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拍品专文
REINVENTING THE FOUNTAIN: FRANCOIS‑XAVIER LALANNE’S GRENOUILLES
For an artist born on the banks of the Garonne river in southwestern France, it is perhaps unsurprising that nature would come to be an enduring force throughout François-Xavier Lalanne’s life and career. Together with his long-term collaborator and wife, Claude Lalanne, the couple have transformed the medium of sculpture into a genre of art that continues to engage, delight, and inspire collectors across the globe. Commissioned by the present owner in 1981, these Grenouilles are the first of Lalanne’s frog fountains in this size and are an exceptional set numbered consecutively 1 through 4. Variations of this form are found throughout the artist’s oeuvre, differing in size and function with examples found in prominent private collections throughout the world, including that of the visionary American architect and collector Peter Marino with a smaller version of this fountain. The present ensemble of four works showcases Lalanne’s singular ability to create immersive environments and experiences.
Executed in bronze, their confident silhouettes together with elegant internal lines and curves emphasize the seductive nature of their turquoise green patina. Together these elements combine to exemplify the artist’s unique aesthetic vision, embracing a sense of luxury and abundance while retaining the visual restraint of Modernism. However, almost unique amongst twentieth-century artists, Lalanne imbues his works with more than just aesthetic merit; they also include a sense of wonder and delight too. For, in addition to the purity of their amphibian form, each of the four frogs can be activated to spurt water in graceful, extended arcs from their mouths. Accomplished as individual objects, as a quartet the frogs offer up a work of timeless elegance and movement.
Lalanne also participates in the long artistic tradition of fountains as sites of theatrical display and communal delight. From the elaborate Baroque fountains of Rome to playful nineteenth-century examples such as the Fuente de las Ranas in Madrid, sculptural fountains have historically occupied a space between ornament, architecture, and performance. Lalanne reinvents this tradition through the language of modern sculpture, transforming the fountain from a decorative civic monument into an intimate and poetic encounter with the natural world.
Throughout his career, François-Xavier Lalanne produced several further works inspired by amphibians, sometimes fashioned into armchairs, fountains, or sometimes created as standalone sculptural objects. Influenced in part by Surrealism, and in part by the animal kingdom, François-Xavier Lalanne’s sculptures take the ordinary, and turn them into the extraordinary. “He was someone with references beyond our era,” recalled gallerist Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand. “His work had something of the Renaissance and ancient Greece and Rome. He admired Nicolas Poussin and Bach. There was a surrealistic touch in the way he transformed sculpture into everyday objects” (J. Mitterrand, quoted by R. Murphy. “Obituary: French Artist François-Xavier Lalanne,” Women’s Wear Daily, 9 December 2008, online [accessed 5/2/2019]).
Frogs have featured in art almost as long as art has existed; during the Predynastic period in Ancient Egypt (the period before the first pharaohs, dating ca. 6000-3100 BCE) sculptures of animals were much more common than human forms. Preeminent among these were representations, frogs and small frogs were among the most common votive offerings deposited at early temple sites. The amphibian’s exact religious significance during this early period is largely unknown, but in later times it was most often identified with Heqat, the goddess who assisted at childbirth. These ancient associations have particular relevance for François-Xavier, who spent many months between 1948-50 working as a guard in the Louvre’s Oriental Antiquities galleries. Here he spent hours studying the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian artifacts in the galleries; these observations would go on to deeply influence his later career.
“Animals are the centre of our vocabulary because they are so very varied,” the artist once said. “There is a variety to animal forms, between the fish, the bird, the monkey, and then there are metaphors connected to each animal. Because it has been such a long time that animals have cohabited on this earth with mankind, we have invented an entire dictionary of metaphors for them, to make a donkey or a snake mean completely different things.” (F. Lalanne, quoted by A. Dannatt, in Claude & François-Xavier Lalanne, exh. cat., Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, 2007, p. 9). Lalanne’s Grenouille fountains have come to represent the enduring qualities of his long and varied practice. It marks a highpoint in the artist’s career, demonstrating not only his love of nature but our unique relationship to it.
“Animals have always fascinated me, perhaps because they are the only beings through which we can enter into contact with another world.”
- François-Xavier Lalanne
For an artist born on the banks of the Garonne river in southwestern France, it is perhaps unsurprising that nature would come to be an enduring force throughout François-Xavier Lalanne’s life and career. Together with his long-term collaborator and wife, Claude Lalanne, the couple have transformed the medium of sculpture into a genre of art that continues to engage, delight, and inspire collectors across the globe. Commissioned by the present owner in 1981, these Grenouilles are the first of Lalanne’s frog fountains in this size and are an exceptional set numbered consecutively 1 through 4. Variations of this form are found throughout the artist’s oeuvre, differing in size and function with examples found in prominent private collections throughout the world, including that of the visionary American architect and collector Peter Marino with a smaller version of this fountain. The present ensemble of four works showcases Lalanne’s singular ability to create immersive environments and experiences.
Executed in bronze, their confident silhouettes together with elegant internal lines and curves emphasize the seductive nature of their turquoise green patina. Together these elements combine to exemplify the artist’s unique aesthetic vision, embracing a sense of luxury and abundance while retaining the visual restraint of Modernism. However, almost unique amongst twentieth-century artists, Lalanne imbues his works with more than just aesthetic merit; they also include a sense of wonder and delight too. For, in addition to the purity of their amphibian form, each of the four frogs can be activated to spurt water in graceful, extended arcs from their mouths. Accomplished as individual objects, as a quartet the frogs offer up a work of timeless elegance and movement.
Lalanne also participates in the long artistic tradition of fountains as sites of theatrical display and communal delight. From the elaborate Baroque fountains of Rome to playful nineteenth-century examples such as the Fuente de las Ranas in Madrid, sculptural fountains have historically occupied a space between ornament, architecture, and performance. Lalanne reinvents this tradition through the language of modern sculpture, transforming the fountain from a decorative civic monument into an intimate and poetic encounter with the natural world.
Throughout his career, François-Xavier Lalanne produced several further works inspired by amphibians, sometimes fashioned into armchairs, fountains, or sometimes created as standalone sculptural objects. Influenced in part by Surrealism, and in part by the animal kingdom, François-Xavier Lalanne’s sculptures take the ordinary, and turn them into the extraordinary. “He was someone with references beyond our era,” recalled gallerist Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand. “His work had something of the Renaissance and ancient Greece and Rome. He admired Nicolas Poussin and Bach. There was a surrealistic touch in the way he transformed sculpture into everyday objects” (J. Mitterrand, quoted by R. Murphy. “Obituary: French Artist François-Xavier Lalanne,” Women’s Wear Daily, 9 December 2008, online [accessed 5/2/2019]).
Frogs have featured in art almost as long as art has existed; during the Predynastic period in Ancient Egypt (the period before the first pharaohs, dating ca. 6000-3100 BCE) sculptures of animals were much more common than human forms. Preeminent among these were representations, frogs and small frogs were among the most common votive offerings deposited at early temple sites. The amphibian’s exact religious significance during this early period is largely unknown, but in later times it was most often identified with Heqat, the goddess who assisted at childbirth. These ancient associations have particular relevance for François-Xavier, who spent many months between 1948-50 working as a guard in the Louvre’s Oriental Antiquities galleries. Here he spent hours studying the ancient Egyptian and Assyrian artifacts in the galleries; these observations would go on to deeply influence his later career.
“Animals are the centre of our vocabulary because they are so very varied,” the artist once said. “There is a variety to animal forms, between the fish, the bird, the monkey, and then there are metaphors connected to each animal. Because it has been such a long time that animals have cohabited on this earth with mankind, we have invented an entire dictionary of metaphors for them, to make a donkey or a snake mean completely different things.” (F. Lalanne, quoted by A. Dannatt, in Claude & François-Xavier Lalanne, exh. cat., Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, 2007, p. 9). Lalanne’s Grenouille fountains have come to represent the enduring qualities of his long and varied practice. It marks a highpoint in the artist’s career, demonstrating not only his love of nature but our unique relationship to it.
“Animals have always fascinated me, perhaps because they are the only beings through which we can enter into contact with another world.”
- François-Xavier Lalanne