Claude Lalanne, Serge Gainsbourg, and the Man with the Cabbage Head

 

Claude Lalanne's L'Homme à tête de chou, as featured on 

the cover of  Serge Gainsbourg's 1976 album of the same title 

 

 

Claude Lalanne was an avant-garde French sculptor and designer, who often worked in collaboration with her husband, François-Xavier Lalanne, even though they had distinctively different styles and ideas.

 

Inspired by a whimsical mix of Surrealism, Art Nouveau, and her love of plants, Claude Lalanne produced some astonishing pieces (including items of furniture and jewellery) and her hybrid (often bizarre) style of decorative design has captured the imagination of many in the art world, as well as leading fashion designers including Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, and Yves Saint Laurent, the latter of whom commissioned Lalanne to create several mirrors adorned with electroplated leaves and branches [1]

 

In fact, for anyone who wanted an apple with lips, a rabbit with wings, or a man with a cabbage head, Lalanne was the go-to artist; Salvador Dalí once asked her to make him some cutlery and Serge Gainsbourg famously acquired her piece entitled L’homme à tête de chou, featuring it on the sleeve of his 1976 album of the same title [2], thereby bringing her work to the attention of a new and wider audience. 

 

Amusingly, Lalanne also made a whole series of chicken-legged cabbage sculptures which she called choupattes - a series she added to (with the assistance of her daughter and granddaughter) right up to her death, aged 93, in 2019. 

 

 

Claude Lalanne: Choupatte (2014 / 2017)

Bronze (57.5 x 63.5 x 63.5 cm)

Ben Brown Fine Arts

  

 

Notes

 

[1] After his death in 2008, Yves Saint-Laurent's fifteen Lalanne designed mirrors fetched more than $2m at auction. 

      It might also be noted that Lalanne collaborated with the designer on his 1969 Empreintes collection, for which she made bronze breastplates cast from the chest of his favourite model. It was Saint-Laurent's only collaboration with an artist. 

 

[2] Although not as celebrated as Histoire de Melody Nelson (Philips Records, 1971) - considered by many to be Gainsbourg's most influential and accomplished work - L'Homme à tête de chou (Philips Records, 1976) does have its moments and dark delights. It tells the story of a middle-aged man obsessively in love with a young and free-spirited shampoo girl, Marilou. Driven mad by jealousy and desire, he eventually murders her with a fire extinguisher, concealing her body beneath the foam. Unsurprisingly, he ends his days in an inane asylum.

      Claude Lalanne's sculpture, owned by Gainsbourg, is pictured on the front sleeve of the album sitting in the courtyard of his house in Paris (5 bis Rue De Verneuil). Click here to listen to the title track of L'Homme à tête de chou uploaded to YouTube by Universal Music Group.