 million at the auction block, the highest-ever price at auction for a work of design.

French designer Yves Saint Laurent commissioned the mirrors, made of gilt bronze and galvanized copper and inspired by plants from the artist’s garden, for the music room of the Paris apartment he shared with Pierre Bergé.

“Outside of Versailles, it is arguably the most important ensemble of mirrors ever conceived as a unified interior,” says Edith Dicconson, the founder of Dicconson Fine Art advisory, to The Art Newspaper’s Carlie Porterfield. “The market is recognizing the importance of that.”

Lalanne, a French sculptor and designer, lived from the 1920s to 2019. She often presented work as a duo with her husband, François-Xavier Lalanne, and together they were known as “Les Lalanne.” The couple’s works drew inspiration from Art Nouveau, Surrealism and the natural world. Much of Claude Lalanne’s artwork features flora and fauna, while Francois-Xavier LaLanne’s pieces often depict animals, like his golden rhinoceros in the collection of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. They both focused on functional art, creating design pieces that could serve as furniture.

Artwork by Les Lalanne is often playful. For example, Claude Lalanne created a sculpture in 1968, whose title, L’Homme à la Tête de Chou (The Man with the Cabbage Head), plainly yet humorously describes the portrayal of a human male whose head is, inexplicably, a big round Brassica. French singer-songwriter Serge Gainsbourg featured the sculpture on the cover of his album of the same name. Another Claude Lalanne artwork, La Pomme de New York, is an amusingly large, eight-foot-tall sculpture of a massive golden apple that garnered roughly $7 million during a sale at Christie’s in April.

The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles Cornell University Library

Mirrors became a hallmark of Claude’s career. These functional and beautiful objects, rich with symbolism of reflection and perspective, have been crafted as artworks since the ancient era, first out of highly polished copper, then glass. Flat, silvered mirrors came out of the glass studios of Venice, according to the Fitzwilliam Museum. When depicted in art, they may represent truth, purity and perception, or, more negatively, vanity and illusion.

The reflective nature of mirrored surfaces adds an additional dimension to artwork that can be unpredictable and ephemeral as the light in a room changes. In Ensemble of 15 Mirrors, “light, architecture, and sculpture become inseparable, each activating the other,” says a Sotheby’s statement.

“These mirrors mark the magnum opus of Claude Lalanne’s early artistic imagination and established a defining hallmark of her oeuvre,” says Jodi Pollack, Sotheby’s chairman of major collections, to Galerie’s Jill Sieracki.

Did you know? The majesty of mirrors The Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles commemorates political, economic and cultural successes from French history. The room hosted part of the wedding festivities for Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and it was where the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919.

The mirrors were sold in an auction with about 125 artworks from the collection of Jean and Terry de Gunzberg, the latter of whom was a creative director at Yves Saint Laurent’s beauty branch. The auction also included a cabinet by André Groult, a pair of armchairs by Jean-Michel Frank and a floor lamp by Alberto Giacometti.

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs featured the artwork of Les Lalanne in a retrospective exhibition in 2010. After both artists died, remaining family members donated some of their sculptures and drawings to France in lieu of paying taxes, a practice that Picasso’s heirs also used and that created the Musée Picasso in Paris.

Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.

View Original Article