François-Xavier Lalanne
Encyclopedia
François-Xavier Lalanne was a French sculptor and engraver. He lived and worked in Ury. He is best known for his furniture in the form of animals, garden sculptures in the form of animals combined with vegetation, a desk in the form of a cow, his garden sculpture of a dinosaur on the Third Street Mall in Santa Monica
Santa Mônica
Santa Mônica is a town and municipality in the state of Paraná in the Southern Region of Brazil.-References:...

, California, the fountains he designed for the Hotel de Ville, Paris
Hôtel de Ville, Paris
The Hôtel de Ville |City Hall]]) in :Paris, France, is the building housing the City of Paris's administration. Standing on the place de l'Hôtel de Ville in the city's IVe arrondissement, it has been the location of the municipality of Paris since 1357...

; and the gardens he created, with his wife Claude, for the reconstructed Les Halles
Les Halles
Les Halles is an area of Paris, France, located in the 1er arrondissement, just south of the fashionable rue Montorgueil. It is named for the large central wholesale marketplace, which was demolished in 1971, to be replaced with an underground modern shopping precinct, the Forum des Halles...

 in Paris.

Biography

In 1945, Lalanne studied drawing, sculpture and painting in Paris, influenced particularly by Constantin Brâncuşi
Constantin Brancusi
Constantin Brâncuşi was a Romanian-born sculptor who made his career in France. As a child he displayed an aptitude for carving wooden farm tools. Formal studies took him first to Bucharest, then to Munich, then to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris...

, Rene Magritte
René Magritte
René François Ghislain Magritte[p] was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images...

 and Salvador Dali
Salvador Dalí
Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

. He had his first one-person show of paintings in Paris in 1952.

In 1956, he began to collaborate with his future wife, Claude, The couple were married in 1967.

He became known to the larger public in France in 1976 when the singer Serge Gainsbourg selected a work by Lalanne, The man with the head of a cabbage, for the title and cover of an album in 1976.

In 1983 he was commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to design new monumental fountains for the square in front of the Hotel de Ville, Paris
Hôtel de Ville, Paris
The Hôtel de Ville |City Hall]]) in :Paris, France, is the building housing the City of Paris's administration. Standing on the place de l'Hôtel de Ville in the city's IVe arrondissement, it has been the location of the municipality of Paris since 1357...

, and also to design gardens for the reconstructed Les Halles
Les Halles
Les Halles is an area of Paris, France, located in the 1er arrondissement, just south of the fashionable rue Montorgueil. It is named for the large central wholesale marketplace, which was demolished in 1971, to be replaced with an underground modern shopping precinct, the Forum des Halles...

in the center of Paris.

A major exhibit dedicated to him and Claude Lalanne was held at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris from March to July 2010.

External links


Sources and Citations

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