Animal Instincts

Constantin Brancusi Louise Nevelson George Nakashima Alexander Liberman Rene Magritte Jean Cocteau Wendell Castle Claude Lalanne

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In his aerie of an office overlooking the Hudson River, Reed Krakoff has a desk surrounded by woolly sheep. Standing in a corner is a chair with a back in the shape of a smallish crocodile cast in bronze. and as one might expect from a man who, besides being executive creative director of coach, is one of the most avid and informed collectors of 20th-century decorative and fine arts, there are sculptures by Louise Nevelson and Tony Smith, a painting by Alexander Liberman, a limited-edition aluminum table designed by Marc Newson and two rare 1940 chairs by Andre Arbus. But the zoomorphic creations, by french sculptors Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, are especially dear to Krakoff, whose truffle-hound nose for the undervalued and whose championship of the unknown and rediscovered have made him a bellwether of collecting trends in the design arts.

Krakoff’s interest in the Lalannes and their creations started around 15 years ago. “When i first encountered one of their sheep, in a book of European interiors, I didn’t know what to make of them,” he recalls, sitting in jeans and a leather jacket on one of the Arbus chairs. “There was something whimsical about them that struck me as so charming, but at the same time, they had this weight of serious sculpture.”

The Lalannes are a curious case: prized darlings of an exclusive set for decades but until recently below the radar of a wider public. “People who started collecting the Lalannes in the late 1960s were the chicest people in the world—many from fashion, like Yves Saint Laurent. And now it’s serious tastemakers like Reed who are interested in them again,” says Paul Kasmin, whose Chelsea gallery is featuring an exhibition of new works by the sculptors that runs through January 13, 2007.

As is his custom, Krakoff spent several years tracking and studying the Lalannes before he purchased a single piece. “I’ve learned the hard way that if you start buying right away when you first get excited about something, you buy too much and buy things you later regret,” he says. About five years ago, he finally purchased three sheep from the French dealer Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand as a gift for his parents, in Palm Beach. Eventually he bought an entire flock, now scattered across several of his homes, in New York, Miami and Southampton. “We bring the ones from Southampton back to New York in winter,” says Krakoff, sounding a positively pastoral note.

Krakoff always begins with in-depth research on his new interests. “I immerse myself,” he says, describing an education process that might span months or even years. The first step is trolling for every relevant auction catalogue he can find. (His own art-and-design library is extensive, with catalogues going back 30 years.) “The auction catalogues from Monaco are particularly strong in the decorative arts,” he notes. Finding and talking to knowledgeable dealers comes next. He seldom seeks out the artists. “I buy through dealers,” he explains. “It’s simpler.”

Two years ago, Krakoff did meet the Lalannes, who live on an old dairy farm outside Paris, and he immediately fell under their spell. The couple have worked side by side for more than 30 years; their individual styles are distinctive yet complementary. Their home and garden are chockablock with their own art: an assortment of beasts and plants—owls, apes, boars, hostas and, of course, sheep—many cast in bronze, all rendered with a poetic flourish and mesmerizing simplicity. Some pieces, like a head of cabbage on rooster legs, are laugh-out-loud funny.

“Their art is everywhere you turn, and it’s integrated into every part of their life. Even the paper-towel rod is this beautifully shaped object,” recalls Krakoff, adding that the temptation to buy everything in sight was nearly overwhelming. They had lamb for lunch; irony possibly intended.

In the 1960s, the Lalannes belonged to a charmed circle of imaginative sculptors that included Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst and Jean Tinguely. Their own sinuously animated sculptures seem firmly rooted in a tradition of European, especially French, Surrealism that goes back to René Magritte and Jean Cocteau. Their knack for combining the surreal with the naturalistic in seductively simple forms quickly attracted the attention of such fashion-world art collectors as Saint Laurent, Pierre Bergé, Valentino and Jean Schlumberger. Interior designers like Jacques Grange, in Paris, and Peter Marino, in New York, also started commissioning pieces for the homes they were decorating, including their own.

The Lalannes’ work has always been difficult to find—an appealing quality for committed collectors, Krakoff admits. “It’s only human nature to be enticed by something you already love when it’s scarce,” he says, noting that the Lalannes tend to work in very small editions, of six to eight, and that their creations are often commissioned by intensely private people who love them too much to sell.

Prices for the pieces that do come to market are begin beginning to escalate. Last December a Sotheby’s auction of 20 lots of furniture commissioned for the Lila Acheson Wallace Garden in Colonial Williamsburg, estimated at $185,000, fetched an astonishing $1,114,000. In June three sheep went for $180,000, more than four times the original estimate.

“The Lalannes are part of a general rediscovery of the 1970s, but there’s more to them than that,” says James Zemaitis, director of Sotheby’s 20th-century-design department. “There’s a deepseated naturalism to their work, an enchanting quality not dissimilar to that of American postwar craft by people like Wendell Castle and George Nakashima that is all really hot right now.” This month, a brass-and-copper stamped hippopotamus made in 1969 by François-Xavier Lalanne is up for sale at Sotheby’s with a $150,000–$200,000 estimate.

As for Krakoff, he’s taken the next step in the evolution of a serious collector and begun commissioning pieces: In addition to the sheep and the crocodile chairs, he is now working with the Lalannes on some mirrors and chandeliers for his new Manhattan home. And he’s wielding the power of Coach and of his own formidable reputation as a trendsetter to champion his interests in more concrete ways. The exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery, for instance, is cosponsored by Coach and has a catalogue published by Krakoff himself. “Doing a show is really the greatest way for me to learn about the artists,” says Krakoff, who two years ago helped organize an exhibition and publish a catalogue on the London-based designer Ron Arad at New York’s Barry Friedman Gallery. Meanwhile, Krakoff is only slightly anxious about an impulse buy he made that magical afternoon in the Lalannes’ garden: a five-foot-tall cast-iron baboon with a wood-burning stove inside its belly. “I don’t know yet where I am going to put it,” he says. “But I’ll figure it out as soon as I have my hands on it.”

"Animal Instincts" originally appeared in the December 2006 issue of Art+Auction.