Is Royère the new Picasso?
Furniture as Art
“To tell the truth, I’m pretty much opposed to furniture. I feel there should be as little of it as possible. This is a generally accepted principle now, almost a cliché: everything goes into walls, cupboards and wardrobes. And what’s left? A few moveable things: beds, tables, and seats.” — Jean Royère
In June last year, within the midst’s of a global pandemic and economic crisis, Christie’s Paris achieved a world auction record for Jean Royère with his Liane six-light sconce (1962), which sold for €1,570,000, as well as the model record for the designer’s whimsically rotund Ours Polaire (“Polar Bear”) sofa (1962), which went for €1,090,000. “The Ours Polaire furnishings are an alcove, a nest,” says Emiliano Salci, one half of the Milan-based interiors duo Dimore Studio. “They even transmit visual comfort to a room. They are timeless.” Highly sought after, Fashion designer Christian Louboutin (b. 1963), art enthusiast Emmanuel De Bayser and gallerist Larry Gagosian (b. 1945) have all acquired pieces, as has Kanye West (b. 1977), the Trump supporting, polarizing patron of the arts, an inherent bundle of contradictions, who tweeted in September 2020: “I honestly need all my Royeres to be museum quality ... if I see a fake Royere Ima have to Rick James your couch.” Given West has, historically, been drawn to wildly successful figures in the worlds of art and design (after all, Axel Vervoordt decorated the monastic 9,000-square-foot Bel Air mansion he shared, until recently, with his wife, the media-mogul and Pop parvenu Kim Kardashian), it’s no surprise he’s a fan, and has, seemingly, made significant sacrifices to fuel his collecting: “I sold my Maybach to get the Royère,” he explained in a 2020 interview with Architectural Digest, “People told me I was crazy for what I paid for it, but I had to have it.” One wonder’s if furniture by the likes of Royère, Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) and the Giacometti brothers has become the new status-symbol for those 0.1% priced out of the blue-chip art market. In 1914 Tsar Nicholas II of Russia paid $1.5 million for Leonardo da Vinci’s Benois Madonna (1478) (also called the Madonna of the Flower), hailed by Gerald Reitlinger in his 1961 study, The Economics of Taste: The Rise and Fall of Picture Prices as “the most expensive picture that has ever been sold” — today that equates to roughly $35.5 million, just about enough to buy a middling-quality Rothko. Using an income-linked list, quite simply, trophy-art has never been so expensive; for e.g. in May 2015 Picasso’s Les Femmes D’Alger (Version “O”) (1955) sold at Christie’s New York for a whopping $179.3 million — making it one of the most costly works of art ever to be sold at auction.
An “Ours Polaire” sofa (1962) designed by Jean Royère image c/o Phillips
Detail of a table (c. 1978) by Diego Giacometti, collection of Hubert de Givenchy image c/o Christie’s
Of course the worlds of blue-chip furniture and art and not mutually exclusive, far from it; there’s a rich minimalism to furniture by the likes of Jean-Michel Frank (1895-1941), Royère, Marc du Plantier (1901-1975) and Pierre Chareau (1883-1950) that, to put bluntly, goes well with an art collection. Such furnishings, whilst of the highest craftsmanship, often using rare and exotic materials, don’t tend to overwhelm a space, or distract from the art in the way for e.g. a heavily ornamented ormolu-mounted Luis XV confection might steal the show. Indeed for many collectors furniture by such design-greats is considered essential to creating a proper a seamless amalgam of design and art. By no means is it to suggest that antiques are not often an integral part of the mix; but even in such environments, a smattering of twentieth century furnishings often ease the transition between Ancien Régime and art moderne. For e.g. French fashion designer Roger Vivier, an early proponent of such eclectic interiors, shocked the Parisian beau monde with his elegant and eclectically appointed apartment on the Quai d’Orsay; where Cycladic idols and French court furniture were displayed against a backdrop of white walls and abstract art by the likes of Jean-Michel Atlan (1913-1960), Serge Poliakoff (1900-1969) and César (1921-1998). Wendell Castle (1932-2018), described as the unofficial “father of the art furniture movement”, was truly unique in that he was able to present himself convincingly to the worlds of sculpture, craft and design. One might even argue that the divide between painting and “design as art” is becoming increasingly blurred and museums are more frequently displaying furniture along with paintings and sculpture. Many of Royère’s creations have a strong sculptural presence, comparable to the silhouettes of Alexander Calder (1898-1976), and the sort of minimal forms dreamt up by the twentieth century’s abstract expressionists (and still considerably less of an investment than for e.g. Calder’s Mariposa (1951) which sold last year at Sotheby’s for $18.2m with fees). Albeit on the nose, lest we forget Royère’s Sculpture series of furnishings, which, much like Calder’s wire works are truly lines drawn into form — colourful, voluptuous masses, suspended in space by an exposed wooden structure.
“Abilene” rocker, stainless steel (2008) by Wendell Castle, image c/o Phillips
Royère may be sanctified as a leading force of mid-century design in France, with his whimsical creations straddling the boundary between furniture and art, but he was, when all is said and done, a décorateur-ensemblier and had no pretentions to be otherwise. If we look to those other names that are hot on the lips of auctioneers and designers alike, the furniture of brothers Alberto (1901-1966) and Diego Giacometti (1902-1985) only serves to further muddy the waters. Take the work of Diego for e.g., a patinated bronze bench from the collection of the late philanthropist Michelle Smith sold at Sotheby’s in April for $3,287,000, after a pre-sale estimate of $4-600,000, considerably more than the $3,140,00 paid for Alberto’s La Cage (Premiere Version) (1990) in June 2020 or the $1,820,000 paid for his Buste d’Homme Assis (Lotar III) (1973) in November 2019. (As an aside, purely on price point, whilst all artists are equal, some artists are more equal than others, the market for Warhol for e.g. is famously inflated, and should not by itself be considered a measure for talent or importance within the art historical canon — but what it does tell us is that collectors are taking furniture designers, and the decorative arts en masse, more and more seriously.) Perhaps somewhat ironically, within his own lifetime, Alberto was derided for the work he undertook for French decorator Jean-Michel Frank, which included some seventeen lamps, eleven floor lamps, thirteen vases, ten wall lights and various other small accessories, including terracotta candle holders.
Unlike his critics however, Alberto considered these decorative works to be as important as his sculptures, explaining in a 1962 interview with André Parinaud: “For my livelihood, I accepted to make anonymous utilitarian objects for a decorator at that time, Jean-Michel Frank ... it was mostly not well-seen. It was considered a kind of decline. I nevertheless tried to make the best possible vases, for example, and I realized I was developing a vase exactly as I would a sculpture and that there was no difference between what I called a sculpture and what was an object, a vase.” The work of Castle, as well as Royère, the Giacometti brothers, and twentieth century designers like George Nakashima (1905-1990) and Sam Maloof (1916-2009) is so fascinating as it transects the boundary between design and sculpture; and to that extent, it paved the way for what we now take for granted in the contemporary design world. Like Castle, the work of dynamic husband and wife duo François-Xavier (1927-2008) and Claude Lalanne (1924-2019) (or Les Lalanne as they became known collectively) in many ways defies categorisation; at once surrealist, classical, contemporary, fine art, decorative and functional design. Only this week François-Xavier’s stunning Troupeau d'Éléphants dans les Arbres table sold at Christie’s for an eye-watering $6,630,000. At the beginning of their careers “artist” was not a word used to describe the makers of chairs and tables. As Times critic Joseph Giovannini noted, when Castle’s furniture appeared in galleries it was seen as “radical in fundamental ways: the visual presence of a piece now outweighed its function, design outweighed technique, and form was more important than material.”
A “Liane” five-arm wall light (1961) designed by Jean Royère image c/o Galerie Jacques Lacoste
When Rose Slivka (1912-2004), editor-in-chief of the influential Craft Horizons (now American Craft Magazine), unpacked her interpretation of craft — of the handmade object — in a special issue devoted to “The American Craftsman”, she identified three categories: “the artist-craftsmen, production craftsmen, production designers.” Using this text as a guide, many pieces which are today seen as twentieth-century design icons fall into one or more of these archetypes. Interestingly, when Slivka wrote about the American Craftsman she was reacting, somewhat presciently, to an issue as problematic now as it was at the time of writing in 1964: “a society that already has more objects than it knows what to do with”. It was a time in America’s socio-cultural history that can be defined by a grotesque magnification of personal wealth, breeding rampant consumerism and a rapacious greed for manufactured Pop culture. Since the 2008 financial crisis, we’ve seen a mad amplification of the hyper-financialised luxury market. “Collecting Jean Royère has become a cultural phenomenon” says Michael Jefferson, Senior Vice President of Christie’s Design department, on the ensemblier’s enduring appeal. “They’re really pleasing to look at and comfortable to live with,” says Jefferson, adding that the last year of pandemic-caused lockdowns makes Royère’s pieces feel all the more resonant.
Of course arguably, there’s a lot of fashion involved, and as with the art world, often, people are buying for show and not necessarily for the love of the object. It’s about acquisition, not collecting; and of course the history of record breaking prices follows the U-shaped curve of 20th and 21st century income disparity; Thomas Piketty a professor at the Paris School of Economics and the author of the best-selling Capital in the Twenty-First Century has suggested that “Global inequality of wealth in the early 2010s appears to be comparable in magnitude to that observed in Europe in 1900-1910”. Picketty’s research suggests the top 0.1% currently owns nearly 20% of the world’s wealth, which is a share — that with low interest rates and rising asset values — will inevitably become greater; ergo, the prices paid for art and design are likely to become more and more obscene, with ever more extreme auction records. For a certain wealth bracket, names like Royère, Perriand, Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) and Jean Dunand (1877-1942) trip off the tongue as easily as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Basquiat and Koons, yet, in the case of the former, they’re still far more affordable status symbols.