The Symptomatic Surreal

 Freud Museum

25 March 2026 to 28 June 2026

Image credit: Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1940. Private Collection, Mia Kim. Image Courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco © 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington / ARS, NY and DACS, London.

The Symptomatic Surreal will be the first institutional exhibition dedicated to Leonora Carrington’s drawings from her Santander sketchbooks, offering a unique vantage point from which to reconsider the artist’s wartime output.

British-born Mexican artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is one of the most celebrated figures associated with Surrealism. She was a painter, novelist, and visionary whose sustained enquiry into the psyche informed her interests in mythology, psychology, alchemy, tarot, and other esoteric traditions.

Told through her sketchbook drawings and letters from 1938 to 1941 prior to her permanent emigration to Mexico, this exhibition follows Carrington’s flight from Nazi occupied France, her hospitalisation in Sanatorium Morales in Santander, Spain, and her journey through Madrid to New York, where she was reunited with the Surrealists in exile in 1941. It was then that she entrusted the Santander sketchbooks to collector Julien Levy, which were held in his collection for over sixty years, until the sketchbook drawings were sold in 2004 and dispersed into various private collections.

This exhibition brings together material from Carrington’s stay in Santander, placing her recurring motifs of horses and the underworld in dialogue with Sigmund Freud’s collection of antiquities devoted to these themes. The exhibition is anchored by the presentation of Down Below (1940), a seminal early painting produced during Carrington’s hospitalisation in Santander, offering a rare opportunity to view the work as it has never been exhibited in London before.

The Symptomatic Surreal is curated by Vanessa Boni.

Sotheby's Mnuchin collection: 11-lot dedicated evening Auction this May in New York

Renowned across the art world for his discerning eye for the artists represented in his personal collection - including Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning - the superlative quality of the examples that Mnuchin chose for himself reflect this extreme level of connoisseurship. Acquiring the works that resonated with him in their ambition and achievement, the group of works is led by Mark Rothko’s towering Brown and Blacks in Reds from 1957 (estimate $70-100 million). 

Collection Highlights 

Mark Rothko 

The collection is led by two paintings by Mark Rothko, both dating to pivotal years of the artist’s career. Standing nearly 8 feet tall, his 

1957 Brown and Blacks in Reds hails from the artist’s most important decade, when he developed his signature rectangular bands of color (estimate $70-100 Million). Executed in Rothko’s coveted red, the painting illustrates the artist’s famed mastery of color. Acquired circa 1957 by Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, Inc., the color palette of this work surely would have played an important influence in the development and conceptualization of the seminal Seagram Mural commission in the years to follow. This painting is one of 15 monumental (90+ in.) canvases created in 1957, most of which reside in museum collections including the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Offentliche Kunstsammlung Basel; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; and The Panza Collection at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others. Held in Mnuchin’s collection for more than two decades, Brown and Blacks in Reds has been exhibited in some of the most important exhibitions dedicated to the artist, from the 1978-79 traveling retrospective organized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Rothko, Tate London, 1987; to the celebrated recent show at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. 

Distinguished by its bright, vivid palette, Rothko’s 1949 No. 1 dates to a critical year of transition in the artist’s practice, as he made the shift from the nebulous multiforms of the late 1940s to the iconic stacked bands of color that would define his mature output from the early 1950s onward (estimate $15-20 million). In this work, both formats coexist, presenting a rare combination of his two most significant bodies of work. Included in a seminal 1950 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, the early champion of the Abstract Expressionists, No. 1 stands at the very threshold of Rothko’s breakthrough. 

Willem de Kooning 

The selection on offer this May presents a retrospective encapsulation of de Kooning’s career, featuring works spanning four decades from the 1950s through the 1980s. It is led by the artist’s

 

1983 Untitled XLII, a superb example of his late, lyrical style distinguished by fluid passages of blue, red, pink and violet. Making its auction debut, the painting is the most significant work from de Kooning’s final decade to appear since Untitled IV achieved over $18.9 million in the landmark Macklowe Collection sale in November 2021. 

Franz Kline 

Held in Mnuchin’s collection for more than two decades, 

Franz Kline, Harleman, 1960. Oil on canvas, 53 x 102 inches. Courtesy Mnuchin Gallery. © 2025 The Franz Kline Estate and Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Timothy Doyon.

Harleman is the finest work by the artist to come to auction in a decade. Executed in 1960, the work is a monumental. Named after the artist’s friend Stanley Harleman, the work subtly anchors his radical abstractions in the figures and places of his Pennsylvania hometown. 

Jeff Koons 

Robert Mnuchin was among Jeff Koons’s earliest supporters, demonstrating the ambition and conviction of a commercial gallery by boldly staging what was effectively the first major retrospective of the artist’s work in New York. The artist’s 

Louis XIV is an icon of the artist’s celebrated Statuary series, and stands alongside his most important early works. Koons first adopted his signature polished stainless steel in this seminal body of work, which would become synonymous with his practice. Inspired by a fiberglass bust the artist encountered on Canal Street, Louis XIV marks Koon’s first direct engagement with canonical “high” art. Moving beyond domestic commodities and advertising imagery, Koons turned to art history as the subject. The work has been included in nearly every major retrospective of his work. This example is the artist’s proof from an edition of 3, plus one artist’s proof. The rest of the editions are held in museum collections, including the Nasher Sculpture Center, The Broad, and the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art.

Basquiat's Monumental 'Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown)' To Highlight Sotheby's May Contemporary Evening Auction

“Intense and electrifying, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) embodies the qualities that define the artist at his very best: executed at the height of his career, on an impressive scale, and charged with the imagery and language that made his work instantly recognizable. A storied masterpiece within his oeuvre, I have long dreamt of bringing this work to auction, and it is a truly rare privilege to do so this spring.” 

Grégoire Billault, Chairman, Contemporary Art, Sotheby’s New York “This work dances between the written and the drawn. On a monumental scale, Basquiat unites images, words and symbols, folding them together so that the words and their meanings begin to blur and shift. There’s an immediacy from his head to his hand to the line.” Lucius Elliott, Head of Contemporary Art Marquee Sales, Sotheby’s 

Few masterworks so powerfully capture the themes, concerns, and personal history that defined Jean-Michel Basquiat’s career as his 1983 Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown). This May, this masterpiece will star in Sotheby’s Contemporary Evening Auction with an estimate in excess of $45 million, appearing at auction for the first time in more than a decade. The work belongs to the most soughtafter moment of his career, when his visual language reached an extraordinary level of clarity, ambition, and scale, unfolding here at a particularly exceptional degree of gesture, color, and compositional complexity. 

 Belonging to a suite of 12 monumental canvases that Basquiat painted in 1983, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) stands among the most ambitious works of this celebrated group. At the center of this group are Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) and the closely related painting, Hollywood Africans —now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York—which together present the most layered and conceptually rich explorations of Basquiat’s iconography and language. 

Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) has been the subject of institutional interest, shown in nearly every major exhibition of the artist’s work including Jean-Michel Basquiat: New Paintings at Larry Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles, where seven works from the suite were presented together. Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) was on long-term loan to the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen from 2013-18. Subsequently, the work featured prominently in Fondation Louis Vuitton’s monumental retrospective (2018- 19), followed by the Brant Foundation’s Jean-Michel Basquiat presentation from March-May 2019. Most recently, the work served as a centerpiece of the major exhibition Signs: Connecting Past and Future at the Zaha Hadid-designed Dongdaemun Design Plaza Museum in Seoul (2025-26), where it appeared on the cover of the exhibition catalogue for the retrospective. 

Further testament to the work’s importance within his oeuvre, the work is featured on the cover of the acclaimed monograph, Jean-Michel Basquiat, edited by Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer. 

“The Fondation Beyeler had the honour of holding the first major retrospective in Europe of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s work on the anniversary of his 50th birthday in 2010. The exhibition traced the development of this extraordinary, ground-breaking artist in over 150 paintings, drawings and objets d’art. One of the most important paintings was Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) (1983), which took a prominent place in the comprehensive retrospective. I was able to study the painting on an almost daily basis for the threemonth duration of the exhibition and it came to be one of my personal favourites. It is a key work in JeanMichel Basquiat’s oeuvre, a modern-day ‘writing on the wall’ in the metaphorical and literal sense, and one of the great masterpieces of contemporary art.” Sam Keller, Director of Fondation Beyeler quoted in Dieter Buchhart and Anna Karina Hofbauer, eds., Jean-Michel Basquiat, Munich 2015, p. 10 

Among the most complex, conceptually rigorous and historically significant works in the artist’s body of work, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) presents a dictionary of Basquiat’s iconic signs, symbols and text, taking head on the themes that preoccupied the artist throughout his lifetime. At an operatic scale, the work unfolds as a vast, epic window into the young artist's innermost reflections on success and exploitation, fame and abjection, value and merit, race, class, and colonialism, colliding and engaging with one another in rich, saturated oil stick. 

Created just a few years after Basquiat emerged from the downtown New York scene, the painting reflects the artist’s growing engagement with structures of cultural authority. With phrases such as “Museum Security” and “Priceless Art,” Basquiat stages a charged confrontation between artistic value, institutional gatekeeping, and the commercial forces shaping the contemporary art world. As he rapidly entered the global spotlight, the work’s title is an exceptionally direct reference to Basquiat’s introspection of his status in the art world as he inserts himself into the canon, while simultaneously questioning the systems that determine who is permitted to enter it – a dichotomy which lies at the heart of the work. 

Towering nearly seven feet in height, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) exemplifies Basquiat’s extraordinary ability to translate the immediacy of street culture onto canvas on a monumental scale. Incredibly complex and heavily worked, from collages, frenetic scrawls to dripping paint to collaged elements, the surface teems with the artist’s signature symphony of text and images which thread themselves throughout his body of work. Among them are “Priceless Art,” “Museum Security,” “Yen,” “Asbestos,” “Hooverville” and “Five Cents,” all alongside the three-point crown, star symbols, and a haunting skull-like head whose red-rimmed eyes anchor the composition. Absorbing and transforming multiple visual languages at once, Museum Security (Broadway Meltdown) fuses the entanglement of the immediacy and urgency of the present with an acute awareness of the weight of art history behind and before him.

Christie's London to offer David Hockney's Largest Editioned Print

 

Autour de la maison, été  

The 12 metre work will headline Christie's London's Contemporary Edition: London online sale, along with major editions by Banksy | Spring season Prints and Multiples sale to include more important works by Hockney, Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Bridget Riley and Andy Warhol

Photographs & Prints

LondonEMEA13 March 2026

David Hockney, Autour de la maison, été (2019, estimate: £200,000-300,000)

LONDON – Christie's announces its Prints and Multiples and Contemporary Edition: London online sales, scheduled to take place from 12-26 March and 17-31 March, respectively. An exhibition of the sales will be held at Christie's London until 31 March. With estimates ranging from £500 to £300,000, the sales offer collectors at every stage the opportunity to acquire important works.

The headline lot of the Spring season will be David Hockney's monumental Autour de la maison, été (2019, estimate: £200,000-300,000), measuring an astonishing 12 metres in length. Printed on a single sheet of paper, it is one of the largest works ever created by the artist, and his largest editioned print. It depicts Hockney's home in Normandy, France, with his garden in the height of summer, the vibrant greens of the grass, trees and hedgerows in contrast with the architecture of the medieval barns and contemporary elements such as a swing set, treehouse and parked vehicles.

Parallels can be drawn between the present work and the Bayeux Tapestry, which the artist notes later inspired him to create A Year in Normandie (2020–2021), a 295-foot (90-meter) iPad painting printed on paper composed of separate images arranged in a continuous frieze. Its presentation in London is particularly timely, coinciding with Hockney's current solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery and anticipating the forthcoming display of the Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum.

James Baskerville, International Head of Contemporary Edition, Christie's: “With Autour de la maison, été, Hockney expands the possibilities of printmaking to an almost cinematic scale. Measuring an extraordinary twelve metres across and realised on a single sheet, the work invites the viewer to move through the artist's Normandy garden as though reading a continuous pictorial frieze. The composition echoes the storytelling of the Bayeux Tapestry, while anticipating the monumental vision of A Year in Normandie. It is a tour de force within Hockney's printed oeuvre and comes at a moment when the market for Hockney's prints continues to demonstrate exceptional strength, with collectors increasingly drawn to ambitious, large-scale works that exemplify the artist's innovative approach to the medium.”

Prints and Multiples – 12 to 26 March 2026
This season's Prints and Multiples sale – open for bidding online until 26 March – presents works by some of the most influential artists of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Among the main highlights of the sale is Pablo Picasso's Visage de Marie-Thérèse, 1928 (estimate: £20,000-30,000). In 1927, Picasso met Marie‑Thérèse Walter on a Paris boulevard, beginning one of the most significant artistic relationships of his career. She became his muse for the next decade, inspiring a celebrated body of work. This elegant lithograph is among the artist's earliest portraits of Marie-Thérèse, capturing the distinctive features that would come to define his depictions of her.

Joan Miró Gargantua (1977; estimate: £40,000-60,000) is a monumental print created in collaboration with printmaker Robert Dutrou using Henri Goetz's innovative carborundum technique. Inspired by François Rabelais's Renaissance tale of the giant Gargantua, the composition combines bold black forms with vivid reds, blues and yellows. Miró's dynamic arrangement of floating elements creates a powerful sense of movement and scale.

Created in 1995, Vertical Dogs by David Hockney (estimate: £20,000-30,000) is a lively etching and aquatint that depicts the artist's beloved dachshunds, Stanley and Boodgie. The work reflects the warmth and intimacy of the artist's domestic life in Los Angeles, capturing the playful character and distinctive personalities of his canine companions.

Bridget Riley's Silvered 2 (1981; estimate: £12,000-18,000) is a precisely structured composition of parallel bands, in which the artist explores the perceptual effects of line and colour. Moving beyond the stark black-and-white optical patterns of her early work, she introduces luminous colour relationships that seem to pulse and shift across the surface, demonstrating her mastery of optical abstraction.

The sale is also completed by important works from Andy Warhol, Henri Matisse, Roy Lichtenstein, Edgar Degas, Edvard Munch, and Paula Rego, among others.

Contemporary Edition: London – 17 to 31 March 2026
Contemporary Edition: London – open for online bidding from 17 to 31 March - highlights sought-after editions by internationally recognised artists alongside emerging talents, with works spanning the late 20th century to the present day.

In addition to the leading highlight – David Hockney's largest editioned print Autour de la maison, été (2019, estimate: £200,000-300,000), the other key highlight of the sale will be Banksy's Bunch of Flowers (2021; estimate: £100,000-150,000) a hand-finished screenprint from 2021. This work has not been publicly exhibited or offered for sale before. It was gifted directly from the artist to the present owner, accompanied by a personal note. The work closely relates to Banksy's iconic image Love is in the Air, which he revisited in 2019 with the Flower Thrower Triptych (Grey), an example of which is also included in the sale (2019; estimate: £100,000-150,000).

Further highlights include Banksy's Kate Moss (2005; estimate: £70,000-100,000), presented in the striking colourway inspired by Andy Warhol's Shot Sage Blue Marilyn. In this work, the artist superimposes the face of the contemporary supermodel onto Warhol's iconic image, creating a playful subversion of art history.

The auction features multiple works by Damien Hirst, encompassing his celebrated Spots, Butterflies, Kaleidoscopes, and Blossom Trees (estimates ranging from £1,500 to £70,000), as well as two monumental tapestries that translate his seminal spin painting designs into Jacquard form. His blossom series explores the fleeting beauty of nature, reflecting on themes of life and death, desire, and the way we interpret and transform the world around us, capturing the striking transience of a tree in full bloom against a clear sky.

Barbara Kruger's celebrated Untitled (We will no longer be seen and not heard) from 1985 (estimate: £30,000-50,000), draws attention to the power imbalances in society, and the importance of amplifying marginalised voices. The powerful images are created with her classic juxtaposition of text and image, and this set is offered in the artist-specified red frames.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SALES

PRINTS AND MULTIPLES

CONTEMPORARY EDITION: LONDON

An exhibition of the sales will be held at Christie's London, alongside a selection of Prints & Multiples Private Sale Highlights, from 12 to 31 March 2026. The exhibitions are free and open to all.

Visuals

AllImages

Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse: Christie's

 

Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse : Two collections, More than 120 works new to the market

Dans l'intimité de Pierre Bonnard : Collection Claude Terrasse — Auction in Paris on 14 April Henri Matisse : tracer le lien, œuvres sur papier de la Fondation Pierre et Tana Matisse — Online Auction from April 9 to 17

Impressionist & Modern, American and Latin American Art

ParisFrance10 March 2026

PIERRE BONNARD (1867-1947), La Rue. Homme aux prises avec deux chiens, oil and black chalk on panel, circa 1895  (Estimate : €250,000-350,000) © Christie's Images Ltd 2026

Paris – On the occasion of a Marquee Week 20/21 that shines a spotlight on graphic works in Paris, Christie's is delighted to announce two unprecedented monographic sales in Paris, largely dedicated to works on paper by Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse : Dans l'intimité de Pierre Bonnard : Collection Claude Terrasse, to be held on 14 April, and Henri Matisse : tracer le lien, œuvres sur papier de la Fondation Pierre et Tana Matisse, an online sale running from 9 to 17 April.
Directly sourced from circles close to these artists and never seen on the market, these two groups present a rare opportunity to acquire works by Pierre Bonnard and Henri Matisse. With estimates reaching up to €400,000, the two sales are aimed both at established collectors and enthusiasts wishing to begin or enrich their collection.

Claude Terrasse, Composer and Brother-in-law of Pierre Bonnard
The collection of paintings, gouaches, drawings, illustration projects, and lithographs by Pierre Bonnard that will be presented on April 14 brings together works that have never before been offered for sale, as they come directly from the collection of Claude Terrasse (1925–2008), great-nephew and sole godson of the artist Pierre Bonnard.
Grandson of the composer Claude Terrasse (1867–1923) and the son of Dr. Jean Terrasse (1892–1930), who also pursued a musical career as a renowned professor and organist.

Highlight of the sale, Midi au jardin (estimate: €400,000–600,000) perfectly illustrates the role that the villa Le Bosquet and the surrounding landscape of Le Cannet played for Pierre Bonnard, just as Mont Sainte‑Victoire did for Cézanne. Le Bosquet was the place the artist roamed endlessly, studying its infinite variations through the seasons and throughout the day.

In a very different vein, yet equally rare, La Rue. Homme aux prises avec deux chiens (estimate: €250,000–350,000), dating from Bonnard's 'Nabis' period, has no direct equivalent in his oeuvre. The painting embodies the key principles of his art: the subject - a street scene with dogs, both motif and favourite companion of the artist - its low‑angled viewpoint, and the technique of repeated motifs. Bonnard's talent as a colourist also shines through in the vibrant charm of the gouache depicting Marthe in her bathtub (estimate: €150,000–250,000), the final preparatory step for the masterpiece Nu à la baignoire (1931), now in the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Another major highlight of this unprecedented collection is the selection of works that bear witness to the collaboration and friendship between Claude Terrasse (1867–1923) and Pierre Bonnard. These include Le Petit Solfège created by Claude and illustrated by Bonnard; the childhood pieces Claude composed for piano, titled “Petites scènes familières”, also illustrated by Bonnard (in which the baby depicted is none other than Jean Terrasse); and the magnificent Villa Bach programmes, designed and illustrated by Bonnard for the musical evenings hosted by his sister Andrée and her husband Claude at their home in Arcachon.

This remarkable group offers collectors a truly unique opportunity to acquire works by Bonnard that trace and celebrate the legacy of an entire family.

 

A unique online sale to benefit the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation
Henri Matisse : tracer le lien, brings together online, and for the first time at auction, a group of exceptionals works on paper by Henri Matisse. Preserved for decades by the Pierre and Tana Matisse Foundation, these works come directly from the collection of the gallerist and son of the artist, Pierre Matisse and his wife, Tana. The latter was behind the creation of the oganisation.
This collection spans the full breadth of Matisse's original works on paper and graphic works : studies of nudes, portraits, decorative research, dance drawings, floral motifs, and Mediterranean scenes. Highlights include Femme allongée (estimate: €50,000–70,000), Nu debout (estimate: €40,000–60,000), Odalisque voilée (estimate: €8,000–12,000), as well as a self-portrait (estimate: €1,800–2,500). An etching titled La Danse (estimate: €50,000–70,000) echoes the work on view in the permanent collections of the Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris.

As a charity event, the proceeds from the sale will support the Foundation's initiatives, particularly benefiting underfunded arts organizations that provide services to New York City public schools and community-based organizations. The Foundation supports a broad network of arts nonprofits across all disciplines—including visual arts, theatre, music, and dance—helping young people develop their creativity and encouraging positive self-expression. Since 2003, it has contributed more than 50 million dollars to 800 organizations that provide hundreds of students with access to arts education.

Among these are 826 NYC, which teaches students the power of creative writing; the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX), an intergenerational arts organization that fosters creative expression through education, residencies, and performances at the intersection of the arts and social justice; the Brooklyn Museum, whose mission is to bring people together through art and experiences that inspire celebration, compassion, courage, and a desire to act. The sale will also benefit the Bronx Documentary Center, a community‑oriented educational space whose mission is to use community‑based documentary practices and education to illuminate critical issues, spark critical thinking, and encourage social change; Harlem Stage, an organization that champions the artistic freedom of Global Majority artists who dare to create new works, new ideas, and a new world in which everyone can thrive. Finally, the sale will also support the New Museum of Contemporary Art's NEW Futures Fellowship program, which empowers young immigrants in New York City to become the leaders of tomorrow through the arts.

With works ranging from €800 to €70,000, the sale offers all admirers of Matisse a unique opportunity to acquire a piece of his legacy.

 

Selection of artworks

 

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Auction Information                 Dans l'intimité de Pierre Bonnard : Collection Claude Terrasse,
                                                     April 14 - exhibition from April 9 to 14.
                                                     Henri Matisse : tracer le lien, œuvres sur papier de la Fondation
                                                     Pierre et Tana
                                                     Matisse, online from April 9 to 17 – exhibition from April 9 to 16.

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