Biography
After an academic career studying art history and a professional career as a dealer in modern and contemporary paintings, Florent Jeanniard developed a fascination with 1930s to 1970s furniture, with a particular predilection for the 1960s-1970s. He joined Sotheby’s in 2011 as a Design Specialist before being appointed as that department’s director in 2017. He was then was made Vice President of Sotheby’s France in 2020, Global Co-Director of the Design Department in 2021 and ultimately became Chairman in 2022.
Mr Jeanniard was the force behind a revival of Design sales in Paris, which have been attaining new heights year after year: the sale held in the spring of 2018 surpassed, for the first time ever, the €10 million mark, but the new record for a Design sale in Europe as of November 2021 now stands at €27.2 million.
Over the past decade, Mr Jeanniard has helped achieve record auction earnings for more than 50 artists, including François-Xavier Lalanne, Claude Lalanne, Alexandre Noll, Jean-Michel Frank, Maarten Baas and Guy de Rougemont.
He has also organised a number of monographic exhibitions paying tribute to the great names in Design, such as Jacques Lacloche, Cecil Beaton, Pierre Staudenmeyer, Diego Giacometti, Pierre Cardin and, more recently, Pierre Paulin.
Florent Jeanniard is also the person responsible for the two biggest collection sales seen on the entire French art market in recent years: L'Univers Lalanne, Collection Claude et François-Xavier Lalanne, which brought in €91.3 million in 2019, the unrivalled record for a Sotheby’s auction in France and for any collection sold in France over the last twelve years, and then the 2021 sale Les Lalanne de Dorothée Lalanne, which totalled €80.9 million, an annual record for an auction in France.
