LES Lalanne: Nature Transformed
Known individually and collectively as Les Lalanne since 1966, Claude’s and François-Xavier’s artistic practices were deeply entangled. Their respective creative processes nonetheless remained recognizably distinct over their decades-long careers. Claude’s sculptures typically mimic the flora of her surroundings, such as a ginkgo leaf, a branch, or an apple. Having resuscitated the Renaissance art of casting forms from life, while also employing the more recent technique of electroplating, Claude achieved a delicacy and sensitivity in her work largely unparalleled in cast bronze.
By contrast, François-Xavier is renowned for his life-size sculptures of animals, a practice inspired in part by his time working as a guard in the Egyptian and Assyrian galleries of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. With much time to study the massive Apis Bull, François-Xavier would later acknowledge that “the animal world offers an infinite repertory of forms connected to a universal symbolism” that “children as well as adults are sensitive to.” François-Xavier’s oeuvre demonstrates his commitment to the artistic tradition of zoomorphism through a Surrealist aesthetic, often making creatures that recall the dreamworlds of Lewis Carroll.
Claude and François-Xavier shared a studio in the 1950s on the famed Impasse Ronsin in Paris, where their neighbors included, among others, Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, William N. Copley, James Metcalf, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle. A list of early Lalanne collectors reads as a standalone catalogue of some of the most influential public figures of the twentieth century: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Gunter Sachs, Dodie Rosekrans, Valentino, Karl Lagerfeld, Anne Gruner Schlumberger, Baron Guy and Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, Giovanni Agnelli, and John and Dominique de Menil all acquired important works by the artists. The famed Greek American gallerist Alexandre Iolas, noted for championing the careers of household names from René Magritte and Max Ernst to Andy Warhol, ushered Les Lalanne onto the international scene and organized their first exhibition at an American institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1967. Kasmin has mounted over 10 solo exhibitions dedicated to Les Lalanne since 2007, when the gallery gave the artists their first New York exhibition in nearly 30 years.
Today, Les Lalanne’s works are included in premier museums and public venues across Europe, Asia, and the United States, from the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris to Windsor Castle in the United Kingdom. In 2021, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, mounted Les Lalanne’s first dedicated art museum exhibition in the United States since 1977, soon followed by a major exhibition at the Palace of Versailles in France. In 2022, large-scale bronzes by both artists were installed in the Kasmin Sculpture Garden in New York. Their works previously have been spotlighted in a retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, a large-scale public exhibition at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Florida, on New York’s Park Avenue and Getty Station, and in the sale of the collection of Yves Saint Laurent.
François-Xavier Lalanne
François-Xavier Lalanne was born in 1927 in an Agen setting that shaped the fundamental principles of his art. A grandfather who imported cow bones and was an art lover who himself reproduced masterpieces displayed in museums, a father who was a car enthusiast and president of the Agen Automobile Club, and his future animals, bred on the altar of art, were already taking shape before our eyes.
Enrolled at the Evreux Jesuit school in Normandy, François-Xavier acquired a good education learning Ancient Greek and Latin. In 1945, eager to learn drawing and painting, he moved to Paris and entered the Académie Julian where he attended Marcel Gimond's sculpture class - who had been Maillol's student and a friend of Rodin's. "While he won the Académies painting prize in 1948 and initially considered himself a painter, he had already integrated the concept of monumental sculpture. In 1949, he worked at the Louvre Museum as a guard and aseeture the works in the Egyptian and Assy departmentsori, which he then took his model. In the same year, he moved to a studio in the impasse Ronsin and joined the artistic tradition of conceptual art, the surrealists and the new realism among Redon and Noguchi, Niki de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely, Max Ernst and Constantin Brancusi or even Marcel Duchamp.
In 1953, at his first exhibition which took place at the Galerie Cimaise, he met the woman who was to become his alter-ego, Claude Dupeux, and who joined him in his studio in the Montparnasse area. Through their contact with James Metcalf, the Lalannes learned the art of galvanoplasty, a process that would stimulate their curiosity as sculptors. Surrounded by art dealers and collectors, the Lalannes created a buzz in Paris. In 1964, Jeanine Goldschmidt, art critic Pierre Restany's wife, enabled them to throw their first exhibition entitled zoophytes at the Galerie J. François-Xavier's Rhinocrétaire is his artistic manifesto: this brass sheet metal rhinoceros-shaped behemoth turns out to be a desk and hides, in the manner of 18th-century secret, furniture a lamp, a wine cellar and a safe.
Two years later, he produced another emblematic work: the Mouton, which embodies the artist's irony and innovation, since while criticizing the bourgeoisie, he offers them a comfortable piece of room that remains a work of art. He thus taught the greatest collectors who acquired it, such as the Rothschilds, Agnelli and Peter Marino, "the art of becoming a shepherd in a flat". A flock was then exhibited in Alexandre Iolas' gallery, giving the Lalannes' career a real boost. For François-Xavier, sculpture must be familiar and useful, while at the same time freeing art from its formal and serious straitjacket; we lie down, we sit, we eat, we write, we tidy up...
In 1967, the Lalannes settled in Ury, a place that became the epicentre of their creation for more than fifty years and revealed their real connivance. Their home-studio was the place for privileged dinners where artists such as Warhol met haute-couture designers such as Karl Lagerfeld or Lanvin, members of high society such as the Rothschilds or the David-Weills, and even aristocrats from the Greek royal family or the Bourbons. It was during these meetings in Ury that their complicity with Yves Saint-Laurent and Pierre Bergé was born. The couple placed many of the Lalannes' works in their flat on the Rue de Babylone, such as François-Xavier's nickel silver brass YSL bar, made in 1965 and sold at Christie's in 2009. Pierre Bergé declared about the Lalannes that it was preferable to replace the idea of "artist(s)" by that of "poet(s)". With this concept he revealed the particularity of an artist-craftsman who develops with lightness and fantasy a whole binary populating our uninhabited universes with humor.
CLAUDE LALLANE
Claude Lalanne was born and raised in Paris. Her father was a gold broker. Her mother was a musician. Lalanne studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and later at the École des Arts Décoratifs, graduating in time to join the last wave of the Parisian avant-garde led by Man Ray and Constantin Brancusi.
She met her future husband, fellow artist Francois-Xavier Lalanne, in 1952 at an exhibition of his work. They soon moved in together in the Impasse Ronsin, an artists’ enclave in Montparnasse, where their social circle included Max Ernst and Rene Magritte.
They were neighbours of the sculptor Brancusi, who became a sort of mentor to the pair. The inseparable artist couple quickly became known as Les Lalanne, though they didn’t marry until 1967. They worked separately and had very different styles though they chose to exhibit together.
While Francois-Xavier’s work was surreal – famously he created a flock of stone and bronze sheep – Claude Lalanne’s work was more delicate and whimsical, combining Surrealism with Art Nouveau. She was inspired by nature. A keen gardener, she used electroplating techniques learned from American artists Jimmy Metcalf and Larry Rivers to transform the plants she nurtured into something truly special. She made jewellery, ornaments and furniture from electroplated leaves and twigs. After seeing her first joint show with her husband in Paris in 1964, Salvador Dali asked Lalanne to make him some cutlery.
Later Lalanne was commissioned by fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent to create a roomful of mirrors adorned with more electroplated leaves and branches. Lalanne also collaborated with the designer on his 1969 Empreintes collection, for which she made bronze breastplates cast from the chest of his favourite model. It was to be the fashion impresario’s only collaboration with an artist. After Saint Laurent’s death in 2008, his 15 Lalanne mirrors fetched more than $2m at auction.
In the 1970s Lalanne reached a much wider audience when Serge Gainsbourg used a photograph of her sculpture of a man with the cabbage for a head as an album cover. Talking of her series of chicken-legged cabbage sculptures, which she called “choupattes”, Lalanne said: “I had taken a mould of a cabbage and just wondered what it would look like with legs. The moment I saw it, it felt right. It had emotion.”
After Lalanne’s husband died in 2008, she continued to work in the studio they had shared in Ury, near Fontainebleau. Assisted latterly by her daughter and granddaughter, she was creating new sculptures, including more choupettes, into her nineties.
Lalanne’s work can be found in a number of notable private collections, including those of Tom Ford and Marc Jacobs. It can also be found in several international public collections, including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2020, a retrospective of the works of Lalanne and her husband is planned at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts. Lalanne is survived by her four daughters, Caroline, Dorothee, Marie and Valerie; six grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.
Claude Lalanne
Born in Paris, France, 1925
Died in Ury, France, 2019
François-Xavier Lalanne
Born in Agen, France, 1927
Died in Ury, France, 2008
READ MORE:
https://www.phillips.com/detail/francoisxavier-lalanne/UK010121/12
https://www.ft.com/content/fc01e6ca-4de7-4358-90c1-fbc0a2888464
https://hyperallergic.com/910205/the-animal-wonderland-of-les-lalanne/
https://hyperallergic.com/910205/the-animal-wonderland-of-les-lalanne/
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/17/obituaries/claude-lalanne-dead.html