Une Exceptionnelle Collection Mise En Scene Par Emilio Terry Jeudi 15 Septembre 2016 Christie's Paris
$450
[151] pp.
w/ 208 lots
Christie's Paris
2016
10 1/2" x 8 1/4"
Fine
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Emilio Terry is one of those talents that set stylemongers’ antennae aquiver. The Havana-born, Paris-bred architect and designer (1890–1969) took France by storm in the 1930s with his daring, neo-Romantic, and often Surrealistic interpretations of 18th-century neoclassicism. I once stayed at a 1950s Terry country house that took the form of a giant broken pediment; Terry’s extravagant follies for Carlos de Beistegui’s Château de Groussay estate are renowned, and his furnishings, from chairs to carpets, were invariably fantastical. So when a Terry project hits the radar, the fashionable world takes notice.
On September 15, Christie’s Paris is selling the contents of a rue de Presbourg mansion that Terry renovated and decorated in the mid-1960s. None of the offerings are known to have been designed by Terry, but the collective chic is clearly his, from a Louis XVI bureau plat by Philippe-Claude Montigny (estimated at $337,978–$563,297) to an Egyptian-influenced Louis XVI mantel clock ($78,862–$112,659).
The star of the sale is a copy of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s 1872 tinted-plaster ecstatic sculpture Génie de la Danse, estimated to bring in as much as $1.12 million. Terry selected it to be the centerpiece of the mansion’s entrance vestibule (shown above), which he encircled with horizontally scored plaster walls. The hypnotic incisions, giving the space a memorable sense of motion and monumentality, were inspired by Terry’s visit to a National Library of France exhibition in 1965, about the wildly inventive work of 18th-century architects Claude Nicolas Ledoux and Étienne-Louis Boullée.