Known individually and collectively as Les Lalanne since 1966, Claude’s and François-Xavier’s artistic practices were deeply entangled. Their respective creative processes nonetheless remained recognizably distinct over their decades-long careers. Claude’s sculptures typically mimic the flora of her surroundings, such as a ginkgo leaf, a branch, or an apple. Having resuscitated the Renaissance art of casting forms from life, while also employing the more recent technique of electroplating, Claude achieved a delicacy and sensitivity in her work largely unparalleled in cast bronze. By contrast, François-Xavier is renowned for his life-size sculptures of animals, a practice inspired in part by his time working as a guard in the Egyptian and Assyrian galleries of the Musée du Louvre in Paris. With much time to study the massive Apis Bull, François-Xavier would later acknowledge that “the animal world offers an infinite repertory of forms connected to a universal symbolism” that “children as well as adults are sensitive to.” François-Xavier’s oeuvre demonstrates his commitment to the artistic tradition of zoomorphism through a Surrealist aesthetic, often making creatures that recall the dreamworlds of Lewis Carroll.

Claude and François-Xavier shared a studio in the 1950s on the famed Impasse Ronsin in Paris, where their neighbors included, among others, Constantin Brancusi, Max Ernst, William N. Copley, James Metcalf, Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle. A list of early Lalanne collectors reads as a standalone catalogue of some of the most influential public figures of the twentieth century: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, Gunter Sachs, Dodie Rosekrans, Valentino, Karl Lagerfeld, Anne Gruner Schlumberger, Baron Guy and Baroness Marie-Hélène de Rothschild, Giovanni Agnelli, and John and Dominique de Menil all acquired important works by the artists. The famed Greek American gallerist Alexandre Iolas, noted for championing the careers of household names from René Magritte and Max Ernst to Andy Warhol, ushered Les Lalanne onto the international scene and organized their first exhibition at an American institution, the Art Institute of Chicago, in 1967. Kasmin has mounted over 10 solo exhibitions dedicated to Les Lalanne since 2007, when the gallery gave the artists their first New York exhibition in nearly 30 years.