Poetry, craftsmanship and the magic of nature: Claude Lalanne’s ‘Ginkgo’ dining suite

Celebrated for their ingenious hippo baths, dove armchairs and crocodile tables, François-Xavier and Claude Lalanne brought a witty insouciance to the world of French interior design. It was at their sprawling estate in Ury that the duo conjured up their fantastical creations.

While Les Lalanne exhibited under their collective name, their work was, in fact, entirely separate. They had their own studios and styles. François-Xavier took his inspiration predominantly from the animal kingdom. Claude found hers in the couple’s garden, collecting leaves and flowers that she would bring back to her foundry to cast.

‘I dream while waking,’ Claude once said of her practice, and there is undeniably a kind of idiosyncratic obsession and radiant wonder to the way the sculptor operated. Inside her hot, sulphurous studio laden with glass beakers and every kind of apparatus for distilling, condensing and purifying, Claude would submerge leaves, butterfly wings, crab claws, even a dead rat, into an electrically charged bath of copper sulphate, creating exact replicas through the process of electroplating.

These uncanny objects would then be combined into surreal formulations such as a cabbage with chicken’s feet or a thumb protruding from a snail’s shell: strange, beguiling sculptures instilled with a supernatural charm. It should come as no surprise to learn that Claude’s father was an alchemist.

Born in 1925, Claude studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, and met her husband at an exhibition of his work in 1952. They began collaborating soon after. By the late 1960s, it seemed as if no chic Parisian address was complete without one of François-Xavier’s sheep sculptures, known as the Moutons de laine. ‘It’s easier to have a sculpture in an apartment than a real sheep,’ he deadpanned.

Claude was the more enigmatic of the two, her art driven by a desire to investigate the workings of nature. Because the universe is strange, she used unorthodox methods to decode it. She seemed to treat the natural world as a riddle requiring sculptural exegesis. The fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent once said of Claude that her ‘fine sculptor’s hands seem to disperse the fog of mystery to reach the shores of art’.

One of the sculptor’s recurring themes was the ginkgo leaf, something she associated with magic and enchantment. Over the course of her long career, she used the distinctive fan-shaped leaf to embellish mirrors, jewellery and furniture. Among her most sought-after creations is the ginkgo-leaf dining suite, which she produced in bronze and aluminium.

Offered for sale on 5 June 2025 at Christie’s in London is a suite of rare examples of this style in a chartreuse green. ‘It is highly unusual,’ says Agathe de Bazin, head of Design at Christie’s in Paris. ‘When you think of an edition, you imagine something that is mass-produced and identical, but that was not the case with the Lalannes. They lavished care on every piece. These have been beautifully painted.’

The works come from The Collection of Baron Diego von Buch, a highly respected financier who acquired the ‘Ginkgo’ dining table, set of six chairs, bench and set of four armchairs for his home in the south of France.

Baron von Buch was one of many international admirers of Les Lalanne: the couple had enjoyed a strong following around the world ever since their 1966 exhibition with the Greek-American gallerist Alexander Iolas in Paris. Critics, however, were unsure how to categorise these humorous outsiders who made a rhinoceros that housed a desk, bar and safe and put mouths on apples. Was it art or design? (‘Neither,’ said François-Xavier. ‘They are Lalanne.’)

Ten years later, another outlier put Claude’s sculpture L’Homme à tête de chou (‘The man with the head of a cabbage’) on the cover of his concept album of the same name. Like the artist, the French singer Serge Gainsbourg was a nonconformist who could be wilfully opaque. Claude’s works seemed to chime with his love of the sacred and the profane.

Today it is acknowledged that the Lalannes’ influence on art and design has been wide-ranging. Indeed, it seems impossible to imagine a sculpture by Jeff Koons or a design by Alessi without them. As Bazin observes, ‘They brought joy to the world.’

The Collection of Baron Diego von Buch is on view at Christie’s in London from 29 May to 4 June 2025 before the sale on 5 June