Dada and surrealism transformed chaos into beauty, contradiction into poetry, darkness into images, and the impossible into the possible. It was an avant-garde movement born from the ashes of the First World War. The surrealists did not try to invent the beauty of the world, quite the contrary, they took it as it was and explored its many faces to bring out joy, strength, hope and humor, something that classicism could not do.
Surrealism is like Bluebeard's disobedient wife, who only wants to open the forbidden door. In a world that is increasingly complex, fluid and incoherent, the legacy of Surrealism is more present than ever in contemporary art because it embraces these contradictions instead of resolving them. The sale that Sotheby's held, on March 15, in Paris, the city that saw the birth of this movement, confirmed the pull that the surrealists continue to have in the market, raising 20.5 million euros (selling 84% of the lots offered).
The auction was led by La leçon de musique, by René Magritte (1898-1967), a painting executed around 1965, two years before the death of its creator, for which three million euros were paid. It was the only known oil version of this image, of which he made several sketches on paper. It takes its title from a homonymous painting by Vermeer, an artist for whom he felt an unquestionable admiration for the wonderful technical mastery and the incomparable use of light that adorns all his paintings. This Magrittian composition should be seen as a perfect synthesis of Surrealist imagery by combining several of its most repeated motifs, such as the bell, different parts of the human anatomy and objects suspended in a sunset, as well as unexpected juxtapositions. This canvas is not only a swan song of surrealism but also as Magritte's last homage to the great masters who came before him.
Novia, an iconic Dada piece originally titled in Spanish by Francis Picabia (1879-1953), rose to 2.2 million euros. It was the first time in a century that this 1916 painting had come up for auction; before it had belonged to some of the most brilliant names in the surrealist movement, such as Marcel Duchamp, the founder of the Dada group Tristan Tzara, or the author of the first surrealist manifesto, André Breton.
The catalog included four more works by Picabia that also found a buyer, including Quatre femmes au bord de l'eau (circa 1942), belonging to his series of hyperrealist female portraits from the 1940s, which reached 1, 5 million euros. Picabia always had an undoubted prestige among his female friends whom he summoned to collaborate in his provocative magazine 391, since his interest in the theme of desire was evident in a singular number of his plastic compositions.
It debuted at auction Les jeux nouveaux (1940), by Yves Tanguy (1900-1955), for which 1.4 million euros were paid, which reappeared on the market after having remained in the same Parisian private collection since the decade of the eighties.
Max Ernst (1891-1976) met Marie-Berthe Aurenche at the end of 1927 and they were married a few months later. Together they would paint the Portrait of André Breton sold by Bonhams, in Paris, on March 29, and which has been the subject of controversy because her contribution has been eliminated as if it had not existed over time. The sitter, the most influential surrealist priest, maintained a close friendship with Ernst, but Aurenche did not count on her sympathy, accusing her of behaving like her husband's nanny and not her wife because of the control she exercised over him. Ernst. The couple ended up divorcing in 1936 and shortly after she became the lover of the painter Chaïm Soutine, being buried in the grave they share. This curious fabric, made with four hands, is valued at between 400,000 and 600,000 euros.
