Sotheby’s has once again proved that the market’s appetite for Lalanne’s menagerie is nowhere near sated. On Wednesday in New York, a rare copper hippo cocktail bar charged past every expectation, dragging the design market with it. Hippopotame Bar (1976), a corpulent creature that doubles as a fully kitted-out drinks cabinet, sold for an astonishing $31.4m. That’s more than triple its high estimate and now the highest price ever achieved for a design object at auction.
Lalanne’s animals have long lived in that sweet spot between sculpture and lifestyle fantasy, but this one had the advantage of being a true pièce unique. Commissioned by the oil heiress Anne Schlumberger, one of the couple’s early and loyal patrons, the hippo is the only bar Lalanne ever made in copper — a detail that clearly thrilled bidders. Inside its hefty flank: a revolving bottle rack, glass storage, an ice bucket, even a serving tray. It’s the sort of object that would make even the most sober minimalist question their principles.
The bidding went on for 26 minutes, a small eternity in auction terms, with seven determined parties nudging the price ever upwards. When the hammer finally fell, Lalanne’s previous record — the €18.3m paid for Rhinocrétaire I at Christie’s Paris last year — looked almost modest. That earlier work, a brass rhinoceros stuffed with desk drawers, bar apparatus, and wine storage, suddenly feels like a warm-up act.
Schlumberger herself is a compelling footnote in this story. Sister of Dominique de Menil and a key figure in a family that shaped American art patronage, she treated her hippo more as a party trick than an investment. She was known to serve chips and salsa from it, a detail that tells you everything about the Lalannes’ peculiar genius: their work invites use, not reverence.
This year’s sales from Schlumberger’s estate have been steadily revealing the breadth of her taste — even a Salvador Dalí necklace went under the hammer. But it’s the hippo that has sent the industry into a minor tailspin. In a market that often pretends to be immune to whimsy, a giant copper animal smashing world records is a reminder that desire can’t always be rationalised. Sometimes it simply opens its mouth, and the room follows.
Claude Lalanne (born in Paris in 1925), with her husband, François-Xavier Lalanne (born 1927), occupies that rare corner of 20th-century art where the practical and the poetic meet in harmony. While their name is forever paired under the shared banner of Les Lalanne, Claude carved out a vision that was unmistakably in a Post Art Nouveau style. At the same time, François-Xavier created dreamy beasts that populated his kingdom.
Claude arrived at sculpture through the side door — architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, decorative arts at the École des Arts Décoratifs — disciplines that never thoroughly answered her curiosity but left their imprint on her precision. From the early 1960s, as the duo began to land commissions from design-conscious titans like Yves Saint Laurent, Claude quietly set about reinventing how botany could be translated into bronze, not as décor, not as ornament, but as something closer to alchemy.
Her process was famously exacting: moulding and electroplating real leaves, stems, whole branches, capturing every vein and serration as if cataloguing a parallel flora. The result was a sculpture that looked alive but behaved differently — strong where nature is fragile, permanent where nature insists on decay. A Lalanne table might rest on a thicket of cast brambles; a mirror frame might sprout ginkgo leaves with unnerving accuracy. Her jewellery, too, had that same dualism: wearable but otherworldly, like something dredged from a myth rather than a studio.
Unlike François-Xavier’s menagerie, Claude’s vegetal universe didn’t aim for whimsy. It operated with a cooler, more meditative logic. The work sits somewhere between Surrealism and, as mentioned, Art Nouveau, though she never seemed keen to pledge allegiance to either camp. Instead, she embraced the in-between — fine art rubbing shoulders with design, sculpture that quietly smuggled itself into daily life. In an era that loved labels, she refused them all.
Their work now lives in major museums — the National Design Museum and Cooper Hewitt in New York, the Musée d’Art Moderne and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and even the Musée d’Histoire Naturelle. Yet it still feels rooted in her original impulse: to look closely, to hold onto the fleeting, and to remind us that art doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes it simply grows, leaf by bronze leaf, into the room.