Big Fish

As artists, ‘Les Lalanne’ managed to be both very famous and utterly unknown, a carefully guarded and clandestine cult. For their names operated as codeword granting access to a certain international high society, an heady mélange of the most-celebrated fashion designers and wealthiest private families, playboys, debutantes and heiresses, the ultimate crust of le gratin, the final fumes of the jet set. In this rarefied milieu, if someone failed to recognise the name of Les Lalanne, you just moved on to the next guest or next villa – you were certainly not sharing the secret or explaining who they were.

François-Xavier Lalanne (1927-2008) and his wife Claude (1924-2019) were sculptors whose wide and generous oeuvre included furniture, jewellery, fashion accessories, tableware, public monuments and even actual architecture. The sheer range of their work caused confusion, while many a highbrow wrinkled at their aesthetic adaptability. Surely Les Lalanne were mere ‘designers’ and ‘decorators’ rather than real artists – a charge they faced the length of their long careers.

They also had a name that was grammatically incorrect – technically it should be ‘Les Lalannes’, in the plural – and difficult for English speakers to pronounce without fear of getting it wrong. This name was at the heart of a longstanding confusion, too, the assumption that François-Xavier (or ‘FX’ as he was known) and Claude operated as a collaborative team producing work together.

In fact, their practices were separate and distinct, and easily distinguishable, with FX’s work usually being larger and simpler of shape, while Claude’s work was more intricate, organic and intimate. They both loved animals – Claude’s own tastes ranged from frisky lapins to slightly sinister crocodiles – and were probably last exemplars of the great ‘animalier’ artists, a tradition that begins with the very first works of art, 40,000 years ago in caves around the world. François-Xavier Lalanne was born in 1927 in Agen, to a family that owed its fortune to the importation of cow bones as fertiliser, a neat precedent of his own use of animal architecture. His father collected sports cars, which provided an inherited love of the idealised curves and fetish finish of such sculptural yet practical objects. A precocious art student, Lalanne was just 21 when he won first prize at the prestigious Académie Julian for his portrait of Chopin, and it was at the first exhibition of his paintings in 1953 that he met Claude, who soon moved into his studio at the Impasse Ronsin.

Claude Lalanne’s Structure Végétale Candelabra (1999), made of bronze with an applied patina, sold for $81,250 at Bonhams

François-Xavier Lalanne’s Coquetier Poule (c.1990), a set of six small porcelain figures

François-Xavier Lalanne’s Tortue Topiaire. Sold for $375,075.

Mouton Transhumant (c.2000), a limited edition by François-Xavier Lalanne, sold for $225,075

This cul-de-sac in Montparnasse had been filled with artists since the 1870s and was famous for housing the studios of Constantin Brâncuși. The great Brâncuși was not only the direct neighbour of the Lalannes, but also their friend and patron. Much older and already world-famous, he was perhaps their central influence, not least as a unique example of a high-modernist, 20th-century animalier sculptor. For, despite their minimal forms, Brâncuși’s sculptures were often derived from, and titled after, animals. Indeed, a clear comparison could be made between Lalanne’s Carpe (Très Grande) – to be offered in Modern Decorative Art + Design in New York on 17 December – and Brâncuși’s own ‘fish’ sculptures, which the artist created between 1922 and 1930, such as the Poisson at Tate, and a marble version at MoMA.

At Impasse Ronsin, a swirl of other artists, with whom the Lalannes cooked, drank, gossiped and worked, circulated around Brâncuși, an impressive international roster that included Max Ernst and Duchamp, William Copley, Yves Klein, Larry Rivers, and another now-celebrated artistic couple, Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely.

The first major breakthrough for FX came at the Salon de la Jeune Peinture of 1966, where he set grazing the first flock of his moutons de laine, sheep which also served as seating, whose success was instantaneous and remains unstoppable to this day. These sheep became synonymous with Lalanne, filling the magazine pages and houses of all the chicest collectors, not least those of the powerful Italian dynasty, the Agnellis, who enjoyed the pun on their own name. The first time these sheep were shown, it was under the title Pour Polyphème, from the myth of Odysseus, FX being a Jesuit scholar of ancient Greek. However, such Classical associations were soon lost in the sheer appeal of these shaggy stools, to the extent that their bastard knock-off descendants can now be seen in every high street. At the same time, the original Lalanne sheep grow more expensive by the day, and the earlier the rarer: a full troupeau of them making £3,149,500 back in 2012, a relative bargain considering a single solitary one sold for a record £390,000.

Such sculptural furniture of animals, life-size or larger, became FX’s trademark, whether a turtle sprouting topiary – the top lot in Modern Decorative Art + Design in 2019 – a giant rhinoceros console, a hippopotamus bath in shocking blue, canine andirons, a bed in the shape of a bird, a free-standing baboon stove, an ape safe, and a memorable toilet in the form of a fly.

François-Xavier Lalanne (1927-2008), Carpe (Très Grande), conceived and cast in 2000 monumental, gilt-bronze, of an edition of eight, with foundry mark for bocquel fd, engraved with monogram ‘fxl’ and numbered ‘1/8’. Estimate $650,000 - 850,000

After the Impasse Ronsin, Les Lalanne moved to a beautiful farm with fabled gardens in the humble village of Ury, outside Fontainebleau, where they maintained adjacent studios and a hectic social life, a mondaine merry-go-round spinning on a Rothschild axis with a blur of other dizzying names, such as De Noailles, Schlumberger, De Ganay, Gunzburg, De Ribes, Pozzo di Borgo, the Queen of Greece. Even the Duke of Edinburgh ended up with a giant FX grasshopper, which is still chirping in the Royal Collection.

Everyone who was anyone came to Ury, not least that now mythic Parisian fashion set of the early 1970s, from Karl Lagerfeld to Pierre Bergé, and especially Claude’s lifelong friend and sometime collaborator Yves Saint Laurent, who dressed her, commissioned her to create body-castings for his 1969 catwalk, and asked her to decorate his famous apartment with her giant foliage mirrors.

For though they may have been snobs, in the best way, Les Lalanne were never snobbish about their work, unlike those truly snooty arbiters of contemporary art. They had begun very much as artisans and, like their master Brâncuși, were happy to consider themselves working craftsmen as much as artists, with practical, physical skills and a healthy regard for the laborious making of objects regardless of function.

Among their earliest works were set designs and props for ballet directors like Maurice Béjart, and Claude went on to craft cutlery for Salvador Dalí, as well as armour for Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire. They never worried such commissions might make them look in any way less serious and, like one of their owl sculptures, they gave not a hoot for what officially constituted ‘art’. After all, they had begun by making window decorations and sets for Christian Dior, at that time the most famous couturier in the world. With magical continuity, Claude was asked to create jewellery for Maria Grazia Chiuri’s debut Dior show in 2017, 60 years after her first collaboration with that illustrious house.

François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne in Ury in 1969. Photograph by Jean-Philippe Lalanne

Claude’s many-armed Unique Structure Vegetal aux Papillons Chandelier, 1998

Claude’s Escargot

And the fashion business has stayed loyally in love with Les Lalanne, including such devotees as Valentino, Carla Fendi, Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs – who contributed the preface to my last book about the pair.

François-Xavier died aged 81 in 2008, while Claude carried on for a full and fruitful decade after that, working harder than ever, becoming more famous than ever, a very grand grande dame indeed, as the most-expensive living French artist after Pierre Soulages. By the time Claude died in Ury in 2019, at the age of 93, she had seen their artistic reputation entirely vindicated – by the oh-so-solemn contemporary art world, as well as the design and fashion mafia, leaving her to ponder such vagaries of taste and fate. As she said, “It is strange, we never changed ourselves, we are still doing exactly what we always were.”

Adrian Dannatt is curator of the exhibition Impasse Ronsin at Museum Tinguely, Basel. He is also the author of François Xavier and Claude Lalanne: In the Domain of Dreams (2018)