Dior shows Sotheby`s sells – Style – Kommersant

In the restored Dior boutique on Avenue Montaigne, which now houses a museum, restaurant and winter gardens, Sotheby`s holds a pre-auction exhibition of sculptures and furniture by Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne from the collection of their daughter Dorothea.

Showing works in interiors is the latest trend of auction houses. The scenography of the pre-auction exhibitions, for which eminent decorators and designers are hired, is becoming more sophisticated and more targeted. The task is not just to show the product in person, but to present works of art in the most favorable perspective, light, color and in their ideal habitat. For Lalanne’s fantastic bestiary, 30 Avenue Montaigne is just such a place.

Why Dior? The history of cooperation began in the early 1950s. François-Xavier, four-handed, with Yves Saint Laurent, Christian Dior’s young assistant, designed his new store. This was already remembered in the new century by the chief architect of all Dior stores, Peter Marino, who ordered Claude a round Ginkgo bench woven from bronze leaves. In 2017, at the request of Maria Grazia Chiuri, who had just taken over as art director of the house, Claude painted jewelry for the couture collection. She died in 2019 at the age of 93, outliving her husband by 11 years. She worked until the last days, completing orders, including for Marino, who became a great admirer and collector of the Lalannes.

It is generally accepted that the world of Claude is poetic and baroque, the world of Francois-Xavier is classical, architectural. She is a poet, a bohemian favorite of fashionable Paris in the middle of the century (the man-Gainsbourg with a cabbage head is her work, all the interiors of Saint Laurent are also her, and it all started with a chain mail armor for Verushka). He is a practitioner, a graduate of Montparnasse from the time of surrealism, he was looking for a use for all sculptors – hence the rhinoceros secretary, and the sheep bench, and the toad chair, and the ostrich bar counter, and so on.

In the summer of 2021, Dior, together with the Parisian Galerie Mitterrand, staged a grandiose exhibition of Lalanne’s landscape gardening sculptures in Versailles. In the gardens, rose gardens, on farms and in the ponds of the Petit Trianon, their wonderful animals and plants settled. And in the same autumn, Sotheby`s arranged a sale of the collection of Dorothea’s daughter (one of the four heirs), once again inflating prices, although they are already one of the most expensive sculptors (Francois-Xavier is still more expensive than Claude). Of the 81 lots, 20 took the mark of a million. The total trading proceeds amounted to €79.3 million, the estimate was exceeded by more than five times. That was the first part. On November 3, the second one will go under the hammer. There are about 90 lots in it, two dozen are shown in the Dior boutique. Among them are the most famous and recognizable: a bureau in the form of a ram, the latest work of Francois-Xavier (estimated at €1.5–2 million), a bronze shark, a bronze rhinoceros (this time in the form of a sculpture, not a chest of drawers), a garden set by Claude Lalanne Williamsburg from patinated bronze, apples, monkeys and sheep in assortment. For every taste, but not for every wallet.

Maria Sidelnikova