Inside a Parisian Sculptor’s World of Wonders
Physically, the Parisian sculptor and furniture-maker Philippe Anthonioz works from a studio near the Bastille in the bohemian 11th Arrondissement, but metaphorically, he also works in a shadow: His father, Bernard, son of the sculptor Charles Anthonioz, was an official in the administration of André Malraux, the novelist whom Charles de Gaulle named Minister of Cultural Affairs; his mother, Geneviève, was de Gaulle’s niece and a legendary Resistance fighter.
Over the course of his long career, the 64-year-old Anthonioz has had another distinguished association to transcend: Early in his career, in 1983, he began a two-year collaboration with the sculptor Diego Giacometti, then 80 and suffering from arthritis, to create furniture and fixtures for the Musée Picasso in the historic Hôtel Salé. While it was Giacometti who conceived the whimsical bronze pieces dripping with tiny flora and fauna, it was Anthonioz who did most of the fabrication; his spidery chairs, benches and oversize resin chandeliers form a conceptual bridge between the building’s 17th-century architecture and Picasso’s slashing Modernism. “I am proud of what we did, of course,” Anthonioz says, recalling the generosity of the older artist, whom he had first met when he was 13 through his well-connected father. “But I don’t want to be defined by that.”
These days, Anthonioz — who mostly sculpts in wood and plaster that is often cast in bronze — is known for his large-scale, abstract public statuary and custom-made lighting and functional objects for architects including Joseph Dirand, the fashion designer Tomas Maier and the interiors brand Ralph Pucci, for which he makes a line of bronze torchieres. Since 1979, he has kept his main studio in Passage Saint Bernard, a two-block-long cobblestone street not far from the apartment he shares with his girlfriend, Afi Nayo, a Togolese mixed-media artist.
When he moved in, the alley had been home to generations of the city’s furniture-makers, restorers and ebonizers. For the first 15 years, he occupied the second floor of No. 17, a magnificent 18th-century wooden building that was torn down to make way for an apartment complex in the mid-1990s, part of a short-lived attempt by Paris officials to erect new housing. But Anthonioz, enamored of the neighborhood’s gritty charm — he compares it to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, back before the boutiques descended in the early aughts — remained, moving a few doors down to the 1,600-square-foot ground floor of another 18th-century building, one accessible through an aged oak door. “If there is no romance in the environment,” he says, “it’s hard to make good things.”
Unlike the studios of many contemporary artists, which are often minimalist affairs, defiantly ahistorical, his is redolent of the past. The front is an art-book-filled office-cum-salon, with walls hung with antique mirrors and vintage photos, including one of Charles Baudelaire, his lodestar; the back is a workshop crowded with stone arms and torsos, piled alongside pieces of old chandeliers used to construct limited-edition light fixtures for spaces like Loulou, the Dirand-designed restaurant in Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Frosted with fine plaster dust, the space itself seems sepia-toned, like a Eugène Atget photograph.
While Anthonioz and Giacometti shared the belief that there should be no dividing line between decoration and fine art, their aesthetics diverged radically. Giacometti was obsessed with figuration and the natural world — he spent hours studying birds in the city’s Jardin des Plantes, where Henri Rousseau had once found inspiration — but Anthonioz has always been driven by abstraction. Giacometti was a master of affixing tiny animals and curling leaves to the bronze framework of his designs, lending them a fey quality; Anthonioz eschews ornament, preferring sleek minimalist shapes. “People always speak of me in the same breath as Diego, but I think of Carlo Scarpa, David Smith or even the Bauhaus,” he says.
Indeed, his sculptures have become increasingly monumental in recent years — the eight-foot-tall “La Méditerranée,” a cast-bronze totem, was installed in Pratt Institute’s Brooklyn sculpture garden in 2016 — so he now works part-time in a lofty second studio in Ivry-sur-Seine, a southeastern suburb. He is also restoring an 18th-century farmhouse in the south, near Aix-en-Provence, where he plans to make work in his later years, in a barn he’s converting into a studio. There, he hopes his five grown children will bring their own kids to run in the fields. “My work has gotten more abstract, maybe even more modern, as I’ve gotten older,” he says. “I don’t want to be a dog on a leash — not in what I create, and not in how I live my life.”
