But it does not hurt. Through the years, the furniture of
Prouvé has been known to increase in value two to three times its purchase
price, according to Tamotsu Yagi, a San Francisco–based industrial designer  | Prouvé’s stool of oak, enameled steel and aluminum, circa 1950, sold for
$30,000 in March at Wright Auctions.
Photography by Brain Franczyk/Wright |
who
first began collecting Prouvé in 1987. But a much-discussed, recent Wall Street
Journal article, which tracked auction prices for Prouvé and other Modernist
designers, suggests that Yagi has made an even shrewder investment than that.
Prouvé prices increased 264 percent in the past five years, the Journal found,
and 512 percent in the last decade. His prices continue to go up, Wright points
out. “There’s something so evocative in the way he mixes materials. That,
combined with his design aesthetic, creates this value.” Today the market shows
no signs of cooling.
Until the early 1980s, Prouvé desks, beds, tables and
other pieces—tossed out as France’s institutions modernized—could still be
found, cheap and plentiful, in Continental flea markets. Many were scooped up by
two canny early Prouvé dealers, Parisians Patrick Seguin and Philippe Jousse;
under their stewardship, the prices began their stratospheric rise. In the U.S.,
the market was slower to develop. French dealer Stéphane de Beyrie of Galerie de
Beyrie in Manhattan recalls that when he and his wife and business partner,
Catherine, brought some Prouvé pieces to a Modernism show in Los Angeles 13
years ago, no one knew who Prouvé was.
Now, it seems, everyone does. The
Prouvé pieces sold handsomely at two auctions last December, in the New York
sale rooms of rivals Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury & Co. At the latter, a
half-dozen examples of the ingeniously simple Standard chair—once meant to be
ordered in the hundreds, even thousands—went for between $2,000 and $5,200 each.
A pair of Visiteur armchairs, with their upholstered seats and backs, tubular
metallic legs and wooden arms and sides, went for $47,000. Rarer pieces, of
course, command larger sums. At the Sotheby’s sale, an adjustable version of the
Visiteur, one of only a few in existence that has a back that can be raised or
lowered, brought in $72,000. A pair of doors with portholes—a Prouvé
signature—went for $680,000 after an intense bidding war. The selling price,
more than seven times the high estimate of $80,000, tied the record for postwar
design at auction, according to Sotheby’s. The high bidder was Grajales,
shopping, she says, for a client who felt it was something that needed to be in
the person’s collection.
Most beginning Prouvé collectors do not start at this
level, of course. Instead, they tend to warm up with some of his more
mass-produced designs, the elegantly curving Antony chair, perhaps, or the
Compass desk, so named because, like the instrument for drawing circles, it has
endearingly coltlike, spindly legs.
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