When François-Xavier Lalanne’s Hippopotame Bar—a copper, nickel silver and brass sculpture within the form of a hippo—offered for $31.4 million in December 2025, it grew to become the costliest design object ever auctioned. Nevertheless, that file was eclipsed shortly after by a set of 15 mirrors created by none aside from the sculptor’s spouse, Claude Lalanne. The Sotheby’s New York sale on 22 April, from the personal assortment of Jean and Terry de Gunzburg, fetched $33.5 million – a brand new world file for a chunk of design. Works by the late couple –collectively referred to Les Lalanne, although they largely practised individually – introduced in a complete $64.7 million on the sale.
‘The enchantment of Les Lalanne has turn out to be actually common,’ Sotheby’s chairman of Twentieth-century design, Jodi Pollack, tells Wallpaper*. ‘With a robust and established collector base, mixed with new consumers getting into the market, there’s a highly effective momentum that continues to drive demand.’
The artist-designers in Paris in 1998. Collectively, they loved parallel design careers.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
The couple loved profitable parallel careers throughout their lifetimes, and have become style world darlings, collaborating with a number of celebrated designers and ateliers on commissions for retailer interiors and personal properties. Their particular person works are markedly completely different, however share widespread themes rooted in surrealism and references to the pure world. These items notably shone within the Seventies, as curiosity in natural kinds adopted the space-age modernism that dominated the earlier decade.
At present, as Les Lalanne proceed to interrupt their very own information within the design class, we delve additional into their careers and affect.
Who had been Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne?
The couple of their studio in 1991.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
French sculptor and designer Claude Dupeux was born in Paris in 1924, and formally educated on the École des Arts Décoratifs within the metropolis earlier than persevering with with architectural research on the École des Beaux-Arts, additionally in Paris. Concurrently, she honed her creative imaginative and prescient via drawing lessons on the Atelier de la Grande Chaumière, the place she additionally found her ardour for sculpture. Claude met her future husband, François-Xavier Lalanne, at an exhibition of his work in 1952. Born in Agen, France in 1927, he initially educated as a painter at Paris’s Julian Academy.
François-Xavier rented a studio within the Deadlock Ronsin, an artists’ enclave in Montparnasse. His neighbour was Constantin Brancusi, who launched him to Surrealists together with Man Ray and Max Ernst. The artist additionally labored as a guard on the Louvre, the place his research of Egyptian artefacts would go on to affect his animal-inspired sculptural work.
François-Xavier with one in all his famed rhino sculptures, an animal that popped up quite a few instances in his oeuvre.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
Quickly after assembly, Claude and François-Xavier moved in collectively and have become artistic companions. The couple’s first joint exhibition, ‘Zoophites,’ opened in 1964 at Jeanine Restany’s Galerie J in Paris and offered a group of hybrid sculptural-functional objects. The present gained the eye of Alexander Iolas, a Greek artwork supplier and collector who launched American audiences to Surrealism. In October 1966, when Iolas exhibited the couple’s works in his Paris gallery, they first used the shared moniker ‘Les Lalanne.’ Claude and François-Xavier married a 12 months later, and each loved a protracted and fruitful profession.
Claude alongside a sardine-shaped sculpture at London’s Whitechapel Gallery.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
After François-Xavier’s loss of life in 2008, Claude continued to work from the home in Ury, France, simply south of Paris, that they’d shared for over 5 many years. When she died in April 2019 on the age of 94, French president Emmanuel Macron and his spouse, Brigitte, launched an announcement of condolences, talking of how the couple kneaded collectively ‘creativeness, humour and poetry’ to create works that ‘re-enchant the acquainted and the useful.’
What characterises their work?
Collectively, the work of Les Lalanne kinds a various oeuvre of useful sculpture, or sculptural furnishings, relying on the way you take a look at it. The duo usually labored collectively, although maintained their distinct types and infrequently collaborated on particular person items. François-Xavier’s creations had been extra usually impressed by the animal kingdom whereas Claude favoured the botanical. They had been, nonetheless, united of their love for historic French craftsmanship, the surreal and the humour they dropped at their advantageous and ornamental artwork.
François-Xavier’s first personal fee, in 1965, was a sculptural brass bar for the house of clothier Yves Saint Laurent and his associate Pierre Bergé, which featured two tiers that incorporate an ovoid bottle-rack and a horn-shaped shaker. The piece offered for $3.2 million at a Christie’s public sale of the couple’s assortment in 2009, 9 instances its preliminary worth.
François-Xavier’s Moutons sculptures at Château de Chenonceau in France.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
François-Xavier is maybe finest identified for his sheep sculptures, the Moutons de Laine, a flock created in 1968 on the request of artwork supplier Alexander Iolas as a marriage current to the artist Invoice Copley. Initially titled Pour Polypheme, based mostly on the passage in Homer’s Odyssey the place Ulysses and his comrades escape from the Cyclops Polyphemus by hiding beneath his large sheep, the 24 shearling-wrapped items with painted-aluminium faces and ft can be utilized as stools. A number of had been later acquired by Saint Laurent and Bergé. In the meantime, François-Xavier’s Hippopotame Bar was commissioned by Anne Schlumberger in 1976, whereas a fish-shaped Grand Carpe bar (1972) and the Rhinocrétaire I cupboard (1964) additionally characteristic in his zoomorphic assortment.
Claude, however, would usually take pure kinds comparable to leaves or flowers, and electroplate them in copper sulphate, making the copper cling to the natural materials to create good replicas. The recently-auctioned assortment of elaborate mirrors completely demonstrates the fragile floral particulars for which she is famend. These had been additionally created for Saint Laurent, with whom Claude additionally collaborated on gilt steel castings from the physique of supermodel Verushka that had been included into the style designer’s 1969 Empreintes assortment.
Claude Lalanne’s whimsical Choupatte sculpture, which lately achieved $5.9 million at Sotheby’s.
(Picture credit score: Courtesy Sotheby’s)
Along with working with Saint Laurent, Claude was commissioned by Hubert de Givenchy, Karl Lagerfeld, Marc Jacobs, John Galliano and Reed Krakoff, amongst others. Her most well-known works embody Choupatte, a collection of cabbage-shaped vessels supported on chicken-like ft; the Croco vary of crocodile-informed tables and chairs; and the surreal L’Homme à Tête de Chou (1976) sculpture that impressed the title and canopy of an album by Serge Gainsbourg.
Les Lalanne’s legacy continues to resonate within the style world, with items being put in in Chanel, Dior and Tom Ford flagship shops. Distinguished collectors embody inside designer Peter Marino, who positioned François-Xavier’s sculptures throughout Chanel’s advantageous jewelry outlets, in addition to many different personal collectors.
‘What I discover particularly compelling is the best way Les Lalanne engages with different works in a group, subtly shifting the dialogue in a approach that all the time feels contemporary and sudden,’ says Pollack, of Sotheby’s.
Claude at work in her studio in 2015.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
Why is the work of Les Lalanne so beneficial?
In recent times, Les Lalanne have been the topic of a number of main exhibitions, together with a retrospective at Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Their work seems in main collections together with the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, the Musée Nationwide d’Artwork Moderne on the Centre Pompidou and the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. The current consideration on their careers has arrived completely at a time when curiosity in collectible design, and a wider appreciation for beautiful crafts, have skyrocketed. The couple’s connections to the posh style world has additional elevated their attract.
The couple alongside Claude’s Lapin de Victoire at Galerie Mitterrand in Paris in 2002.
(Picture credit score: Getty Photos)
‘Over the previous two years, we’ve seen new pricing benchmarks achieved at public sale for each Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, throughout each distinctive and editioned works,’ Pollack explains. ‘Demand stays exceptionally sturdy and continues to drive the market ahead. On the similar time, this momentum is bringing a number of the artists’ most celebrated works again to market.’
Together with a robust marketplace for design basically, the current public sale information for Les Lalanne show that collectors should not solely within the works’ worth – they’re additionally searching for items which can be beautifully-crafted, extremely whimsical, and don’t take themselves too severely. Pollack, who has a François-Xavier-designed Mouton de Laine in her workplace, concludes: ‘All of us want a bit Lalanne in our lives, particularly in a world that hardly ever pauses for breath.’
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Supply: Wallpaper
