Versailles transformed into Lalanne land
The palace grounds are populated by creatures in an exhibition of sculptures by French artists Les Lalanne
When visitors wander into the Queen’s Hamlet, a picturesque corner of the Versailles Palace dreamt up by Marie-Antoinette, it may take them a while to notice what’s different this summer. The small village has gained new inhabitants — including two ducks looking at each other by the lake, a bronze donkey and two oversized doves.
They fit so seamlessly into their bucolic surroundings, designed in the 1780s by Richard Mique, that it’s easy to forget they are the work of two whimsical 20th-century artists: Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, better known as “Les Lalanne”.
For half a century, the husband-and-wife team carved a niche at the crossroads of sculpture and decorative arts. Both drew from nature for their animal- and plant-inspired works, and many are cheekily designed to be used. The donkey grazing in Versailles isn’t just a statue, but opens to become a desk; the doves’ backs are carved into a chair.
Although François-Xavier died in 2008, followed by Claude in 2019, their large output has arguably never been more popular. A large sale at Sotheby’s in Paris, shortly after Claude’s death, drew more than 4,000 bidders from 43 countries, and exceeded all expectations to raise €91.3m (more than four times the estimate).
The exhibition at the Versailles Palace, west of Paris, is set to cement their place in the pantheon of French sculptors — and inject a little playfulness into visits to the venerable palace. Rather than being grouped in a single space, the Lalannes’ works are deliberately scattered around the Queen’s Hamlet, the Petit Trianon — the smaller residence gifted by Louis XVI to Marie-Antoinette — and its English gardens.
Turn a corner near the Love Monument, and you may spot a large wapiti, designed by François-Xavier, near a clearing; elsewhere, boars stalk a deer from across a small river, and sheep keep their distance from a bear. “After an hour, you feel like the works have always been there,” says Catherine Pégard, the director of the Versailles Palace.
Yet there were no plans to bring them to Versailles until March of this year. The palace usually puts on a contemporary art exhibition by a living artist each year, but after a cancelled season last year due to the pandemic, Pégard opted for caution. “We hadn’t planned anything for 2021, first due to the uncertainty, and also because our financial situation is far from easy,” she says.
Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, a veteran art dealer and nephew of former French president François Mitterrand, saw an opportunity. A Lalanne exhibition at Versailles had been on his mind for a long time: “I had mentioned it to Claude before she died, but she was too tired,” he says. Pégard said yes — but with only three months to plan it, and find sponsors.
Dior provided financial backing: Claude designed jewellery for designer Maria Grazia Chiuri’s first collection there in 2017, one of the Lalannes’ many brushes with fashion. (Yves Saint Laurent was a major early supporter of the pair.) And Mitterrand, who started working with Claude and François-Xavier in 1975 and went on to represent them via his own Galerie Mitterrand, persuaded their four daughters to lend 70 per cent of the roughly 50 artworks on display.
While the Lalannes often made copies of their designs, some of the sculptures at Versailles have rarely been seen. François-Xavier’s “Bar Autruches”, with its two porcelain ostriches holding a bar counter in their beaks, was commissioned in the 1970s by president Georges Pompidou for the Elysée Palace, where it still stands today. Only a handful are in circulation, and the Sèvres porcelain is too fragile to open the ostriches’ wings or to pour ice into the egg that stands between them. Regardless, in Versailles’ French Pavilion, where it echoes a golden frieze dotted with birds, it looks spectacular.
“A fundamental principle of the Lalannes’ work is to make sculpture useful,” Mitterrand says. In the recently restored Cool Pavilion stands a lush piece by Claude, the “Lit Singerie”, whose monkeys swinging from branches overlook the bed; inside the neoclassical Belvédère, another bed — François-Xavier’s “Cocodoll”, which is shaped like a seagull — seems as if it’s waiting for Marie-Antoinette to lounge on it.
Even though they rose to fame as a duo, the Lalannes actually worked separately. According to Mitterrand, they only co-created “three or four” pieces over the course of their lives. At home, their studios were separate. “They always said: we share a bedroom, but not a studio,” Mitterrand says. “At the end of their work days, they had a little reunion. They would talk about their work, and usually they were in agreement.”
The Lalannes shared Surrealist influences and a love of nature, but each had a distinctive style, too. “François-Xavier had a love of classical French paintings and worked with very strict, pure lines, while Claude was more baroque,” Mitterrand says. While her husband worked from drawings, Claude revived a 19th-century process known as electrotyping, or galvanoplasty, to reproduce her models.
“She would dip flowers and plants into a moulding material, and then use the mould to craft bronzes. It allowed her to work as close to nature as possible,” Mitterrand says. The only human figure in the exhibition is also by Claude: “Olympe”, a fountain installed near the Belvédère, is based on a moulding of one of her granddaughters.
At home, where the pair often entertained, their sculptures weren’t merely for show. Guests were occasionally invited to use Claude’s leaf-inspired cutlery or François-Xavier’s duck-shaped salt shaker. Yet Mitterrand insists their creations weren’t “functional” per se. “When you use a Lalanne piece, it doesn’t serve you: you serve the work. Claude’s cutlery, for instance, had to be handled elegantly. It requires you to invent a relationship with each piece.”
Art collectors are now queueing up to buy works by the Lalannes in the wake of a series of major exhibitions and sales, starting with the auction of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s collection in 2009. The 2019 Sotheby’s sale, which served to pay for inheritance taxes on the Lalannes’ family collection, helped to spread pieces around the world, Mitterrand says. This spring and summer the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, is also hosting the first museum exhibition devoted to the Lalannes in the US in over 40 years.
The next step might be a permanent exhibition space to host the Lalannes’ quirky menagerie — perhaps at the pair’s former home near Paris, which now belongs to one of their daughters. “Perhaps it could remain an artists’ house, open to visitors,” Mitterrand says. “We may yet be able to do it.”