Hello again! Back for another installment of my series, “What Am I Looking At?”….This time, it’s this cute little guy and his buddies:
These aren’t children’s toys; rather, they are “Lalanne Sheep” (“Moutons de Laine”), the creation of sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne, and quite rare and valuable today. He and his sculptor wife, Claude, known together as “Les Lalanne,” were influenced and befriended in Paris by Surrealists such as Man Ray. The sheep, which are meant to be used as chairs, were exhibited in Paris in 1965. According to Christie’s, they appeared under the title “Pour Polythème,” referring to the part of the Odyssey where Ulysses and his comrades blind the cyclops Polyphemus and escape by clinging to the bellies of the cyclops’ giant sheep. Some have interpreted the sheep as a commentary on bourgeois “follower” culture, and some have viewed the sheep as a juxtoposition of outdoor-indoor/wild-tame. They are both charming and absurd in a residential context.
“Les Lalanne.” Photo: Willy Rizzo
Yves Saint Laurent was the first private patron of Les Lalanne. He had several sculptures created, including a legendary bar (seen below) that decorated his apartment at the Place Vauban. Here, several sheep roam about the library of Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé.
Photo: Horst P. Horst
Les Lalanne rarely collaborated, however. François-Xavier preferred animal subjects, creating a hippopotomus that turned into a bathtub/sink/vanity combination, for example, while Claude preferred to depict vegetation, such as chairs shaped like gingko leaves. In 1976 the singer Serge Gainsbourg named an album after Claude Lalanne’s sculpture L’Homme à Tête de Chou, or “The Man with the Head of a Cabbage”, and placed the image of her creation on the front cover.
François-Xavier died in 2008. His wife died in 2019.
A rare collaboration of gilt sheep between husband and wife sold at auction for $2.4 million last year.
Designer Valentino Garavani with a menagerie. Photo: Lukas Wassman
If you don’t have that kind of cash to drop on the originals, good knock-offs (gasp!) start around $3,500. How bourgeois.