Chasing a Tip Results in a Great Pane : A Glass Masterpiece Found in South-Central Warehouse

Interior designer Francine Alfieri Brandt didn’t really believe that a huge glass wall by French artist Rene Lalique was languishing in a warehouse in South-Central Los Angeles. But last summer when she checked out the enticing tip, Brandt made an astonishing discovery: an 11x10-foot artwork composed of 165 glass panels, which experts say is an unknown masterpiece.

“It is the most exquisite glass wall I have ever seen,” Brandt said of the artwork, which depicts an effusive burst of naturalistic flowers in molded and frosted glass. “And it taught me a lesson. I think the wall is a great metaphor for the beauty that can be found in South-Central L.A.”

Lalique (1860-1945), a celebrated jeweler and glass-maker, was a leading practitioner of the Art Nouveau style. His unknown wall turned up in a Parisian flea market during the early 1980s and took a circuitous route to Antiquarian Traders on South Alameda, where it was in storage until about a year ago. “It was propped up near a window during the riots. It could easily have been destroyed--only a block away, there’s a burned-out warehouse--but this beautiful work of art survived,” Brandt said.

Some experts speculate that the mysterious artwork was removed from its original site in France during World War II to save it from Nazi looters. If so, the glass wall is a doubly powerful “metaphor for resilience,” Brandt said.

Her discovery also turned out to be an irresistible investment opportunity. Sotheby’s New York has made the artwork a star of a March 20 auction of 20th-Century decorative works of art. Brandt paid $46,000 for the wall, plus a group of Lalique panels from three arched windows, which she plans to keep. The auction house has estimated the selling price of the wall at $200,000 to $300,000.

“It isn’t easy to let it go, but it needs to be seen. It should be in a museum, and the only way that will happen is to put it on the international market,” Brandt said. Indeed, the international market has taken kindly to Lalique in recent years. A glass fountain created in 1926 for a chic Parisian shopping center was sold in 1990 in Geneva for $1.1 million, a record for Lalique. A blue glass vase--unsigned and undocumented--was sold last October in Paris for $175,000.

Mark Slotkin, the Los Angeles dealer who sold the glass assemblage to Brandt, seemed unperturbed by news that it appears to be worth several times his selling price. “It is signed by Lalique and I believed it was his work, but I sold it without a warranty,” he said. Slotkin said he had purchased the artwork second- or third-hand along with a lot of other merchandise. “I don’t know who I bought it from. I buy from 60 or 70 dealers, sometimes in the middle of the night,” he said.

The immense artwork is “perhaps the most dramatic Lalique ‘discovery’ to date,” according to an auction catalogue essay by Nicholas M. Dawes, an authority on the artist. Although 34 of the 165 panels are not original, two panels are cracked and there are chips throughout, the artwork is “extraordinary in many respects,” he has written.

“The design, scale, method of manufacture and wheel-cut signature type all suggest a date of origin between 1926 and 1933, the peak years of Lalique glass production during which scores of architectural commissions were installed internationally. It is most likely that the panels were part of a private residence or hotel in Paris, and may have been removed during the German occupation,” according to the catalogue essay.

The wall--which is thought to have had an identical counterpart--is among Lalique’s major architectural works. Along with his better known perfume bottles and vases, he created large glass installations for his own residence and showroom, Parisian couture salons, a Strasbourg museum dedicated to Louis Pasteur, an ocean liner and luxurious railway sleeping cars.

Thirty tons of Lalique’s work arrived in downtown Los Angeles in 1928, when James Oviatt opened an elegant haberdashery lavishly decorated with glass. The glass ceiling and stairway windows were sold in the ‘60s after Oviatt’s death, but Lalique’s original work can still be seen at the Oviatt building (617 S. Olive St.) in elevators, a penthouse and Rex Il Ristorante.

The largest in situ example of Lalique’s work in the United States--the glass facade of the Coty Building, at 712 5th Ave.--was rescued from demolition in 1985. The vast windows--consisting of 350 panels depicting long-stemmed poppies--were restored in 1989 and unveiled in 1991, when Henri Bendel’s fashionable clothing store moved into the building.

Brandt’s discovery has launched her on a new career. Though she has always loved to rummage around for treasures--and she confesses to a talent for spotting the most expensive item in any store she enters--she took her parents’ advice to do something practical and became a journalist. Having recently completed a four-year program in design at UCLA, she has stopped free-lancing for USA Today and started handing out business cards for Alfieri Design.

Her investigative experience was helpful in researching Lalique, however. After finding the piece, she read up on the artist whom she had long admired but knew little about, and tracked down experts. “They all thought I was crazy,” she said. “Lalique’s work is very well documented and the wall is not in the catalogue raisonne. It was too big and too beautiful to be unknown. And what was it doing in South-Central Los Angeles?” Even after word of its existence began to make the rounds, “disbelief kept it in the warehouse,” she said.

Brandt agonized over the purchase for several months. “I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” she said, but it took courage to spend her savings on it. The turning point came in November when three small panels--which appear to be from the missing counterpart of the wall--were sold for a total of $20,000. Suddenly the doubting experts called and said, “Buy it.”