CLAUDE LALANNE

Claude Lalanne was born Claude Jacqueline Georgette Dupeux in Paris in 1925, into a household that made beauty feel entirely natural — her father a gold broker, her mother a musician. She studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts and the École des Arts Décoratifs, a formation that gave her something most jewellers and sculptors lack: a structural instinct, an understanding of how things hold together and why. During these years she also attended drawing classes at the Atelier de la Grande Chaumière, where she discovered sculpture, and encountered American artists Larry Rivers and James Metcalf, who introduced her to electroplating — the technique that would become the defining material language of her career.

In 1952 she met the sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne at an exhibition of his work. They fell in love, and in falling in love began one of the most singular creative partnerships in twentieth century art. They settled at the Impasse Ronsin in Montparnasse, a legendary artists' enclave whose most distinguished resident was Constantin Brancusi — their studio backed directly onto his. From Brancusi they absorbed something of his understanding of form reduced to its essence; from the Surrealists, whose circle they entered through their gallerist Alexandre Iolas, they took the conviction that the irrational and the fantastical were not escapes from the world but a more honest account of it.

Their first joint exhibition, at the Galerie J. in Paris in 1964, announced immediately what kind of artists they were: a life-size rhinoceros that folded open to reveal a writing desk; an onion with a watch inside; a cabbage resting on chicken's feet. The work was whimsical and deeply serious at once, rooted in the natural world and entirely transformed by imagination. They took the collective name Les Lalanne — though their practices remained distinct. François-Xavier's eye was drawn to animals; Claude's was fixed on the botanical, on leaves and stems and flowers and the endlessly varied intelligence of plant life.

Her method was as remarkable as her vision. Electroplating — the process of submerging organic material in a bath of copper sulphate through which an electrical current runs — allowed her to make perfect metallic replicas of natural forms: every vein of a leaf, every texture of bark preserved exactly as nature made it. From these fossilised forms she then constructed objects of an entirely different order — furniture, sculpture, jewellery — sewing together copper forms that had once been living things into pieces that were simultaneously scientific record and pure poetry.

Her jewellery, which she made throughout her career alongside her larger sculptural work, occupied its own particular place in that world. Where François-Xavier made the occasional piece, for Claude jewellery was a sustained and personal medium. She made earrings, necklaces, bracelets and brooches for friends and clients, often working from moulds — including, recurringly, moulds taken from mouths: a gold torque framing a golden mouth appeared as early as 1964, and the motif never entirely left her. Her small flower pins, worn by those close to her, functioned almost as tokens of belonging. Yves Saint Laurent, the most devoted collector of Les Lalanne's work, commissioned pieces repeatedly, understanding instinctively that what she made was not decoration but an entirely different kind of dress.

After François-Xavier's death in 2008, Claude continued to work alone at their rural retreat in Ury, an hour outside Paris, where the couple had moved after Iolas died and the gallery closed in 1979. She died in Fontainebleau on 10th April 2019, aged 93, having worked almost to the end. She left behind furniture you want to inhabit, jewellery you want to wear, and sculpture that makes the natural world feel, briefly, like the most extraordinary thing that has ever existed — which, of course, it is.