Line Vautrin - Design London Tuesday, September 19, 2017 | Phillips
  • Provenance

    Jean-David Botella, Paris
    Acquired from the above by the present owner

  • Literature

    Patrick Mauriès, Line Vautrin: Miroirs, exh. cat., Galerie Chastel-Maréchal, Paris, 2004, pp. 48-49

  • Artist Biography

    Line Vautrin

    French • 1913 - 1997

    After brief stints with the couturier Elsa Schiaparelli and a Parisian photography firm, Line Vautrin taught herself metal foundry, which had been her father's trade, and went door-to-door selling her cast jewelry. In 1937 she rented a stand at the Paris International Exposition that attracted enough clientele for her to open a shop in the Rue de Berri. As business improved, she moved to the more fashionable Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Vautrin started out making jewelry, belts, powder compacts and buttons: At the time, the term for her line of work was parurière (one who makes and sells fashion accessories).

    Eventually, however, she hit on her signature style, developing a material she coined talosel, which comprised layers of cellulose acetate that she carved, gouged, molded and encrusted with colored mirrored glass. This new material enabled her to expand her repertoire to include larger objects such as the mirrors for which she is best known today. The objects that she created in talosel are unlike any others — original, exuberant modern designs that, with the accretions and texture of the scarified talosel, carry the aura of ancient, time-worn relics. Vautrin credited the London art dealer David Gill with re-discovering her work at a 1986 auction of her property in Paris. Her work entered the collection of London's Victoria and Albert Museum, and since then has gained major traction in the twentieth-century design market.

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62

‘Trèfle’ mirror

circa 1960
Talosel resin, coloured mirrored glass, convex mirrored glass.
29.5 cm (11 5/8 in.) diameter
Reverse incised with LINE VAUTRIN.

Estimate
£12,000 - 18,000 

Sold for £35,000

Contact Specialist
Sofia Sayn-Wittgenstein
Specialist
+44 207 901 7926

Design

London Auction 20 September 2017