PARIS, April 10, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The French artist Claude Lalanne, part
of the Lalanne sculptor couple whose surreal but functional works are highly
prized by collectors, died early Wednesday aged 93, her agent told AFP.
For decades Lalanne formed an artistic duo with her fellow sculptor and
husband Francois-Xavier Lalanne, creating works whose fans included fashion
giant Yves Saint Laurent and the iconoclastic French singer Serge Gainsbourg.
She had been taken to a hospital in Fontainebleau, south of Paris, after
suffering a stroke.
“Claude Lalanne had the simplicity of artists who work with their hands to
build their own poetic world, without worrying about anything else,” the
gallery owner Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, a nephew of former French president
Francois Mitterrand, said.
The artist, who was still working in her studio in the village of Ury last
week, studied architecture at Paris’s renowned Beaux Arts school before
turning to art.
“Les Lalanne,” as the couple were known — she met her husband, who died in
2008, at a gallery in 1952 — created baroque works large and small, with
whimsical imagery often fused with intensely realistic renditions of leaves,
vegetables and animals.
They intended their works to be functional — last week she was working on
a staircase for the American architect and designer Peter Marino.
In an interview in 2013, Claude remembered how “the critics completely
ignored us” when she and her husband first showed their work.
“For them, making sculptures which had a use was a complete nonsense,” she
was quoted by Christie’s auction house as saying on its website.
One of her best-known sculptures was “L’Homme a la Tete de Chou” (Man with
the Cabbage Head), a 1968 work which Serge Gainsbourg chose for the cover of
his 1976 concept album of the same name.
She designed objects for the home as well, including intricate
candlesticks or benches — one had two crawling crocodiles as the backrest.
– Park Avenue ‘Pomme’ –
In the late 1960s, Lalanne began several collaborations with Saint Laurent
on jewelry as well as two robes, one with a sculpted copper waist, the other
with a copper breastplate.
At the massive sale of Saint Laurent’s collected artwork in 2009, a set of
15 Lalanne mirrors went for 1.8 million euros ($2 million at current rates),
a record for the artist.
That year she and her husband were the subject of an outdoor showing in
New York of several works along Park Avenue, including a shiny golden “Pomme”
(Apple).
“Claude Lalanne’s personality functioned as a fortress against bad taste
and pretentiousness,” Mitterrand said.
Despite their success, Claude Lalanne was unable to stop the city of Paris
from razing a few years later their fantastical sculpted park for children in
the Les Halles district in the heart of the city.
Inaugurated in 1986, the “Lalanne Garden” was a mischievous oasis tucked a
stone’s throw away from the hulking Les Halles shopping centre and transport
hub.
Even after a spirited resistance by locals and fellow artists, many of
whom urged the city to move the gardens if they could not be saved, the
garden was destroyed as part of a huge renovation project.