A giant bear, a winged rabbit, a rhinoceros, a donkey which serves as a desk: 70 animal sculptures in bronze or stone by the Frenchman François-Xavier Lalanne, a deceased visual artist and posthumous star of the world art market, have been sold for $59 million at auction on Thursday in New York, announced Christie’s.
At its prestigious headquarters at Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, Christie’s auctioned off models of wild, domestic or imaginary animals, cut and shaped by this sculptor who worked with his wife Claude, also deceased, in their workshop in Fontainebleau to the south of Paris.
Three times more than expected
The 70 works for sale were all by François-Xavier Lalanne (1927-2008) and belonged to his daughter Dorothée Lalanne. They reached a total of 58.9 million dollars, announced Christie’s, which hoped for 16 to 23 million.
The company, owned by the Artémis holding of French billionaire François Pinault, congratulated itself in a press release on “exceptional results” and the “enthusiasm” of its customers: more than 50% came from the Americas, 15% from Asia. and 30% from Europe, in a global art market which has been declining since 2023 due to international crises.
Lalanne’s works which broke records in their category were “ Très Grand Centaure (2001) ” in patinated bronze, which sold for 7.5 million dollars, and the monumental “ Très Grand Ours (2009) ” sold for 6.1 million dollars. A very original “Nathalie’s Donkey (2005)” in bronze, wood, leather and brass, the center of which opens to form a desk, was purchased for $2.6 million.
“A major sculptor of the 20th century
Daphné Riou, expert at Christie’s, praised to AFP “a major sculptor of the 20th century”, passionate “by nature” and who with his wife Claude formed a couple of visual artists “always on the border between art and design, full of humor, who refused to take themselves seriously.”
“The animal world includes all forms, in addition to the legendary code attached to it, a marvelous code, since it exists as well in the head of a child as (in) that of an old gentleman,” declared François-Xavier Lalanne to Dorothée Lalanne, according to a 1991 interview published by the Artcurial notebooks.
The Lalanne’s price exploded in 2009 during the auctions of the Bergé-Saint Laurent collection with 15 Claude Lalanne mirrors sold for 1.8 million euros. The following year, the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris dedicated a retrospective to the couple, before Christie’s competitor, Sotheby’s, sold a lot of 274 sculptures in 2019 for 91 million euros.