Phillips Announces Highlights from New York June Design Auction

11 June '14

New York

Phillips is pleased to announce highlights from the forthcoming Spring Design Auction, featuring 115 lots with a pre-sale low estimate of $4,161,000 and a pre-sale high estimate of $5,857,000.

“This season we have the privilege of offering historically important works and providing a tremendous opportunity for collectors and institutions. It is exciting for us to bring these works to market and share our enthusiasm and it will be equally exciting for us to see the market’s response.” Meaghan Roddy, Head of Sale, New York

The top lot of the sale is EDGAR BRANDT’S L'Âge d'Or, 1923. The unique five-panel wrought-iron and bronze hall gate was in the collection of the Higgins Museum, Worcester, for two decades before being acquired by renowned collectors of French Art Deco, Claude and Simone Dray. Created by Brandt for the entrance to the decorative arts rooms of the 1923 Salon d’Automne, Paris, the gate comprises stylized flowers and foliate forms in the shape of mechanical gears—a virtuosic expression of the Machine Age. Contrasting with the abstraction of the gate’s wrought-iron ground, Brandt inset gilt-bronze medallions of the Three Graces, Mercury, and Venus by sculptor Max Blondat (1872-1926). “The bronze toe [of Venus] perched on the iron poetically links the past with the future,” notes Joan Kahr, noted Edgar Brandt expert, who has contributed an essay to the sale catalogue and will hold a lecture at Phillips on June 5.

EDGAR
BRANDT
L'Âge d'Or, 1923
EST $700,000-900,000

Jean Dunand exhibited the present lot in 1930 in his “Boudoir” at the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs in Paris. In 1941 the dressing table was acquired by the Mobilier National, the French state collection of furniture and tapestries, as an effort to keep the firm’s artisans employed during the Second World War. In 1972 the dressing table was officially sold or “vendue par les domains.” The armchair designed for use with the dressing table and exhibited with it in 1930 remains in the collection of the Mobilier National.

JEAN DUNAND
Important dressing table with illuminated mirror, circa 1930
EST $180,000-$240,000

Albert Cheuret was a sculptor and designer best known for his lighting designs that incorporate geometric elements with stylized birds. He also designed a shop installation at the Paris Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes of 1925.

ALBERT CHEURET
Chandelier, circa 1925
EST $120,000-$180,000

Charlotte Perriand conceived the present model table in 1935 for clients Paul and Ange Gutmann. The following year she included the model in the annual Exposition Internationale de l’habitation, organized by the journal L’Architecture d’aujourd’hui, at the Salon des Arts Ménagers, Paris. In 1953, Perriand organized an exhibition at Tokyo department store Takashimaya, titled “Synthesis of the Arts,” where she again presented the model accompanied by ten “Ombre” side chairs.