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| Passion Investments: Antiques |
Institutional Invention
Jane Innes
10/01/2005
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“As they learn more and become more
excited and more educated, they maybe buy one of the more special pieces,”
Grajales says. It is a path that collectors such as Chung and many others have
followed. Seven years have gone by, but Chung’s passion remains undiminished,
and Prouvé has even become an integral part of his interior design. “I always
encourage my clients to work with Jean Prouvé pieces in their houses,” he says.
Chung was the driving force behind a large show recently at the noted Kukje
Gallery in Seoul, one that included such
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| Prouvé’s first piece, the iconic Standard chair, was designed for institutional
use and produced in great numbers. Today, a single chair can sell for as
much as $5,200. Photography by
Brain Franczyk/Wright | rarities as metal beams from some of
Prouvé’s prefabricated houses—never on the market before, Chung points out—a
leather-upholstered Presidence Bridge armchair and a back-slung Kangaroo sofa,
which, like the animal it is named for, seems poised to leap.
To satisfy the
demand for this designer’s work, intrepid dealers have fanned out across
continents, extricating pieces from often-proletarian provenances and bringing
them to market at once-undreamed-of sums. One of the more surprising prices at
the Sotheby’s sale in December was for a quite frankly ordinary-looking lighting
fixture that once graced a government building in the French city of Le Mans. It
sold for a very unprosaic $45,000.
Canny dealers have also snatched up Prouvé
furniture and structures in many of France’s former overseas buildings and
possessions, obtaining the pieces for a pittance and then selling them for vast
sums in the West. In 2004, Sotheby’s sold a rare table from a government
scientific institute in the Ivory Coast for $72,000 and a metal and wood sun
breaker—a screen—from the Air France building in Brazzaville, the capital city
of the Congo Republic, for $25,200.
One Prouvé devotee, Robert Rubin,
recently purchased one of the designer’s sheet metal and aluminum tropical
houses—long in place in Brazzaville—for more than $1 million, and he then had it
shipped from Africa to France where it was restored. (It was on display at Yale
University in May and June.) Rubin, a former commodities trader who worked on
Wall Street for 25 years before “I decided to do what I really wanted to do,” as
he puts it, is now a PhD student at Columbia University, studying architectural
theory and history. His self-appointed mission, in regard to Prouvé, is to move
the spotlight from his furniture to his buildings. “His architecture is
disappearing, and people only really know his architectural objects.”
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