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Ron Arad George Nakashima Charles Eames Serge Mouille George Nelson Alexandre Noll Hella Jongerious Tord Boontje

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Many bidders at Phillips de Pury & Company’s London auction of important design this past September were doubtless surprised that the top-selling lot was a circa 1950 mahogany dining table by the French sculptor Alexandre Noll (est. £115-125,000; $213-232,000). After all, the sale was chock-full of sleek pieces by some of today’s hippest and most celebrated designers — Ron Arad, Tord Boontje, Zaha Hadid and Hella Jongerius among them — and Noll’s lovingly carved and joined creations in wood, at once sensual and almost primordial, are the antithesis of flash. Yet the Noll table fetched £169,250 ($314,000), $40,000 more than a lacquered fiberglass-reinforced polyester chandelier by Hadid and Patrik Schumacher (which was pictured on the auction catalogue cover) and outselling the third-place lot, a limited-edition Arad patinated-bronze lounge chair, by $100,000. It was if collectors were saying: "Keep your computer-assisted diagrams, laser cutting and high-tech synthetic materials. Give us sincere, natural, artful, handworked design."

In his native France, Noll (1890-1970) has long been a revered, if quixotic, figure. The legendary French dealer Pierre Passebon, who co-authored a monograph on the designer in 1999, compares him to the Japanese master craftsmen known as "living treasures." Noll, says Passebon, has "an elegant style because he shows such humility before the beauty of the wood’s essence."

His work debuted outside France in the mid-1980s, and most collectors did not know what to make of it. "When I first saw his pieces, I was taken aback," says Anthony DeLorenzo, the New York dealer credited with introducing Noll to the United States. "I had never seen anything like them." Noll’s oeuvre ranged from sculpture — totemic items in ebony that resembled Franz Kline abstracts rendered in three dimensions and others that suggested Constantin Brancusi in an unusually Brutalist mode — to functional objects such as chairs, large and medium-size cupboards, tables, trays and little boxes that seemed almost Neolithic, as if carved using Stone Age tools.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the market for midcentury design began to take off. Connoisseurs split into two camps. One camp promoted the stylish "Martini Modern" work of American industrial designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson and Edward Wormley. The second turned to Europe, and to France in particular. In this camp was DeLorenzo, who presented the spare, dramatic metal-and-wood furnishings of Jean Prouvé and the biomorphic lighting fixtures of Serge Mouille. He befriended the Noll family and made what he calls a "major purchase" of the artist’s work.

Like other dealers who followed his lead, DeLorenzo was betting that serious aficionados would be attracted to rarity. He carefully and quietly cultivated a group of discerning collectors who would come to include such boldface names as the fashion designers Donna Karan, Wolfgang Joop and Helmut Lang; the financier Ronald Perelman; the architect and interior designer Peter Marino; and the publishing mogul Peter Brant and his wife, the fashion model Stephanie Seymour. DeLorenzo guided them to an appreciation that Noll’s pieces — like the studio designs of his coeval, the soulful American woodworker George Nakashima — were sui generis. There was truly nothing else like them. Sure enough, by the late 1990s the market for Eames and company — whose designs, after all, were produced in huge numbers — had begun to wilt. Top collectors were now interested only in singular, or custom-made, pieces.

Still, Noll was hardly known outside this select circle of collectors. His reputation got a boost in 1997, when the French dealers Catherine and Stéphane de Beyrie mounted the first solo exhibition of his sculptures and functional objects at their couture-design showroom in New York’s SoHo district. Viewers’ reactions were mixed. "Some people said the furniture looked like something from Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," recall the de Beyries, who have since returned to Paris. "But most collectors came to share our passion for Noll. They understood his unique way of sculpting, the strength of his pieces, his love of wood and the sensuality of his work."

Noll caught the attention of the design world at large in 2003, when Joop consigned a number of his by-then-huge trove of the artist’s pieces to a Sotheby’s sale. A mahogany Noll chair, primordial yet pillowlike, from an edition of five, was bought by Stephanie Seymour for $680,000, setting a briefly held auction record for postwar design. "Until then, Noll’s market had been growing at a healthy rate," recalls James Zemaitis, the head of the 20th-century decorative arts department at Sotheby’s. "But this was a beautiful sale: the collection of a minor celebrity, full of pieces by a rising star. It came at the perfect moment."

The Sotheby’s sale made Noll a "name" designer, although he is still not a household name. "Noll remains an acquired taste," says Richard Wright, head of the Chicago auction house that bears his name and specializes in postwar design and art. "He has such a unique aesthetic. His work is so idiosyncratic and feels so primal."

The $680,000 paid for the mahogany chair remains the high-water mark for Noll design, but as evidenced by the London auction, demand for his output is still strong. "I’m sure Noll prices will continue to rise as masterworks become rarer," says the New York dealer Cristina Grajales, who purchased the record-breaking chair on behalf of Seymour. "There are fewer pieces around because the collectors are really keen on keeping them — they refuse to part from them," says the Paris-based design dealer Jacques Lacoste, who staged a memorable 2008 show of the artist’s work. "This is not a speculative market."

Case in point: Tucked away in the warehouse section of DeLorenzo’s downtown gallery, DeLorenzo 1950, is a magnificent six-foot-long mahogany sideboard carved circa 1947. "I’ll probably never sell it," the dealer says.

Functional objects remain the most sought-after Noll pieces, with smaller items, such as boxes and bowls, fetching between $2,500 and $7,000. But interest in his purely sculptural pieces is rising. Prices have lately ranged from $50,000 to $80,000, depending in part on size and type of wood, ebony pieces bringing the top sums. But many feel the greatest lure of Noll’s work is the mystique surrounding it. You can picture him humbly toiling away, carving a single chair from a huge block of the wood he so adored: teak, rosewood, ebony, mahogany, elm, beech, walnut — even, during the Second World War, when wood was rationed, scavenged railway ties. "Everything he made was sculpture, really," says Grajales wistfully. "When you come across a Noll piece, you feel an immediate urge to touch it, to stroke it gently. There’s not much art you can say that about."

"Into the Wood" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.