This Small Dorothea Tanning Painting Sold For $120,000 Per Square Inch-And Set A New Record

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Dorothea Tanning's“Children's Games” Rockets to £3.8 Million at Christie's London, Setting New Auction Record

A nine-by-five-inch painting can still stop a sale room cold. At Christie's London, Dorothea Tanning's“Children's Games” (1942) drew sustained bidding before landing at a hammer price of £3.8 million (about $5 million), nearly quadrupling its £1 million low estimate. With fees, the total reached $6.26 million, establishing a new auction record for the American Surrealist and almost doubling the previous high, set just four months ago.

The result arrives as Tanning's market is being recalibrated in real time, propelled by institutional visibility and a broader reassessment of women Surrealists. New York-based art advisor Megan Fox Kelly described the moment as the product of converging forces rather than a fluke, arguing that Tanning is no longer a specialist's pursuit for a narrow band of collectors.

That shift has been reinforced by museum attention, including a major Surrealism exhibition at Paris's Centre Pompidou in 2024 that featured Tanning's work. When a rare early painting appears, Fox Kelly noted, collectors understand they may not get another comparable chance for years.

Christie's framed“Children's Games” as a key work from Tanning's early Surrealist period. The image is a charged domestic vignette: young girls tearing at patterned wallpaper, a gesture that can read as both mischievous and unsettling. Ottavia Marchitelli, Christie's head of the Art of the Surreal Evening Sale, has described the scene as often interpreted as“a metaphor for the awakening of female desire and autonomy.”

Scale, in this case, only sharpened the headline. At just nine by five inches, the price implies roughly $120,000 per square inch - a figure that underscores how intensely collectors are competing for Tanning's most sought-after early pictures.

The sale also condensed a great deal of art history into a single lot.“Children's Games” was acquired directly from Tanning by Surrealist Max Ernst shortly after they met in 1942; the pair married in 1946. The painting was later included in Peggy Guggenheim's landmark 1943 exhibition“Exhibition by 31 Women” at Art of This Century in New York, a foundational moment in the visibility of women artists in the mid-20th century. It has been widely exhibited since and remained in the same collection for nearly four decades before returning to the market.

The record in London builds on a run of recent highs. According to the Artnet Price Database, Tanning's auction sales climbed to just over $7.7 million in 2025, marking a nearly sevenfold year-over-year increase and her strongest annual total on record. That surge was fueled by consecutive benchmark results:“Endgame” (1944) sold for $2.35 million at Christie's New York in May, followed by“Interior with Sudden Joy” (1951), which achieved more than $3.2 million at Sotheby's New York in November.

The Christie's London result now represents roughly 80 percent of Tanning's 2025 total, a reminder of how a single exceptional work can reshape an artist's annual market profile.

Even with the new record, Fox Kelly argues that Tanning's prices may still be in an early phase of“full price discovery,” especially when compared with fellow woman Surrealist Leonora Carrington, whose auction record reached $28.5 million in 2024. The limiting factor for Tanning, she added, is supply: major early works are scarce, and many are held tightly.

Christie's also sees the buyer base widening geographically. Marchitelli noted that North America and Europe remain the primary centers of demand, while interest from Asia continues to expand steadily.

For collectors, curators, and scholars alike, the London sale reads as more than a single-night triumph. It signals a market increasingly willing to price Tanning's psychological intensity - and her place in Surrealism's history - at the level long reserved for the movement's most canonical names.

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