ATTRIBUTED TO FRANCISQUE LAPANDERY (1910-1961)

This stylish art deco sculpture of a female nude is attributed to the French sculptor Francisque Lapandery (1910-1961). Lapendery was a highly proficient sculptor working in the Lyon area following the first war and few pieces from his distinctive and highly stylised oeuvre are known to survive. The present work, which was purchased as the work of Lapandery, in the Lyon area, has much in common with the artist’s two best known public works; the war memorial erected in Perrache, and the monument to the Lumière brothers erected in Place Ambroise Courtois, Lyon. The latter is a monumental semicircular structure for which Lapandery collaborated with architect Hubert Fournier. It was commissioned following the death of the famous film-maker Auguste Lumière at Lyon in 1954, and was perhaps the culmination of Lapandery’s career as its completion seems to almost coincide with the artist’s own death in 1961. Clearly inspired by the paired down aesthetic of the machine age, Lapandery seems to have developed a clean, almost streamlined aesthetic which was still eminently suited to the world he found himself in following the Second World War. Whilst the Lumière monument’s bass-relief mural is of significantly later date than this sculpture, there is an apparent commonality in the use of light and shadow as well as a confidence of line, which can only serve to strengthen the attribution to this talented, if somewhat enigmatic, sculptor.