Yves Saint Laurent's Lalanne Mirrors Set For $15 Million Sale

A group of 15 mirrors commissioned by Yves Saint Laurent in 1974 is set to lead Sotheby's April 22 design sale at the Breuer building in New York, where the ensemble carries an estimate of $10 million to $15 million. The mirrors, made by French artist Claude Lalanne (1924–2019), are among the most closely watched lots in Jean and Terry de Gunzburg's collection, which Sotheby's says is its most valuable single-owner design sale to date.

The auction, a 123-lot offering spanning 20th-century design from Art Deco to postwar avant-garde, is expected to bring in more than $40 million. The mirrors alone illustrate how sharply the market for Lalanne has accelerated: Jean and Terry de Gunzburg bought them in 2009 for €1.9 million, or about $2.4 million at the time. In December, a Lalanne hippopotamus bar sold for $31.4 million, setting a record for the artist.

The sale includes 16 Lalanne lots in total. Among them are François-Xavier Lalanne's (1927–2008)“Mouton de Laine” sheep, estimated at $700,000 to $1 million each, and Claude Lalanne's“Pomme d'Hiver” from 2009, a monumental golden apple estimated at $3 million to $5 million. A 10-light crocodile chandelier is estimated at $500,000 to $700,000.

The rest of the collection reflects the de Gunzburgs' taste for French design with a distinctly Parisian sensibility. Alexandre Noll's mahogany cabinets are estimated at $700,000 to $1 million, while Jean Royère's (1902–1981)“Ours Polaire” sofa, designed for his mother's Paris apartment, carries an estimate of $600,000 to $800,000. Alberto Giacometti's (1901–1966) patinated bronze floor lamp is estimated at $250,000 to $350,000, and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann's (1879–1933) spiraled carpet is estimated at $150,000 to $200,000.

Terry de Gunzburg, who later founded By Terry after working at Yves Saint Laurent, and her husband, Jean de Gunzburg, a former chief scientific officer at Da Volterra, assembled the collection over four decades. Sotheby's co-worldwide head of design, Florent Jeanniard, described it as“one of the most intellectually rigorous and aesthetically coherent design collections of our time.”

A second sale in May will bring the couple's art collection to auction, including works by Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, and Agnes Martin. Together, the two sales offer a rare look at a collection built with unusual discipline, and at a market still recalibrating the value of 20th-century design.

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