A new show pairing Magritte and Les Lalanne puts the surrealist master in conversation with two spiritual successors—capitalizing on the heat surrounding both of their markets and challenging the boundaries of surrealism, itself.
Last week, I ambled over to the Upper East Side for a sneak peek at a revelatory new exhibition at Di Donna Galleries that groups three stars in the increasingly hot surrealism category: René Magritte, the Belgian painter born in the final years of the 19th century, and husband-and-wife sculptors Claude and François-Xavier Lalanne, who arrived on the scene a generation later. It’s a clever juxtaposition, given the art-historical lineage binding the artists across time. The very first work in the show is a 1974 bronze bust of gallerist Alexander Iolas, who has been credited with bringing surrealism to America and famously worked with both Magritte and Les Lalanne. “He was the connective tissue of their sensibilities and the uniqueness of their language,” Emmanuel Di Donna told me.
There have been other group exhibitions featuring artists from Iolas’s roster—Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Giorgio de Chirico, etcetera—but there has never been an exhibition dedicated to just Magritte and Les Lalanne until this one, which Di Donna has staged in collaboration with Ben Brown Fine Arts. Wandering through the show, In the Mind’s Garden, which officially opens on Wednesday, the wisdom of the combination seems obvious: Magritte is the top seller in classic surrealism, racking up sales north of $1 billion at auction since 2018. Meanwhile, Les Lalanne are the two top sellers in contemporary surrealism, with combined auction sales of more than $700 million in the same period. “This show was exactly what the market wanted,” said Ben Brown.
The potential upside is greater for Les Lalanne, who are still gaining stature as sculptors versus functional designers, than for Magritte, who is already in the rarefied stratosphere of artists whose work has sold for more than $100 million. “The Lalannes are still dismissed in some sectors of the more judgmental art world as overly commercial,” said the collector and dealer Leo Rogath. “I don’t agree—and the market clearly disagrees as you can see from the prices. I presume part of the idea is to continue to give the Lalannes the gravitas they deserve, putting the work in context with an artist at the highest level of recognition and institutional support.”
For collectors, In the Mind’s Garden provides access to a wide selection from Les Lalanne’s oeuvres, including pieces that are particularly rare. The show features one of only three of François-Xavier’s cerulean blue hippo bathtubs, for example, and one of only two of his grasshopper-shaped wine cabinets (the other is at Windsor Palace). For Di Donna, the show is a chance to contextualize Magritte with Les Lalanne, two of the most in-demand artists in the category at the moment.
It’s also a validating moment for Brown, who told me he viewed the show as an opportunity to present Les Lalanne works in-depth to the U.S. market. Brown, a longtime dealer for the two sculptors, stuck by them during the early 2000s, when their work was a much tougher sell. In his first-ever show of their work in London, he couldn’t sell one of François-Xavier’s bronze hippo bars for $200,000; a couple of years ago, one came up at Christie’s and made $6.2 million. Brown’s more current exhibitions of Les Lalanne work, including Planète Lalanne in a Venetian palazzo during last year’s biennale, comprise mostly pieces from his own collection that he’s held on to since their market’s more difficult days. A quarter-century on, it’s safe to say the gamble paid off.
It’s not known if Magritte and Les Lalanne ever met in their lifetimes—the French duo didn’t start working with Iolas until 1964; Magritte died just three years later—but the couple certainly knew of the older artist’s work through the gallerist. Which is why, despite the generational gap, Di Donna said, “They were always in the same conversation,” addressing themes of “transformation, amalgamation and fragmentation.” Moreover, he pointed out, surrealism is “the only movement still alive” of the major artistic movements of the 20th century. Its enduring appeal can be attributed in part to artists like Les Lalanne, who are among the torch bearers who have brought the genre into the present day.
That reality is clear in the way the show organizes its 71 nature-themed works, 26 by Magritte and 45 from Les Lalanne. There are the obvious pairings, like Magritte’s painting of a bowler-hatted man with a floating baguette—L’Ami intime, from 1958, which made $43 million at Christie’s last year—hanging above Claude’s bronze, caterpillar-like baguette with feet, Pain Pieds, conceived in 1991 and cast in 2006. Then, of course, there are all the apples. A gouache of Magritte’s iconic masked duo of the fruit, from 1966, hangs near several of Claude’s life-size bronze apples and above the 4-foot-tall Pomme de Ben—named for, yes, Ben Brown—conceived in 2007 and cast in 2013. In one of the rare collaborations between husband and wife, a monkey sits on the oversize fruit’s stem in a humorous play on scale.
Another parallel explored in the show is how both Magritte and Claude Lalanne frequently tackled the subject of nature overpowering man. One of Magritte’s best-known examples of this theme is a bronze tree stump with the roots overtaking an axe, Les Travaux d’Alexandre, from 1967, named for Iolas. It is displayed near Claude’s 1994 bronze sculpture La Dormeuse, depicting a head lying on its side with branches of leaves instead of hair. Other pairings focus on the figure. Claude’s bronze casts of fragmented body parts overgrown with flora hang on the wall next to Magritte’s 1939 female nude, Le miroir universel—which, in a similar vein, depicts the top of the body as a stone statue blending with the sky and the bottom half as flesh. The painting last sold at Sotheby’s in 2023 for $9.9 million from the collection of Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei, who had purchased it eight years prior for two-thirds that price.
All three artists challenge our ways of looking at the world, sometimes quite literally, by using novel framing devices, like François-Xavier’s outdoor animal sculptures with rectangular cutouts revealing the vista beyond. As he once said, “If we place a sculpture in a landscape, it’s absolutely necessary that its presence be better than its absence.” The current exhibition has two different size versions of his bronze Poisson Paysage from 2007 and 2010. Magritte used similar framing devices in his compositions, and there are multiple examples in the show, even including one with a fish, La Recherche de la vérité (The Search for Truth), from 1962-63.
“Everyone agrees that Magritte is a genius,” a U.S.-based collector told me, “but I suspect that this exhibition will accelerate the reassessment of Les Lalanne as visionary artists.” By positioning the duo’s functional pieces, like the hippo bathtub and grasshopper wine cabinet, alongside masterpieces by Magritte, Di Donna and Brown are challenging their categorization as part of the design canon. “Les Lalanne are the spiritual inheritors of the surrealist movement,” Brown told me. “They are all about creating worlds.”