[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 (18901969) 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; Terrys extravagant follies for Carlos de Beisteguis Chteau 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, Christies 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 Carpeauxs 1872 tinted-plaster ecstatic sculpture Gnie de la Danse, estimated to bring in as much as $1.12 million. Terry selected it to be the centerpiece of the mansions 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 Terrys visit to a National Library of France exhibition in 1965, about the wildly inventive work of 18th-century architects Claude Nicolas Ledoux and tienne-Louis Boulle.