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| Passion Investments: Antiques |
Institutional Invention
Jane Innes
10/01/2005
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| Prouvé’s furniture soars. Executed for the most part in metaland
wood, they have exhilarating, aeronautic lines and still look contemporary today. |
In the midst of all the frenzy, some experts sound a
cautionary note. “Prouvé’s been mined very heavily at this point,” Wright points
out. “It’s been pretty hot for several years.” The Wall Street Journal, rating
investments of Modernist furniture, suggested that collectors hold rather than
buy or sell their Prouvés at this point, reasoning that their value had
increased so dramatically that it could not possibly continue at the same pace.
But others are convinced that prices for this designer—whom James Zemaitis,
until recently director of 20th-century design at Sotheby’s, has described as
having been vastly underrated for years—will continue to climb. Good pieces
sell, as Grajales puts it, comparing the Prouvé market to Andy Warhol’s, in
which more commonplace pieces sell briskly, but perhaps not at top dollar, while
truly exceptional examples continue to command truly exceptional sums.
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A circa 1954 bibliothèque from Cite Universitaire, Antony, constructed of
laminated oak and enameled steel, sold for $34,800 at Wright Auctions in
March.
Photography by Brain Franczyk/Wright | Prices
will go up in both categories, Grajales predicts, noting that recent auction
prices have been good but not stratospheric. One example is a library table,
commissioned half a century ago for the medical school of the University of
Paris, which came up at Sotheby’s last December. Although the piece was a
collaboration between Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand and lighting designer André
Salomon, its look, with its bent steel legs, is pure Prouvé. “I thought that
lighted table would go for $1 million,” she says. “It was one of the important
pieces of the 20th century. It’s also an intellectual piece. Architecturally,
it’s very strong.” It sold for $490,000.
Susie Tompkins, cofounder of the
Esprit clothing empire, is a longtime Prouvé fan whose collection includes a
round coffee table she describes as “a flying saucer that landed in my life and
taught me so much about that era in design.” Recently she has been divesting
some pieces that she was storing rather than enjoying. The truly exceptional
items—for example, a perfect Presidential desk, its name presumably inspired by
its authoritatively hefty, angular wooden surface—stayed.
She finds it
ironic, if not disturbing, to see a confirmed socialist, who ran his factories
as studios and shared profits with his workers, transformed into the very
personification of Modernist cool. “For those of us who discovered him on the
main floor, it’s sort of become so chic it doesn’t appeal.” Still, she
appreciates his designs more than ever. Tompkins has changed the look of both of
her California residences, which used to be all Modernist—lighting fixtures by
Mouille, furniture by Prouvé, Alvar Aalto and Perriand—to include classic French
furniture, some of it veering toward the baroque. “I like old and new together,”
she says. “It’s very eclectic.” While some 20th century pieces can’t hold their
own when juxtaposed with Louis XVI, that is not true of Prouvé, she discovered.
“Prouvé just sits fine with it all. He’s always looking great with
everything.”
Jane Innes is a writer based in New Jersey.
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