Our La Biennale Paris Finds: Fine Jewelry, Retro Furniture, Stunning Artwork, and More

Fine jewelry and timepieces were on offer, including contemporary stunners by Nirav Modi. One of their latest creations was the Sakura necklace and earrings set. The pairing, inspired by the Japanese blossom, included more than 100 solitaire diamonds and nearly as many onlookers in its small booth near the fair’s center.

Speaking of specialists, Paris’s Galerie Chevalier, which deals in rugs and tapestries, displayed a massive set of four 17th-century tapestries in one room—“The Hunts of Maximilian”—while in the other showed 20th century works that included a fantastical, 8-foot-high “Man and the Sea” by Jean Picart Le Doux.

The fair is also a great place to find unloved or under-recognized greats of 20th century design. Galerie Yves Gastou, also from Paris, offered tables and chairs in oak from the ’70s by the late Dominique Zimbacca that were originally created for a home in the South of France. The pieces are architectural in style with sharp lines, but also look uniquely handmade (he was inspired his studies of Frank Lloyd Wright), illustrating that the “unlovable decade” of design wasn’t all that louche.

At Galerie Chastel-Marechal, masterworks by another name that deserves to be rediscovered, Paul Dupré-Lafon, included a large, circa-1937 desk that was still covered in its original red Hermes leather.

Also sourced—in this case, rescued—from the South of France was “The Mortola Gardens,” a series of nine oil paintings on wood panels by Camille Roche that were presented by Galerie Dumonteil. The works, depicting a colorful Mediterranean garden, were saved from destruction from a house in Juan-les-Pins (near Antibes), villa “Le Roc,” that was owned by the Lord and Lady Cholmondeley.

While French galleries dominated the scene, there were standouts from elsewhere including a jewel box of a booth from Vienna’s Kunsthandel Kolhammer. The outfit, specializing in works from the Wiener Werkstätte and the like, displayed rare curiosities such as a Josef Hoffmann gold-and-pearl ring, and metal busts from the early ’80s by the late artist Franz Hagenauer, whose workshop developed a unique, stylized vision for a better part of the 20th century.