Sotheby's Modern Evening Auction, 19th May Part I

This May, Sotheby’s will offer works from the collection of Adele and Enrico Donati, two leading figures in New York’s creative circles. A highly important presence within the Surrealist milieu, Enrico Donati, often referred to as “the last Surrealist”, was at once an artist and trusted confidant to many of the movement’s leading figures, counting Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and André Breton among his close friends. Alongside him was his wife Adele Donati, a designer and artist, who viewed the collection with a discerning eye, informed by her work across advertising and fashion. The collection, which was rarely exhibited publicly, reflects the breadth of Enrico’s close friendships and influences. It is led by

Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste), est. in the region of $40m, one of the artist’s most significant early Cubist portraits, created just two years after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is among the most important works from this decisive moment to appear at auction in recent decades. 

Created in the Spring of 1909, just two years after Picasso had established himself with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the work stands at a pivotal moment, poised on the threshold of one of modern art’s defining breakthroughs: the emergence of Cubism.In the painting, Picasso takes one of his most legendary motifs, the harlequin, and transforms it through a radical early Cubist lens. Traditionally associated with 17th-century theatre, the wandering circus performer became a recurring figure in Picasso’s oeuvre, often representing outsiders and those on the margins of society. Picasso himself felt a particular affinity for the harlequin, even using it as a veiled self- portrait in masterworks such as Au Lapin Agile (1905). In Arlequin (Buste), he distills the figure to its essence, reducing it to a series of geometric forms.

Alongside Arlequin (Buste) is Wassily Kandinsky’s vibrant Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) (est. $12 – 18m), a dynamic example of the artist at the height of his Bauhaus era. 

Executed in 1925, while Kandinsky was a leading influence at the Bauhaus, Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) is among the finest works by the artist to appear on the market in recent years. By the mid-1920s, Kandinsky had become one of the intellectual pillars of the Bauhaus, the influential school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius to unite art, architecture and design for a modern era. Having returned to Germany from revolutionary Moscow in 1921, Kandinsky joined the faculty in 1922 and quickly assumed a central role in shaping its theoretical and artistic direction. Completed in June 1925, the very month the school relocated from Weimar to Dessau, Rote Tiefe belongs to the final group of paintings Kandinsky produced that year, just as his focus increasingly shifted toward teaching and his mature artistic theory. 

There is also Yves Tanguy’s Aux Aguets le jour, gifted by Tanguy to Donati (est. $800,000 – 1.2m),.

Painted in 1939, Aux Aguets le jour marks a pivotal moment in the career of Yves Tanguy, created the year he arrived in New York, under the looming threat of war in France. Together with his soon-to-be wife, Kay Sage, Tanguy became part of a vibrant circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals — many of them fellow Surrealist émigrés—who would come to define the cultural landscape of wartime America. Aux Aguets le jour is one of the most fully realized expressions of Tanguy's Surrealist style, with a composition anchored by biomorphic forms positioned within an expansive landscape. The setting evokes a world that feels otherworldly, no doubt inspired by his childhood on the Brittany coast as well as the stark terrains encountered during his trip to North Africa in 1930. The work also carries an undercurrent of exile and isolation, themes that permeated the work of many Surrealists during the war years. In 1946, Tanguy and Sage settled at Town Farm in Woodbury, Connecticut, which became a gathering place for avant-garde artists, including Donati. The two were close friends, and Tanguy gifted Donati this work.

Alexander Calder’s, Untitled, given to Donati in exchange for one of his drawings (est. $700,000 – 1m). 

Enrico Donati: “In 1943, I had a show at the NY School of Social Research. Venturi came and told me I should meet André Breton. He introduced us, and Breton decided I was a surrealist. He wrote a preface for a show at Passadoit where he wrote “I love the paintings of Enrico Donati as I love a night in May.” All the surrealists came to the show: Tanguy, Max Ernst, Ozenfant, too. From then on, I was in the group.” – Enrico Donati, 2007 

Heralded as one of the last members of the Surrealist movement, Italian American Enrico Donati’s career began in the 1930s in Paris, where he immersed himself in the city's cultural avantgarde and he first encountered the work of the Surrealists. However, in 1939, with the threat of war rising in Europe, Donati relocated with his young family to New York, joining the wave of European artists and intellectuals fleeing the continent. In 1942 he held his first solo exhibition in the city at the New School for Social Research. It was seen by André Breton, who immediately proclaimed him to be a Surrealist, and welcomed Donati into the movement. 

Thereafter Donati became enmeshed with the close circle of European émigré artists and writers in New York, including Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy, contributing to the city’s vibrant artistic life during the war years. He and other artists would meet for daily lunches at Larre’s on 56th Street and Sixth Avenue. These convivial gatherings became a space for exchanging ideas, and were often followed by excursions to nearby antique shops to look for ‘found’ or ‘surreal’ objects. 

As he developed his own practice, he worked together with his artist friends on collaborations and exhibitions while amassing a much-cherished collection of his own - buying the work of artists he loved, but also acquiring pieces through his friendships - via exchanges, gifts, or acts of support - or sometimes just buying a painting simply to help out a friend. 

The Surrealist group had lunch together every day at Larre on 56th and 6th Avenue. We all sat at a large table near the window and we could see everyone coming in (Breton, Callis, Gorky, Seligman, Julio Diego who married Gypsy Rose Lee). One day, Breton gets up suddenly and starts to bow to someone walking in – Marcel Duchamp! He sat next to me and asked me my name. He said call me Marcel and we were best friends ever since. “ – Enrico Donati, 2007 

Insatiably curious, Donati reinvented his style multiple times over his six-decade career, oscillating between the influences of Surrealism, Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism, yet always maintaining a uniquely Surrealist style. In 1947, he returned to Paris as one of the organisers of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, where three of his works were included. In 1961, he had a major retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and often took part in group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. 

Today his works are held in important museum collections, including at The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American art in New York.