Trauner: A Cinema Icon Under the Hammer

For Orson Welles, Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks, he was the greatest set designer of all. The sale staged on 16 October by Alexandre Giquello (with Serge Plantureux as expert) is a real immersion in the golden age of the cinema. Alexandre Trauner was an iconic figure in this world, but one who always stayed in the background, even after receiving an Oscar and several Césars. In December 1993, he joined his longstanding friend Jacques Prévert in their final resting place in the cemetery of Omonville-la-Petite, the Normandy village where they had lived as neighbours. "They were both poets who were painters," to quote his wife, Janine Trauner. In the 1930s, Prévert presented the young immigrant to Marcel Carné, with whom Trauner worked on all his major films before being taken on by his American counterparts, for shoots in first Europe, then Los Angeles. The sale is offering affordably-priced shots of this work covering several decades and…