Furniture and sculpture meet

T wo-and-a-half millennia ago, wealthy Romans favoured cast bronze beds, often embedded with copper and silver, for the sleeping quarters of their palatial frescoed villas. The Greeks had bronze tripods on feline feet for lamps and incense burners along with beds and footstools, and, even earlier, from the 13th century BC, the most lavish Cypriot homes were decorated with functional metal pieces.

“Those bronze furnishings were the luxury goods of the ancient world,” says Beryl Barr-Sharrar, a professor of art history at New York University.

As empires fell and, later, monarchies folded, expensive and heavy cast metal furniture was increasingly replaced by less costly carved wooden items. But the lure of intricate, sometimes over-the-top, hand-wrought pieces in bronze and similar materials has never completely faded.

In early 20th century Paris designer Armand-Albert Rateau was well known for his stylish bronze seating, including a set of fauteuils aux poissons – armchairs with a fish scale pattern on the back and scallop shells on the frame – made in 1919 for New York financier George Blumenthal’s pool. Italian-Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti and his brother Diego followed with pared down, surrealist metal furniture – coffee tables, consoles and music stands; a bronze bird here, a flower there.

A few decades later, streamlined, mass-produced stainless steel designs from the likes of architects Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer symbolised the dominant aesthetic. But by the 1960s, in some high society circles, cast bronze and other hand-turned metal pieces were again in vogue. The limited edition work of French couple Claude and Francois-Xavier Lalanne in particular became a cult fascination with buyers including fashion designer Yves St Laurent and his chief executive Pierre Bergé.

Today, art galleries around the world are championing these older designers as well as a new generation of players in the metal furniture world, selling their one-off pieces for increasingly impressive prices.

One of Rateau’s chairs sold for more than €1.5m at a Christie’s auction in Paris last year, more than double its estimate and far outstripping prices in the 1970s, when a set of four chairs by the designer sold for a mere $3,500. And work by the Lalannes, though not as rare or expensive, is equally popular with homeowners around the world.

“Collectors for Lalanne span the [US] even down to Atlanta and suburban Maryland,” says Paul Kasmin of the eponymous New York gallery. Earlier this year he put on the first big exhibition of their work in 30 years and all 60 pieces, including six Croconsoles at $100,000 each and three fireplaces in the shape of baboons priced at $300,000, sold. Ben Brown Fine Arts in London also held a successful Lalanne show this summer, drawing buyers from Switzerland, Germany, France, Greece and Hong Kong. “Each time it was couples and many of them already had work or knew someone who [did] and liked it,” Brown says. “Sales were evenly distributed between ‘useless’ sculpture and ‘useful’ furniture.”

Reed Krakoff, chief executive of Coach and an avid collector of Lalanne, explains the appeal. “With more collectors upping their art holdings, they are turning to furniture by artists,” he says. “The Lalannes’ work straddles both fine art and design. That’s what captivates me.”

He has examples of the couple’s bronze furnishings in both his Manhattan and Long Island homes, including a pair of Claude Lalanne’s Pomme-bouches, bronze apples sporting casts of his own lips and his wife’s. (Another Lalanne commission – a bronze desk cast from a crocodile perched on branch-like legs with a matching chair – can be found in the centre of Tom Ford’s new store in New York.)

One of the the best-known contemporary designers of hand-finished metal furniture is Israeli-born, London-based Ron Arad, who works in heavy duty iron and polished stainless steel as well as more precious metals, such as bronze, and complex mixtures of alloys. New York’s Friedman Benda gallery will showcase his pieces in its new Chelsea space in September, offering one chair composed of stainless steel rods priced at $500,000.

“Ron is a very testosterone-driven artist and making his work is pure art and hard labour,” says Marc Benda. Buyers of his most expensive metal furniture range from hedge fund managers to “real estate types with lots of space like downtown lofts”, he adds. “They are drawn to [it] because it challenges them.” In fact, Krakoff displays Arad pieces alongside his Lalanne.

Australian designer Marc Newson has also had much success with metal. Aside from his famed aluminium Lockheed Lounge, a rare model of which is now priced at $2m through Latin American paintings dealer Rames Barquet, his 1986 Pod chest of drawers, also in aluminium, sold for more than $1m to gallerist Larry Gagosian at Christie’s contemporary art sale in New York in May, making it the most expensive piece of furniture by a living artist ever sold. Other functional works in nickel, as well as marble, go for six-figure sums at Gagosian’s New York gallery.

Given the skyrocketing prices for metal works from established designers, gallerists and collectors have begun to search out emerging ones. Five years ago Barry Friedman introduced his clients to the limited edition bronze furnishings of Ingrid Donat, a French artist mentored by Diego Giacometti who has studied furniture construction, casting, engraving and patinating. Sales of her work, which makes use of Mayan scroll-work, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Greco-Roman caryatids, have more than tripled since, attracting finance and design industry buyers from New York to Munich. “What’s new are calls for Donat’s work from designers in Chicago, Seattle and Denver,” says Carole Hochman, Friedman’s gallery director. Prices start at $10,000 and rise to $100,000 for a big sideboard.

Architect Robert Couturier has used Donat in client homes from Caracas to the Hamptons and recently filled an entire ski chalet in Aspen, Colorado, with nothing but her furnishings, even down to the lamps. “Her work is in the tradition of Giacometti and some clients have his work in New York but don’t want to repeat it elsewhere, so Donat is very fitting,” he explains. The comedian and actor Steve Martin is also reportedly a fan.

Philippe Anthonioz is another French sculptor-turned-furniture designer, now being championed by Lefevre Fine Art in London, which previously dealt exclusively in impressionist and modern art, and Galerie Tino Zervudachi in Paris. Blurring the line between sculpture and furniture, his limited edition, cast bronze pieces have been snapped up by designers David Mlinaric, John Stefanidis and Peter Marino. “I felt he was credible enough to be shown in a fine art environment,” says Alexander Corcoran of Lefevre. After all, as Anthonioz explains, “I make no difference between my sculpture and my furniture.”

Offering a similar ethos but putting a slightly different spin on this burgeoning bespoke market is London-based Ian Abell, whose company Based Upon employs a patented technology to turns metal into liquid, which can then be sprayed on to any surface. Working with a team of metallurgists, sculptors and ceramicists and a glassblower, he turns out furnishings in complex alloys as well as lacquer and coloured resins. A commode can cost £25,000. “Everything is made by hand and there is a connection to natural forms”, bearing the imprint of shagreen or the veining of leaves, Abell says. “Private commissions have quadrupled in the last 18 months.”

Clients include fashion designer Donna Karan, as well as music and property executives. One recent custom project included 30 pieces for the owner of a house on the volcanic island of Pantelleria, off Sicily.

An Oxford University graduate who studied philosophy, Abell has thought carefully about the messages conveyed by different metals in different finishes and the appeal of hand-crafted, sculptural work, from Rateau’s to the Lalannes’, Arad’s to his own. “I think people are looking for furniture beyond the rush of the contemporary art market and removed from a certain slickness,” he says.

Krakoff agrees. “People today [want] furniture that borders on sculpture and speaks of the creative process. With life so transient, the furniture is enduring.”

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On their metal

www.friedmanbenda.com

www.barryfriedmanltd.com

www.basedupon.co.uk

www.benbrownfinearts.com

www.gagosian.com

www.lefevrefineart.com

www.paulkasmin.com

www.ingriddonat.com

www.philippe-anthonioz.com