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The Kasmin Gallery, her New York representative, announced her death on its website.
Lalanne and her husband, sculptor François-Xavier Lalanne, who died in 2008, were known collectively as “Les Lalanne,” and their work was coveted by collectors, who often paid attention-getting prices for it. Despite their collective billing, they did not collaborate often; rather, they shared a fondness for the unexpected.
François-Xavier Lalanne was especially known for surrealistic sculptures like a baboon with a fireplace in its belly and a flock of stone-and-bronze sheep, some adorned with real sheepskin. Claude Lalanne’s works tended to be smaller and often drew on imagery from the botanical kingdom, as with elegant candelabra reminiscent of entwined branches or mirrors framed by bronze foliage. She found inspiration in the gardens at the couple’s home in Ury, south of Paris.
“I never stop walking in the garden,” she told The Financial Times two years ago, “looking at what is there and using what I grow.”
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She meant that in a very real way: In addition to her sculptures, she made jewelry, often using an electroplating process in which something from her garden — a leaf, a twig — was immersed in a bath of sulfuric acid and copper sulfate, leaving it covered in a delicate copper coating.
She was still making new work until shortly before her death.
“The sculptures of Claude Lalanne were so many poetic moments stolen from the hardness of the world,” Franck Riester, France’s culture minister, said on Twitter.
Claude Dupeux was born on Nov. 28, 1925, in Paris, and grew up there. Her mother was a musician and her father was a gold broker.
She studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in 1952 she met François-Xavier Lalanne at an exhibition of his paintings in Paris.
They began working together shortly after, although they would not marry until 1967, and in the mid-1950s they became part of the group of artists embedded in a back street in the Montparnasse section of Paris known as the Impasse Ronsin. The ragged alley became, as The New York Times Magazine put it in a 2016 article, “an artery of aesthetic energy that, in no small fashion, defined French postwar art in all its insanity.”
The sculptor Constantin Brancusi, who died in 1957 at age 81, was a grandfatherly presence in their early years there. Claude Lalanne once complained to him that he was throwing too many cigarette butts on her floor; he responded by giving her a metal bowl he had made, which she used as an ashtray.
She received some commissions from department stores and such for decorative work, and at first she and her husband were not taken seriously in artistic circles, where abstraction was dominant. Their work, in contrast, featured recognizable imagery and was often utilitarian. The distinction between craftswoman and artist was not one she dwelt on.
“Artists and artisans are the same thing,” she said in a 2017 interview with Italian journalist Alain Elkann. “It is the same definition in the dictionary.”
Claude and François-Xavier’s first show together was in 1964 in Paris and brought them some influential fans. Salvador Dalí asked Claude Lalanne to make him some cutlery. The trendsetting gallerist and collector Alexander Iolas began exhibiting them.
Yves Saint Laurent, the fashion designer, was another early champion of her work.
“Yves asked me to make two mirrors for him,” she recalled, “and one night when we were having dinner together he said to me, ‘Why don’t you do the whole room with mirrors?’”
In 1969 she collaborated with him on his Empreintes collection, casting bronze breastplates from the chest of the model Veruschka that were then incorporated into gowns.
Posthumously, Saint Laurent contributed to a late-life surge in demand for Claude Lalanne’s work. The year after his death in 2008, Christie’s auctioned off the collection accumulated by Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Berge, with results that astonished the art world. Among the many items that sold for well above their estimates were her mirrors — a set of 15 sold for more than $2 million.
Later that year Christie’s auctioned some 50 works by Les Lalanne, which brought in more than $3 million, more than 15 times the collective low estimate.
“Before the Saint Laurent sale, that would have been unthinkable,” the publication Art Market Monitor wrote.
Les Lalanne exhibitions have been frequent in recent years. Four years ago the Kasmin Gallery mounted a retrospective, “Les Lalanne: 50 Years of Work, 1964-2015.” An exhibition at Ben Brown Fine Arts in London closed just this February.
Claude Lalanne’s survivors include four daughters, Dorothée, Caroline, Marie and Valérie; six grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.
She seemed particularly inspired by cabbages. Her sculpture “L’Homme à Tête de Chou” — “The Man With the Cabbage Head,” which pretty much describes the work — was owned by French singer Serge Gainsbourg, who put a picture of it on the cover of his 1976 album of the same name.
And then there were those cabbages with chicken legs — “Choupattes,” she called them. She made the first one early in her career as a gift for François-Xavier.
“I had taken a mold of a cabbage and just wondered what it would look like with legs,” she once said, explaining how the signature work came about. “The moment I saw it, it felt right. It had emotion.”
Now there are versions in museums and art collections all over the world.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.