A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Let’s get started with some auction results…

While the art market has just pulled out of a three-year slump, the design market has never flagged over that period—buoyed in part by the growing appetite for surrealist objects made by the French couple Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. Fortuitously, the market for these pieces has risen at the same time that a generation of collectors—including some of the couple’s most loyal patrons—have either met their demise or decided to sell their works. It’s the rare case where supply and demand are seemingly perfectly calibrated to drive up interest from bidders.

One inflection point for Les Lalanne was the 2009 sale of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s collection, which featured the Bar YSL that sold for $3.5 million. A subsequent high point came when a group of stone sheep sold for nearly $7.5 million in late 2011. Later, of course, came Claude’s death in 2019 at the age of 94, which unleashed upon the market a large number of works from the couple’s estate, through both the sale of the estate itself and later sales by two of their four daughters.

A MESSAGE FROM OUR SPONSOR

Those sales set the market tone we’ve seen for the past six years, wherein Lalanne pieces have been auctioned at unrealistically low estimates—even as sales have reached new highs. In 2021, a bronze leopard sold for more than $9.6 million, and in October 2023, a rhinoceros bar sold for more than $19 million. More recently, two major sales of collector Pauline Karpidas’s homes in Greece and the United Kingdom also fed the market frenzy. The current sales show that the market for Lalanne is slowly starting to see realistic estimates.

In fact, McHenry, who was on the boards of the Wildlife Conservation Society and New York’s Commission on Cultural Affairs, was so pleased with the couple’s work in Williamsburg that he enlisted them to plan for a renovation of New York’s Central Park Zoo. Alas, the zoo’s renovation went in a different direction, but Christie’s is now the beneficiary of the Lalannes’ early planning, when Claude proposed a pair of gates and François-Xavier came up with some animal sculptures. The resulting maquettes left with McHenry include magazine-sized models of the gates, each estimated at $20,000, and miniatures of some of the Lalannes’ most loved designs, like F-X’s standing bear, estimated at $60,000. As Alex Heminway, Christie’s international head of design, pointed out, one of the secrets to the Lalannes’ current success in the design and art markets is that they made many of their designs in multiple sizes and limited editions, giving collectors numerous entry points to their work.

Chandeliers feature in Christie’s sale, too, including three by Diego Giacometti—originally made for French art book publisher Louis Broder and later belonging to seat belt baron Jerry Ganz—that Christie’s is selling in two lots. One lot is a pair of chandeliers estimated at $600,000, and the second is a single fixture estimated at $300,000.

Then there are about a dozen ceramics made by Lucie Rie and Hans Coper, Jewish refugees who settled in London, and whose work fused sophisticated European ceramic styles with the grit of postwar brutalism. You might have noticed these pieces, with their uniquely urban sensibility, at Christie’s November sales preview last month, sitting on a small wooden bookshelf in the wall of the gallery showing Robert and Patricia Weis’s midcentury masterpieces. Patricia Weis and her daughter had assembled this collection of ceramics over the course of annual trips to the U.K., including Coper’s Large ‘Spade’ Form, estimated at $70,000; Rie’s Footed Bowl, estimated at $60,000; and another Footed Bowl, estimated at $40,000.

A separate sale at Christie’s draws attention to the art deco centennial. The top lot is a pair of cubist columns by Gustave Miklos, estimated at $1 million. A Jean Dunand dressing mirror is estimated at $800,000, as is Ruhlmann’s own semicircular desk.

Phillips has its own Coper: Footed pot with four indents, estimated at $60,000. There’s also an interesting Harry Bertoia “Bush” sculpture that opens the sale with a $30,000 estimate, and a rare Guy de Rougemont “Nuage” coffee table on offer at a $100,000 estimate. Phillips’s Kim Sørensen told me the table has been gaining ground with influencers and the design set. She also pointed to the enduring popularity of George Nakashima’s furniture (her sale has half a dozen examples) and growing interest in works by Judy Kensley McKie, which can be seen at Phillips and across town.