ADAM'S Fine Jewellery & Ladies Watches 12th May 2026

TUESDAY 12 TH MAY 2026 . STARTING AT 4PM 146 137 CLAUDE LALANNE: A COLLECTIBLE BRONZE AND GALVANISED COPPER NECKLACE WITH EARCLIPS, CIRCA 1975-80 Of naturalistic design, the torc necklace centring a flow- erhead between textured leaves, with a pair of earclips en suite (can be clipped to the necklace) , stamped Lalanne on necklace, earclips unsigned, necklace inner diameter 13.4cm, earclips 2.9cm € 4,000 - 6,000 Claude Lalanne (1924–2019) occupied a position in twenti- eth-century art that resists easy classification. She was a sculp- tor, a jeweller, a designer and, above all, an artist for whom the natural world was not merely a source of beauty but of form, wit and perpetual surprise. Working alongside her husband François-Xavier under their shared identity, Les Lalanne, and in her own right, she produced a body of work that brought sur- realismdown from the gallery wall and into the intimacy of the adornedbody and the inhabited room. Born inParisandtrainedat theÉcoledesArtsDécoratifsandthe École des Beaux-Arts, she brought to her practice an architect's instinct for structure and a botanist's devotion to living form. The decisive technical discovery came through her friendship with American sculptor James Metcalf, who introduced her to electroplating; a process she mastered until it became entirely her own. By submergingorganicmaterial into a bathof copper sulphate and running a current through it, she could produce a perfect metallic replica of a flower petal, a vine, a leaf. From these shewould construct jewels and sculptures of remarkable delicacy, their distinctive pink-copper patina immediately rec- ognisable as hers alone. She met François-Xavier in 1952. Their artistic temperaments were com- plementary rather than identical: he favoured animal forms with desks concealed inside rhinoceroses, stools in the shape of sheep; while she was drawn to flora, to the human mouth, to the abundant formal intelligence of the garden. Their debut, at Galerie J in Paris in 1964, drew the attention of Alexandre Iolas, the gallerist who had championedWarhol andMax Ernst. It was thebeginningof a sustained international career. The most significant relationship of Claude's professional life was with Yves Saint Laurent: described as the only artist he ever truly collaborated with throughout his career. Saint Laurent and his partner Pierre Bergé were among the Lalannes' earliest and most devoted patrons, commissioning pieces and acquiring works from the 1960s onwards. Claude later worked with Dior, creating accessories for the runway under Maria Grazia Chiuri in 2017. The reach of her influence extended into music: Serge Gainsbourg, inspiredby her sculptureof amanwith a cabbage for a head, titledhis 1976 concept albumL'Homme à têtede chou in its honour. Thewider recognition came, in someways, posthumously for François-Xavi- er. The 2008 sale of the Saint Laurent and Bergé collection brought her mir- rors to auction for more than two million dollars, and a major retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris in 2010 confirmed the standing of Les Lalanne in the canonical history of French art anddesign.Works entered the collections of theCentreGeorges Pompidou, theCooper Hewitt inNew York and the MuseumBoijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Claude con- tinued working alone at Ury, outside Paris, until close to her death in April 2019. What endures in her jewellery is the quality of attention it demands. A Lalanne necklace or pair of earrings does not announce itself through scale or spectacle, but through the uncanny precision of its forms: the sense that something alive has simply, andperfectly, been stilled.