Discover the Rarest and Most Extraordinary Works from FAB Paris 2023

The reason for this range is that it combines Paris’s oldest fair, La Biennale des Antiquaires, and the newer Fine Arts Paris—united as Fine arts Paris & La Biennale under the FAB acronym. Included in its 20 sectors are Asian art, Royal Provenance and Tribal art. The last, while unlikely to feature in British or American fairs, where the talk is more of restitution, is still a mainstay of French collecting: the legacy of Picasso (who took inspiration from African masks) and the Surrealists (who reverered Native American and Oceanic objets) continues to resonate.

This year, the fair takes place in the Grand Palais Ephemere – a temporary barrel vaulted structure by Jean-Michel Wilmotte that opened in 2021. With the sweeping curve of its ceiling lined in a deep purple felt and each gallery being housed in what amounted to its own pavilion, designer Sylvie Zerat has certainly invested FAB with as much elegance as the current venue will allow. (Next year, FAB will move to the Grand Palais itself which will reopen after some spectacular and much-needed renovations.)

On the opening day, President Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte Marcon, as well as Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak visited the fair. Also seen wandering the aisles were designers including Jacques Granges and Herve van der Straten, as well as Monsieur Wilmotte himself, and Monsieur Macron

“I’m already noticing changes from last year,” said the Paris-based art advisor Fiona Scarry. (If that name rings bells, she is the grand-daughter of Richard Scarry, the American children’s book writer and illustrator.) “Particularly with the integration of design and painting together on some stands, like Demisch Denant. It brings a certain kind of contemporary energy to a serious collecting fair.”

Bathroom by Armand-Albert Rateau at Anne-Sophie Duval

With its gold mosaic floor, marble fittings and bronze taps, the perfect recreation of an octagonal bathroom by the Art Deco master Armand-Albert Rateau is an act of decorative generosity on the part of Anne-Sophie Duval, who specialises in work made in France between the wars (1918-1939). Rateau worked to the highest level of modernity and opulence, and the bathroom, made for the Franco-American Dubonnets in 1928 for their home in the posh Parisian suburb of Neuilly, would have been the last word in trail-blazing chic. Rateau loved to incorporate plants and animals into his work, and here the taps take the form of slender birds while the lamps are butterflies holding up daisies. “We had the plans and all the elements – bath, basin, mirrors, hardware,” explains Duval of the reconstruction.

Ngombe Stool at Schoffel de Fabry; Ellie Nadelman head at Benjamin Proust

It wouldn’t be Paris without the legacy of its most famous fashion designers leaving a trace. At FAB it comes in the presence of a rare Ngomobe stool, made in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the 19^th Century that was formerly in the collection of Yves Saint Laurent and a exceptional marble head of a woman, by Nadelman 1919/20, that was once owned by Karl Lagerfeld.

The rare Ngombe stool, made in wood and brass nails, is one of no more than 25 of its type recorded in private and institutional collections. With its curving seat, backwards splaying legs and geometric compostion of its nails, it was known to and copied by the interior decorator and designer Pierre Legrand in the 1920s. It’s also said to have inspired Yves Saint Laurent’s African collection of 1967.

Meanwhile, the luminous marble head by Elie Nadelman certainly caught the eye of Patrick Hourcade when he visited the fair. The art historian turned designer and art advisor first met Lagerfeld in 1975, and became his confidant while overseeing the decoration of several of Lagerfeld’s homes over a twenty year period. According to Hourcade, the sculpture had been part of the décor of Lagerfeld’s own bathroom in one of his last apartments, in Quai Voltaire.

Sonia Delaunay, Leonor Fini, Dora Maar at Loeve&Co

The team at Paris gallery Loeve&Co decided to celebrate “Fabulous Women” on their stand, and it is a joy to see fabric studies by Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) that have been assembled from private collections. In brilliantly painted gouache, the designs demonstrate Delaunay’s exceptional ability to work in strong colour and geometric shape without losing a sense of poetry and fantasy. As the curator Anne Monfort has pointed out, “it is not irrelevant to the historian that her works preceeded those of Mondrian”.

Also assembled from a variety of private sources is a series of watercolours on paper by Leonor Fini (1908-1996), which are modest in format if not price at around 35,000 euros each. Known for her depictions of powerful and erotic women, these are no exception. In one, a man and a woman seem in preparation for an exciting encounter, standing back-to-back as equals. In another, the female figure sprouts the wings of an angel, those these are charcoal grey. Both show the influence of her work as the costume designer that she mostly was between 1944 and 1972.

Camille Claudel at Galerie Malaquais

Galerie Malaquais has lent several works to the exhibition of the figurative French sculptor Camille Claudel that is currently taking place at the Art Institute of Chicago and which will travel to the Getty in Los Angeles next year.  The 60 strong show, curated by Emerson Boyer in Chicago and Anne-Lise Desmas in LA, represents a timely introduction into the US of a female artist who was largely overlooked in her lifetime in France (1864-1943) and still has a remarkably unsung reputation in the States (there are fewer than 10 examples of her work in US institutions.)

Claudel, however, was a master of her metier, imbuing her figures with an intensity, power and sensitivity all her own. With highly expressive faces, and extended limbs and torsos, Claudel didn’t seek realism in her work but an interrogation of human emotion – tenderness, abandonment, fear and happiness are all visible in various pieces.

In 1883, Claudel started to work in the studio of Auguste Rodin, with whom she had a long and agonising affair. He frequently used her as a model. While Claudel had plenty to learn from Rodin, her work remains firmly her own in its lyricism and narrative conviction. Don’t miss the US shows. It’s at the Art Institute until 19 february 2024.