Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne


Book Description

Revered and collected by design connoisseurs and enthusiasts alike, the work of husband-and-wife team Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne defies categorization. Crossing between sculpture and the functional object, the designs by the Lalannes—such as a hammered brass rhino-cum-desk—are whimsical and elegant with references to ancient French craftsmanship and twentieth-century Surrealism. This is the first intimate visual biography of their work, as well as the studio and life of the Lalannes. Never-before-seen photographs of their studio and home life—where study models and unfinished sculptures reveal a true portrait of the artists at work—are combined with the finished works shown in galleries and gardens, including an installation on the grassy median of Park Avenue in New York and their largest outdoor exhibition at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden outside of Miami. Transforming visual imagery of flora and fauna into delightfully sensual, dreamlike objects, the designs by the Lalannes have been sought by the likes of Yves Saint Laurent, Jacques Grange, and Peter Marino. This publication makes their work and process understandable, and ultimately accessible.




Claude & François-Xavier Lalanne


Book Description

Foreword by Adrian Dannatt. Text by Pierre Berge, Peter Marino, Reed Krakoff.




The Lalannes


Book Description

Takes art lovers into the whimsical and surrealistic world of a pair of French sculptors, with color photos showcasing 35 years worth of work. Published to coincide with a 1998 exhibition held at the Chateau de Bagatelle in Paris (and published simultaneously in French by Flammarion as Les Lalannes)




Alain Elkann Interviews


Book Description

Alain Elkann has mastered the art of the interview. With a background in novels and journalism, and having published over twenty books translated across ten languages, he infuses his interviews with innovation, allowing them to flow freely and organically. Alain Elkann Interviews will provide an unprecedented window into the minds of some of the most well-known and -respected figures of the last twenty-five years.




Lalanne(s)


Book Description

This comprehensive volume covers over 50 years of sculpture from the Lalannes - a menagerie that includes hippo bathtubs, escargot cutlery and wild boar topiaries.







Impasse Ronsin


Book Description

From around 1864 until 1971 the Impasse Ronsin in Paris was home to a warren of studios used by wide variety of artists. This curious cul-de-sac hidden away in Montparnasse served as home and atelier to some 220 artists, from academic sculptor Alfred Boucher to Argentine performance artist Marta Minujin. If Constantin Brancusi was its most famous resident, its most infamous was Madame Steinheil, mistress and maybe murderer of the French President whose artist-husband also met a brutal end, turning the Impasse Ronsin into one of the most notorious crime scenes of the early 20th century.




Doomed and Famous


Book Description

An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric. In Doomed and Famous, an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged the dead, with a macabre disregard for the etiquette of mortality. His specialty, much in demand among even the most mainstream publications, was to memorialize those whose eccentricity or criminality made them unlikely candidates for the fleeting immortality of a newspaper necrology. Dannatt maintained a veritable lust, perverse certainly, for capturing and celebrating such wayward existences. This book is a selection of some of the best—meaning most improbable—of these miniature biographies. Here are arranged an almost fictive cast of characters including an imaginary Sephardic count in Wisconsin, a sadomasochist collector of the world's rarest clocks, a discrete Cuban connoisseur of invisibility, an alcoholic novelist in Rio, a Warhol Superstar gone wrong, a leading downtown Manhattan dominatrix, a conceptual artist who blew up a museum, and many others. Dannatt terminates this volume with his own putative extinction, performing the difficult if not dangerous task of penning his personal life history and ultimate end.




The Parisians: Tastemakers at Home


Book Description

Twenty-five world-class designers invite us inside their private French residences, providing intimate access to their creative universe and rich inspiration for home style. Stepping inside the private residences of France's leading tastemakers provides unrivaled inspiration for interiors with a personal flair. From a modernist retreat to an urban-pop apartment, and from an eclectic cabinet of curiosities to an eighteenth-century hôtel particulier, each ambiance demonstrates a perfect mastery of associations between color, pattern, volume, material, and decorative genius. Pierre Yovanovitch's elegant, purist sensitivity infuses his seventeenth-century château in Provence. Pierre Passebon, owner of the famous Galerie du Passage in Paris, has furnished his carefully curated home with a brilliant mix of tribal art, Wiener Werkstätte masterpieces, and design from the 1930s. Jewelry designer Lorenz Bäumer's own interior creations complement the resolutely contemporary pieces by modern masters such as Ingo Maurer, Ettore Sottsass, and Verner Panton in his light-filled, constantly evolving apartment. Fashion designer Gilles Dufour's eclectic collections include nineteenth-century history paintings, classical sculptures, and Christian Bérard drawings, displayed alongside a menagerie of sculptures by Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne. These private residences, each created by a world-class aesthete with a discerning eye, offer up a rich palette of inspired ideas for the home.




Serious Fun


Book Description

For almost thirty years Claude Cormier et Associés has designed landscapes daring in scope while earnest in execution, courting controversy while inviting public accord. Produced under the leadership of Claude Cormier, the range of these projects has spanned the creation of parks and squares, the renovation of historical landscapes, and the conversion of industrial sites. While always serious in the address of function, their designs often display a touch of humor in both method and form--in all, these are works marked by "serious fun." It is a practice unique in Canada, arguably in the world. That people use, and may even love, these urban landscapes testifies to the pleasure afforded by their designs and the humanistic dimensions of the practice. This, the first book exclusively dedicated to the landscapes of Claude Cormier and his team, provides a broad overview of their ideas and methods with insightful discussions of selected projects and the thinking behind them.