NEW YORK.- Christie’s New York Fall sale of Important 20th Century Decorative Art & Design takes place on Wednesday December 8 and features over 100 lots including excellent French avantgarde works, lots by Greene & Greene, unique Frank Lloyd Wright, Tiffany and icons of modern design. The sale is led by Thérèse Bonney’s exceptional collection of decorative art and design from Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. Providing an exemplary window into this momentous period in design history, this 27-lot collection was assembled by an American woman who moved to Paris in 1919 and became the youngest person to be awarded a PhD from the Sorbonne in 1922, at the age of 28. Thérèse Bonney quickly became part of the Parisian intellectual elite and established the first American illustrated press service in Europe in 1923, with her photographs famously documenting the modern movement until the outbreak of war in 1939. She then began to focus on war reportage – and never returned to her earlier subject matter. Her archive of Parisian design photography is housed at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York.

Featuring furniture, carpets, lighting, ceramics and tapestries, highlights of the collection include an ‘MB 405’ iron and rosewood desk and an ‘SN 3’ stool, circa 1927 (estimate: $250,000-350,000) and an aluminum table lamp by Jacques Le Chevallier and René Koechlin, circa 1930 (estimate: $40,000-60,000). The collection is offered for sale by the University of California, Berkeley, Bonney’s alma mater, to which she bequeathed it when she died in 1978. The Frank Lloyd Wright ‘Butterfly’ Hanging Lamp, 1903, offered for sale by Greenville College, Illinois, is a significant sale addition. Similar to the five ‘Butterfly’ lamps that hang in Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas House, owned by the State of Illinois, this lot provides a unique opportunity to bid on one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most exquisite art glass objects. Derived from Wright’s abstracted vision of the prairie butterfly at rest, the lamp was given to Richard W. Bock, an architect who worked on the Dana-Thomas House with Lloyd Wright. The lamp stayed in the Bock family until it was donated to Greenville College as part of the Richard W. Bock Sculpture Collection in 1972 (estimate: $400,000-600,000).