Mouvements Modernes was also showing an iconoclast, the French-speaking Italian Nanda Vigo. Born in 1940, the same year Fuller designed his Dymaxion Deployment Unit, a self-supporting structure used in London as emergency shelter during the war, Vigo is well known for her work with mirrored surfaces and neon lights. The Paris gallery is offering a quirky one-off by Vigo, a 19th-century Venetian cabinet retrofitted with purple neon and Day-Glo orange dinosaurs. As of this writing, the work, priced at $147,000, also remained unsold.

A guarded buying spree among design collectors clearly looking for star appeal without breaking the bank saw established product designers pushed aside in favor of the polymaths of convergence theory, Quinn and Hadid. Prominently displayed, two unique Rod Arad New Orleans armchairs, for instance, drew many lookers, but no buyers. Hinting at a new austerity perhaps, a representative of Carpenters Workshop politely used the word “balk” to characterize buyer responses to their asking price of $536,000 apiece.