Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Claude Lalanne, Whimsical (and Sought-After) Sculptor, Is Dead at 93

Her works, like a metal cabbage with chicken legs, weren’t taken seriously at first but now command lofty prices.

Claude Lalanne in her studio in Ury, France. She often drew on the botanical world for her sculptural inspiration. She called her sculptures of cabbages on chicken legs "Choupattes.”Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Kasmin Gallery

Claude Lalanne, a sculptor with a whimsical streak whose metalwork included quirky cutlery, an apple with lips, and bronze cabbages standing on chicken legs, died on April 10 in Fontainebleau, France. She was 93.

The Kasmin Gallery, her New York representative, announced her death on its website.

Ms. Lalanne and her husband, the sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne, who died in 2008, were known collectively as “Les Lalanne,” and their work was coveted by collectors, who often paid attention-getting prices for it. Despite their collective billing, they didn’t collaborate often; rather, they shared a fondness for the unexpected.

Image
Ms. Lalanne preparing for an exhibition of work by her and her husband, François-Xavier Lalanne, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in East London in 1976.Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Photograph by Chris Ware/Getty Images

Mr. Lalanne was especially known for surrealistic sculptures, like a baboon with a fireplace in its belly and a flock of stone-and-bronze sheep, some adorned with real sheepskin. Ms. Lalanne’s works tended to be smaller and often drew on imagery from the botanical kingdom, as with elegant candelabra reminiscent of entwined branches or mirrors framed by bronze foliage. She found inspiration in the gardens at the couple’s home in Ury, south of Paris.

“I never stop walking in the garden,” she told The Financial Times two years ago, “looking at what is there and using what I grow.”

She meant that in a very real way. In addition to her sculptures, Ms. Lalanne made jewelry, often using an electroplating process, in which something from her garden — a leaf, a twig — would be immersed in a bath of sulfuric acid and copper sulfate, leaving it with a delicate copper coating.

Image
Ms. Lalanne made jewelry incorporating leaves, twigs and other matter from her garden.Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Kasmin Gallery
Image
A 2013 necklace by Ms. Lalanne called Chrysalis and made of galvanized copper.Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Photograph by Richard Valencia, Louisa Guinness Gallery

She was still making new work until shortly before her death.

“The sculptures of Claude Lalanne were so many poetic moments stolen from the hardness of the world,” Franck Riester, France’s culture minister, said on Twitter.

She was born Claude Dupeux on Nov. 28, 1925, in Paris, and grew up there. Her mother was a musician, and her father was a gold broker.

She studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1952 she met Mr. Lalanne at an exhibition of his paintings in Paris.

They began working together shortly after, although they would not marry until 1967. In the mid-1950s they joined a group of artists embedded in a back street in the Montparnasse section of Paris known as the Impasse Ronsin. That ragged alley became, as The New York Times Magazine put it in 2016, “an artery of aesthetic energy that, in no small fashion, defined French postwar art in all its insanity.”

Image
Claude Lalanne’s Pomme de New York, on Park Avenue, in 2009.Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Kasmin Gallery

The sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who died in 1957 at age 81, was a grandfatherly presence in their early years there. Ms. Lalanne once complained to him that he was throwing too many cigarette butts on her floor; he responded by giving her a metal bowl he had made, which she used as an ashtray.

She received some commissions from department stores and such, for decorative work, and at first she and Mr. Lalanne were not taken seriously in artistic circles, where abstraction was dominant. Their work, in contrast, featured recognizable imagery and was often utilitarian. But the distinction between craftswoman and artist was not one she dwelt on.

“Artists and artisans are the same thing,” she said in a 2017 interview with the Italian journalist Alain Elkann. “It is the same definition in the dictionary.”

Image
"Love Seat," 1972, by Ms. Lalanne, made of gilt bronze and galvanized copper.Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris, via Christies Images Ltd. 2019

Claude and François-Xavier’s first show together was in 1964 in Paris and brought them some influential fans. The trendsetting gallerist and collector Alexander Iolas began exhibiting them. Salvador Dalí asked Ms. Lalanne to make him cutlery.

Yves Saint Laurent, the fashion designer, was another early champion of Ms. Lalanne’s work.

“Yves asked me to make two mirrors for him,” she recalled, “and one night when we were having dinner together he said to me, ‘Why don’t you do the whole room with mirrors?’”

She collaborated with him in 1969 on his Empreintes collection, casting bronze breastplates from the chest of the model Veruschka that were then incorporated into gowns.

Image
Ms. Lalanne’s “Snail Shell Spoons” from the show “Bijoux” at the Kasmin Gallery in New York in 2016.Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Kasmin Gallery

Posthumously, Saint Laurent contributed to a late-life surge in demand for Ms. Lalanne’s work. The year after his death in 2008, Christie’s auctioned off the collection accumulated by Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, with results that astonished the art world. Among the many items that sold for well above their estimates were Ms. Lalanne’s mirrors — a set of 15 sold for more than $2 million.

Later that year Christie’s auctioned some 50 works by Les Lalanne, which brought in more than $3 million, more than 15 times the collective low estimate.

“Before the Saint Laurent sale, that would have been unthinkable,” the publication Art Market Monitor wrote.

Les Lalanne exhibitions have been frequent in recent years. Four years ago the Kasmin Gallery mounted a retrospective, “Les Lalanne: 50 Years of Work, 1964-2015.” An exhibition at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London closed in February.

Ms. Lalanne’s survivors include four daughters, Dorothée, Caroline, Marie and Valérie; six grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.

Image
Ms. Lalanne on a bench of her design at her studio in 2015. Credit...Les Lalanne/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; Photograph by Luc Castel/Getty Images

Ms. Lalanne seemed particularly inspired by cabbages. Her sculpture “L’Homme à Tête de Chou” — “The Man With the Cabbage Head,” which pretty much describes the work — was owned by the French singer Serge Gainsbourg, who put a picture of it on the cover of his 1976 album of the same name.

And then there were those cabbages with chicken legs — “Choupattes,” she called them. She made the first one early in her career as a gift for François-Xavier.

“I had taken a mold of a cabbage and just wondered what it would look like with legs,” she once said, explaining how the signature work came about. “The moment I saw it, it felt right. It had emotion.”

Now there are versions in museums and art collections all over the world.

Neil Genzlinger is a writer for the Obituaries Desk. Previously he was a television, film and theater critic. More about Neil Genzlinger

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 25 of the New York edition with the headline: Claude Lalanne, 93, French Sculptor, Dies; Made Whimsical Art. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT