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O n view at Sotheby’s New York from 7-11 December before heading to the auction block 12-13 December, the Important Design sale features notable examples of Art Deco, post-war and contemporary design – and a stunning sequence of Poul Henningsen light fixtures from the Louis Poulson Archives. Design Week will conclude with three sales dedicated to masterworks by Tiffany, including glass, windows and lamps.
On 12 December, Important Design will offer a curated survey anchored by masterworks from Jean Dunand, Poul Henningsen, Les Lalanne, Shiro Kuramata and Marc Newson, among others.
Claude Lalanne’s Unique ‘Structure Végétale’ Console
A modern multidisciplinary master, Claude Lalanne drew inspiration from the natural world, consistently infusing her designs with whimsical wonder and beauty, rendering the mundane extraordinary. Her unique works take surrounding, pre-existing objects and transform them into artisanal works of functional and elegant art. Paired together, the unique “Végétale” Console and unique “Hosta et Oiseau” Mirror reflect the reverie and beauty of the natural world.
The “Végétale” Console is adorned with sinuous lines that gracefully curve and traverse the length of the piece, floating down to rest on the floor in an elegant and sophisticated demonstration of Lalanne’s masterful craftsmanship and deft sculptural hand. More abstract than other consoles by Lalanne, the present console puts mastery of material at the forefront of her refined design. Another rare and distinguishing feature is the rare treatment of the textured casting on the top, suggestive of linen fabric, beautifully complementing the smooth gold patinated bronze surfaces of the work.
Similarly, the unique “Hosta et Oiseau” Mirror is an exemplary presentation of Claude’s craftsmanship and vision. Complementary to the console’s undulating legs, this mirror presents branches that sprout from its periphery and gracefully trace the work’s perimeter, with delicate leaves harmoniously adorning the mirror’s edges. Dramatic and larger than life, these leaves are crafted with an astonishing level of detail, while an aged patina further enriches their appearance and aesthetic. In the bottom right corner of the mirror, perched on a curving branch, sits a bird with its head slightly tilted to the side, an exceedingly rare inclusion. Crafted with a keen eye for detail, the bird’s feathers are painstakingly sculpted to accurately reflect the natural world, while the bird’s feet clutch the mirror’s branch. In rendering these natural motifs with such a high level of accuracy, Lalanne further animates and invigorates the piece, instilling it with an acute dynamism.
Jean Dunand’s ‘Parfum’
Jean Dunand’s path to becoming a master in lacquer began when he met the acclaimed Japanese artist Seizo Sugawara in 1912. Seeking to learn more about dinanderie, Sugawara offered to teach Dunand the art of lacquer if he would teach Sugawara about dinanderie in return. This fortuitous exchange set Dunand on the path to become one of the preeminent lacquer artists of the 20th century, eventually setting up his own famed lacquer workshop. His brilliant dexterity in the medium is most evident in his lacquer portraits, as exemplified by Parfum.
The present work was selected by Jean-Charles Worth, chief designer of the illustrious House of Worth fashion house, for his own home in Neuilly on the outskirts of central Paris. The imagery of the panel is among the most evocative of the Art Deco era, the slender stylized sitter adorned with geometric jewelry as elaborately decorated drapery, reminiscent of the work by Dunand for the House of Worth, contours her body. Resting in the figure’s hand a large perfume bottle releases swirls of vapors. This resplendent and striking panel, held in a private collection for thirty years, is a summation both the celebrated talents of Dunand and his ability to capture a moment of ethereal reflection that encapsulates the Art Deco style.
Toshiko Takaezu’s ‘Untitled (Growth)’
Toshiko Takaezu saw herself not so much as making art as growing it. She attributed a certain sentience to her materials–and she spoke of her clay forms “dying” as she bisque-fired them in her kiln. To revitalize them, she gave them color through glazes. It’s no wonder then that seedpods figure prominently in her form language. Nor is it any wonder that, as a Hawaiian-born artist, the concepts of destructive renewal and vegetal profusion were especially front of mind. In the volcanic ecology of her homeland, forests were sometimes immolated by flows of magma only to creep back into verdancy, fertilized by the cinders of their predecessors.
Untitled (Growth) captures the moment when Takaezu’s Tamarind forms began to reach tenuously, skyward, becoming more unstable and dynamically asymmetrical in the process. Monumental in scale, Growth strikes a pose that evokes an unbracketed range of visual references: the human body in motion, seaweed, stacked amphora and oversized seed pods. It is also an expression of raw sculptural energy. The work’s palindromic symmetry means that it can be read downward or upwards – as a root or a sprout.
Takaezu was almost the lone ceramicist with a claim to a significant role in Abstract Expressionism – she turned her forms into three-dimensional paintings–breaking the paradigm of opticality that so bedeviled theorists, such as Clement Greenberg, who took a flat picture plane as their primary reference.
Shiro Kuramata’s ‘Miss Blanche’ Chair
Named for the famous Blanche Dubois from Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire, Shiro Kuramata's iconic Miss Blanche armchair was first exhibited at the KAGU exhibition, held during the Tokyo Designer’s Week at Axis Gallery Annex in 1988, a year before its Paris debut at Galerie Yves Gastou in 1989, where the present lot was purchased. Kuramata had envisioned exhibiting the chair in Paris from the early stages of the design process: “Take this chair [Miss Blanche]: I was determined from the start to bring it to Paris. That’s what inspired me… Don’t look for logic. It comes from an image – the one of France, or Europe – that I made for myself. It’s a feeling.” The exhibition was an unequivocal success, with every piece, including the prototypes, finding buyers.
The technicalities involved in the production of Miss Blanche were complex: the design required each artificial rose to be held in place for extended periods of time until the resin had hardened sufficiently. Experiments with natural roses were conducted, but the flowers would burn up in the acrylic resin, prompting a serendipitous moment when Kuramata decided “it has to be fake [materials] because Blanche Dubois is a fake.”
Jean Royère’s Pair of ‘Yo-Yo’ Tables
Once proclaiming, “The secret of good decoration lies in its absence, or rather in its extreme simplicity,” Jean Royère’s design ethos did not stray far from his contemporaries, such as Charlotte Perriand and Le Corbusier, who also favored extreme simplicity and admonished ornamentation for the sake of ornamentation. Yet Royère’s designs are distinguished by his infusion of whimsy and elegance. His decoration came in the form of embellishing with sumptuous materials and voluminous, biomorphic upholstered forms.
Royère designed luxurious yet comfortable interiors, noting, “The client has to feel relaxed and at ease when he’s at home.” His ability to seamlessly integrate comfort with style is a testament to his enduring legacy. This is evidenced in many of his popular forms, including the present “Yo-Yo” consoles, which prominently feature the playful design elements that have contributed to his fame and enduring popularity among collectors and design enthusiasts. Defined by the interplay of straight and curved lines, the present form is a classic example of Royère’s artistic ethos. Exceedingly rare, the present model, originating from the collection of Peter M. Brant and Stephanie Seymour, is a precious collector’s item and exceptionally pure design by the French cabinetmaker.
Offered as a sequence within the Important Design auction is a magnificent collection of lamps designed by Poul Henningsen, a leading designer of midcentury Denmark.
Poul Henningsen’s ‘PH Spiral’ Ceiling Light Designed for the Main Hall of Aarhus University.
In 1942, Danish architect C.F. Møller approached Poul Henningsen to create the lighting for the main hall of the University of Aarhus, which featured a 62-foot ceiling. Møller had in mind large balloon-shaped ceiling lights. Echoing his original idea, Henningsen created oval ceiling lights hanging from the ceiling and shaped like what would appear as a water-drop, with a spiral shade measuring around 42 inches high. The spiraling layers were uniformly spaced to give the illusion of simplicity.
What made its construction particularly complex was Henningsen’s insistence that the light – emanating from a bulb at the bottom of the lamp— – should be reflected at different angles depending on the position of the shade, so as to illuminate the hall effectively. “The principle in this lamp is much the same as in the PH lamp and the Globe per se, but the light ray direction is reminiscent of the way it shines outwards from the Globe,” Henningsen wrote in Louis Poulsen’s magazine, NYT. “The shape is geometric, and the light strikes all the parts of the spiral which are illuminated at the same angle reflecting it out into the room in the same way.”
The “PH Spiral” shade is held together by three arms providing a structure for the surrounding spiral looping downwards and at a slight angle. Cutting the aluminum pieces and soldering them together into a coherent spiral, supported by three internal metallic arms, proved enormously difficult and time-consuming. This ultimately meant that the Spiral lamp could not be put into wider production. A prototype was first designed and produced in 1942, but the set of 12 lights was not installed in the university hall until after the war.
A Second Variant of Poul Henningsen’s ‘PH Spiral’ Ceiling Light
The present ceiling lamp is a particularly rare variation on the “Spiral” chandelier commissioned in 1964 for the Headquarters’ Assembly Hall at the Danish Consumers Cooperative Society (COOP) in Albertslund, outside Copenhagen. Virtually designed and constructed in the same manner as its earlier counterpart, the distinguishing factor that contributes to its scarcity and importance lies in the three different materials comprising the descending spirals: brass, copper and aluminum. The three metal spirals were wound into each other, and were glossy on the outside and with a white painted coating on the inside. To make room for the three spirals, the distance between them was steeper than in the Aarhus version. The light emanating from it also differed quite dramatically, with each metal surface providing a different coloration. Henningsen thought personally that the lamp with the three stranded threads had a more impactful and visually powerful effect.
Poul Henningsen’s ‘The House of The Day After Tomorrow’ Ceiling Light
The House of the Day After Tomorrow was an ultramodern home built as an exhibition space in Copenhagen in 1959. Its architect, Ole Helweg, was tasked to imagine the interior of the future, and in doing so he created a circular house based off of earlier designs by Arne Jacobsen and Flemming Lassen. Helweg’s overall approach to the design of this experimental space was to eliminate superfluous ornaments and to instead favor advanced materials and design strategies.
The success of the presentation was in great part due to the contribution of Poul Henningsen, who was asked by Helweg to create new lighting solutions for the space that would fulfill its futuristic concept. In collaboration again with Louis Poulsen, Henningsen created 15 pendants specially for the house, including the present lot, whose design he modeled after his “Artichoke” ceiling light from two years prior. The “Artichoke” was originally designed in 1957 for Copenhagen’s Langelinie Pavilion, an upmarket restaurant and social hub overlooking the city’s harbor. The two models share a number of similarities, with both their design made of flat lacquered panels of various sizes opening outward from the light source and evoking a pine cone.
Some of the design principles guiding the Langelinie Pavilion’s lights seem to continue to resonate here: functional use in a U-shaped area; resonance with the surrounding architectural style; a “festive and warm glow”; and a design that would be visually appealing, regardless of whether the lights are on or off. While similar, significant differences make the present work unique in its own right. For this project, Henningsen used trapezoids of aluminum rotating as a spiral, and horizontally subdivided into three sections using different color paint. The color choices were, as much as every small detail of Poul Henningsen’s work, not the result of a spontaneous inspiration but a carefully planned arrangement. In response to ultraviolet light, as opposed to incandescent light, the colored panels of the pendant replicate the color scale of the ray spectrum. Indeed, Henningsen wrote that “the light of the future can of course be nothing more than a critique of the present. The large variegated lamp, reminiscent of the cone crown in the ‘Langelinie Pavilion’, is a rather unrealistic poem about how the light tube could be if it were not a tube, but a fixture, and if it only emitted ultraviolet light and not also a line spectrum.”
Three auctions dedicated to Tiffany Studios include ‘Artistry in Glass: The Seymour and Evelyn Holtzman Collection,’ Volume IV of ‘The Doros Collection’ and ‘Dreaming in Glass: Masterworks by Tiffany Studios,’ which features property from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tiffany Studios’ ‘Parrots and Hibiscus’ Window
Sotheby’s is honored to present two extraordinary windows from the esteemed collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Both windows impressively demonstrate Louis Comfort Tiffany’s ability to create striking and beautiful compositions thanks to his incomparable Favrile glass and artistic virtuosity.
Tiffany’s achievements in the artistic and commercial rise of the American stained-glass industry were the culmination of his experimentation with opalescent glass. Those experiments led to Tiffany's trademarked Favrile glass, which he boasted was “the most important discovery made this century in the arts.”
The Parrots and Hibiscus window, with its wonderfully illusory sense of movement, fully displays the finest qualities of Tiffany’s glass with the birds’ colorful wings articulated in tightly rippled Favrile glass typically seen in those of his angel figures.
These two windows brilliantly exemplify how Tiffany’s revolutionary glass, combined with his decorative genius and in the hands of his skilled designers and artisans, could create leaded-glass windows unlike any the world had ever seen.
Exhibition Coffer from the Personal Collection of Louis Comfort Tiffany
This is the only known example in which Louis Comfort Tiffany utilized mother of pearl in an objet d’art. The rectangular body, with tapered and rounded sides and raised on four gilt-bronze ball feet, is inset with columns of irregularly shaped rectangular sections of golden-white mother of pearl alternating with smooth, polished lozenges of the same material. The hinged cover, with a graceful gilt-bronze clasp having a small mother-of-pearl lock, is similarly decorated on the sides and its top is divided into four quadrants featuring entire shells having a natural gold and silver-blue iridescence.
The chest has been well known to Tiffany collectors and scholars for many years, as it is pictured in several archival images. What comes as a total surprise, however, are the small insets of colorful Favrile glass enveloping the mother of pearl. These mosaic dots of blue, red, lavender, pink, cobalt and peach create an almost Pointillist effect while reinforcing Tiffany’s reputation of being a supreme colorist.
It was highly likely that Louis Tiffany claimed ownership of the casket. Unlike many other important objects that he exhibited at multiple expositions and world’s fairs, this was apparently never shown again publicly. It does make a rare appearance in Gertrude Speenburgh’s The Arts of the Tiffanys (1956), where it is shown in a Laurelton Hall display case, but the author focuses on the enameled pieces next to it. Just as the reemergence of the Medusa pendant two years ago, the totally unexpected and remarkable reappearance of the coffer again presents the opportunity for lovers of all things Tiffany to admire another “holy grail.”
Tiffany Studios’ Unique ‘Wisteria-Laburnum’ Table Lamp
Louis Tiffany was enamored with all flowering vines, but perhaps none as much as the wisteria. Native to Asia, the Japanese variety, originally simply known as the “blue vine,” was introduced to the United States in 1830 and soon named after the American anatomist and physician Caspar Wistar. Tiffany was an avid collector of Asian arts and crafts, and was likely well aware that the wisteria in Japan symbolized long life and immortality, love and tenderness. His affection for the plant is even apparent in his landscaping of Laurelton Hall, Tiffany’s Long Island mansion
It is no surprise that Tiffany Studios decided to transform the wisteria into a leaded-glass lamp shade. Clara Driscoll, the head of the firm’s Women’s Glass Cutters Department, is credited with the design, most probably with Louis Tiffany’s guidance and suggestions. The lamp made its first appearance in late 1901 and received immediate critical recognition. Although priced at the exorbitant sum of $400, the model soon became one of the company’s best-selling lamps.
The example offered here is apparently unique. The standard Wisteria shade features a steeply shouldered form with straight sides, an irregular lower border and a cast-bronze openwork top. This particular shade, however, was constructed on the same block as the company’s model 1539, the 22-inch Laburnum, which explains why it is numbered as such and not 342 – the model number for the standard Wisteria shade.
It is a wonder why the shade was never duplicated, as it could be considered a superior design. While the bronze openwork top of the standard model offers the firm an opportunity to exhibit the casting skills of its foundry, it unfortunately allows for a considerable amount of light seepage and areas of impenetrable darkness. In this instance, however, the entire shade is replete with exceptional Favrile glass depicting lush opalescent racemes, in shades of navy, blue, teal and purple-streaked pearlescent white, which descend to the irregular lower border. These blossoms are interspersed with vibrant yellow-tinged green foliage pendant from sinuous amber-brown branches. And, unlike the stiff form of the basic Wisteria shade, the undulating shape of this example creates a distinct sense of the blossoms being rustled by a gentle summer breeze.
The Wisteria lamp provides one of the finest pieces of evidence of the extraordinary skills possessed by the “Tiffany Girls.” A magnitude of pieces of glass had to be individually inspected, chosen, cut and fitted to create a magnificent illusion of pendulous wisteria blossoms. This rare and exceptional example equally and beautifully demonstrates Louis Tiffany’s unsurpassed genius in translating his deep love of nature into iconic works of art.
Louis Comfort Tiffany’s ‘The Old and the New Mosque’
Traveling with fellow painter Robert Swain Gifford, Tiffany arrived in Cairo, Egypt, on November 27, 1870. The city had been revived for commerce and tourism with the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. After several days, Tiffany began to feel ill, and by December 9, he was diagnosed with measles; unfortunately, this preempted any plans for an excursion on the Nile, and by Christmas the two artists were in Italy making their way back to New York.
Although Tiffany’s time in Cairo was brief, he apparently made sketches that are now lost, and he procured commercial photographs by J. Pascal Sébah, the Zangaki brothers, Félix Bonfils, Francis Frith, Wilhelm Hammerschmidt, Hippolyte Arnoux and others. The use of these large-format albumen prints in composing paintings and capturing details was a common practice for modern French Orientalist painters, most notably Jean-Léon Gérôme.
Upon his return to his studio in early 1871, Tiffany relied on his collection of photographs to create a series of paintings set in Cairo. In this case, Francis Frith and Frank Mason Good, who had been Frith’s assistant, both photographed the view that appears in Tiffany’s watercolor The Old and the New Mosque. The main architectural structure is recognizable as the 1383 funerary mosque of Aytmish al-Bajasi, a Mamluk monument on Bab al-Wazir Street.
In 1874, Tiffany’s painting was exhibited at the 17th annual exhibition of the American Society of Painters in Water Colors. The Daily Graphic featured a prominent illustration and offered an enthusiastic review: “Louis C. Tiffany is so well-known for his Oriental scenes that he needs little eulogy for this clever picture of Cairene mosque architecture. Indeed, there is little to be said about it, except that it is a magnificent study of color, with carefully elaborated details, giving a most vivid idea of the remarkable edifices depicted.” Then, in 1876, this painting was one of six watercolors exhibited at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
Tiffany Studios’ ‘Lava’ Vase
The blown-glass objects produced by Tiffany Studios were internationally acclaimed for their forms based on nature and the use of vividly colored glass that ran the full gamut of the spectrum. The firm’s “Lava” vases, such as the present lot on offer, were a rare and exciting anomaly. Apparently produced only in 1906-07 and again around 1916, it was originally theorized that the motif was inspired by Louis C. Tiffany’s observation of Mt. Etna erupting during one of his many European trips.
That story, however, has been proven to be apocryphal. A far more likely design source can be found in Tiffany’s love of Japanese art, which had a significant influence on much of his aesthetics. He was a serious collector of Asian decorative arts, including ceramics, and “Lava” vases are Tiffany’s fairly obvious attempt to emulate, in glass, 17th-century Japanese raku-fired ceramic tea bowls.
