#MADCAP RETREATS FREE#

#MADCAP RETREATS FREE#

This open-air show is free from signage, so visitors are left to chance upon the fantastical creations on tree-lined avenues and in grassy meadows and lakes. Claude, who died in 2019 at the age of 93, and her husband, who died 11 years earlier, have been represented by MitterrandвЂ™s gallery since the early 1990s.

Snaking through the grounds this summer is a sculpture trail of more than 50 works by FranГ§ois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne, known together as Les Lalanne. Construction on the estate primarily took place during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis XVI, whose wife, Marie Antoinette, sought refuge from the stuffy confines of court life in the bucolic surroundings and quickly made them her own. Large windows overlook the neatly manicured French gardens and the neoclassical Petit Trianon palace beyond nearby are the less formal English gardens and the rustic QueenвЂ™s Hamlet. WeвЂ™re in the French Pavilion, a rococo structure in the Estate of Trianon at Versailles, west of Paris. Sitting opposite in a matching armchair, I too begin to fidget, conscious all of a sudden of a claw close by my elbow. I have to search for a comfortable position, and one that shows the crocodile.вЂ™ He gestures to one of two gilt-bronze reptiles, snouts almost touching, their tails wrapped around the edge of the banquette and their scaly bodies forming its back. вЂI canвЂ™t sit on this banquette as I normally would. вЂThe interesting thing,вЂ™ says Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand, вЂis that when you use a Lalanne desk, bar or chair, you have to change the way you use a desk, bar or chair.вЂ™ To demonstrate his point, the Parisian art dealer shifts left and right on the seat of Claude LalanneвЂ™s Banquette Crocodile (2006).

Madcap retreats