The Personal Collection Of 'Last Surrealist' Enrico Donati Heads To Auction

A collection built through friendship, exchange, and a distinctly Surrealist sense of intimacy is heading to auction in New York. Sotheby's will offer“A Night in May,” the 45-lot collection assembled by Italian-born artist Enrico Donati (1909–2008) and his wife, Adele, with a high estimate of $82.3 million.

The sale is anchored by Pablo Picasso's *Arlequin (Buste)* (1909), a green-and-gray Cubist portrait estimated at $40 million. The work leads the first group of lots in Sotheby's Modern Evening Auction on May 19, alongside Yves Tanguy's *Aux Aguets le Jour* (1939), estimated at $800,000 to $1.2 million, and Wassily Kandinsky's *Rote Tiefe* (1925), estimated at $12 million to $18 million. A miniature Alexander Calder mobile, estimated at $700,000 to $1 million, will appear in Sotheby's Contemporary Day Auction on May 15.

The title of the sale comes from André Breton's preface to a 1944 exhibition of Donati's work, a fitting reference for a collection shaped by the artist's ties to the Surrealist circle that included Breton, Marcel Duchamp, and Arshile Gorky. Sotheby's head of Impressionist and Modern Art, Julian Dawes, described the works as“intimate things,” not trophies, noting that they were lived with in Donati's home and Central Park South studio.

Donati's path to collecting was as personal as the works themselves. According to the account attached to the Picasso, he saw *Arlequin (Buste)* at France's first Cubism retrospective at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in 1953, rushed to gather money, and then encountered dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler at Galerie Lousie Leiris. Kahnweiler reportedly set the price at exactly the amount Donati had in his pockets.

The collection also reflects the transatlantic art world Donati inhabited in the mid-20th century, when artists' works were often exchanged as gifts, barter, or gestures of allegiance. Tanguy's painting, given to Donati by the artist, carries the bleak, suspended atmosphere that defined much of his late work. Calder's mobile was traded for a drawing. Kandinsky's *Rote Tiefe* was chosen by the Donatis together in Switzerland in 1960, after the artist had left Milan for Paris in pursuit of avant-garde music.

Several works from the collection will be dispersed across Sotheby's sales through September, following Adele's death last year. For collectors, the offering is not only a rare concentration of major modern works, but also a record of how one artist's life was shaped by the exchange of ideas, objects, and friendships across continents.

MENAFN13042026005694012507ID1110976536