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Good evening, and welcome back to Wall Power, where I’m hunkered down and tying up loose ends before the one-two punch of Frieze London and Art Basel Paris starting October 7. I’ll be arriving in London that Monday. Mrs. Wall Power is in charge of where we eat, but if you’ve got ideas for gallery shows I should see, shoot me a note or text me (details at the bottom)—or just stop me if you see me on the circuit, at the fairs or in the museums.
In the meantime, I’ve got a refresher course on the hottest market around: the surrealist-inflected furniture and sculpture of Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, the late husband-and-wife duo referred to collectively by the art and design world as Les Lalanne. When Claude died in 2019, 11 years after her longtime artistic partner, she left behind a veritable Aladdin’s cave of works at their farm in Ury, some 70 kilometers outside Paris, that the pair made but never sold.
The couple’s adult children have been selling tranches of the work at auction since 2019, pushing the market for Les Lalanne to a higher register with each additional transaction. Two works going to auction in November—one each at Christie’s and Sotheby’s—are likely to blow past their estimates, too.
But first…
- That headline!: All week, I’ve been hearing complaints about the long and provocative article that The Wall Street Journal published last Tuesday with the alarmist headline, “The Art Market Is Tanking. Sotheby’s Has Even Bigger Problems.” Sotheby’s does have problems, as I reported earlier that very day. But people in the industry are rightly irked about...
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| Year of the Camel |
| In the white-hot market for the hybrid sculpture-furniture works by the late husband-and-wife team known as Les Lalanne, nothing is as it seems. Camels are couches, hippos are bars, and the prices always seem to be going higher and higher. This fall, after an opulent show in a Venice palazzo, the auctions may give us even more to talk about. |
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| This fall, in Christie’s November auctions, one of the lots will be a historic piece of furniture—or sculpture, depending upon your point of view—depicting two camels, complete with shaggy fur, that function as couches. The hybrid, hard-to-define work was made by François-Xavier Lalanne. He and his wife, Claude Lalanne, are the surrealist-inspired duo whose oversize, animal and vegetal objets have become some of the most sought-after works in the art market.
The pair of camels, which are two of only four ever made, carry an estimate of... |
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