Chasing Dreams

Courtesy Christie's

Going on the block November 3 at Sotheby’s New York: René Magritte’s "La magie noire" (1946), estimated at $1.8 million to $2.5 million.

Courtesy Sotheby's

René Magritte—whose "L’Empire de la réflexion" (1942) pictured in detail, hits the block at Sotheby’s November 3—commands some of Surrealism’s top prices.

Pablo Picasso Joan Miro Federico Castellon Salvador Dali Rene Magritte Claude Monet Giorgio de Chirico Max Ernst

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For a timeline mapping Surrealism's colorful trajectory, click here.

  For decades the typical collector of Surrealism was a pipe-smoking European gentleman, unafraid of complexity in his art and appreciative of the wit of the works by the movement’s leading players: Giorgio de Chirico, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Joan Miró and Yves Tanguy. This profile has shifted in the past 10 years, prodded by several major museum exhibitions and the record-setting 2003 auction at Calmels Cohen (the French house bought by Sotheby’s in 2007) of the collection of André Breton—the French poet and father of Surrealism—as well as this year’s sale of the only known complete copy of the Surrealist Manifesto, along with eight other works, for €3.6 million ($5.6 million) at Sotheby’s Paris.

David Fleiss and his father, Marcel, the directors of Paris’s Galerie 1900–2000, served as experts for the 2003 Breton sale, which made $50.2 million on some 4,100 lots, including paintings, drawings, photographs and manuscripts by Magritte, Miró, Picasso and others. “After the sale, prices for Surrealism went up, and we began to see different types of buyers—younger people, and a few contemporary artists, as well,” says David. “We also saw that galleries that focused on Impressionism began to change a bit to include more Surrealist paintings.” Some reports show that the category’s auction totals have risen more than 20 percent this year.

The auction record for a Surrealist work is $17.1 million, paid in May at Christie’s New York for La caresse des étoiles by Miró, for whom the sum was also an auction high.  The picture, painted in 1938, during the Civil War in Miró’s native Spain, is considered a modern masterpiece and had not been published or exhibited since the first buyer, an American soldier and art lover named Nathan Halpern, obtained it from the dealer Pierre Loeb, reputedly in exchange for an overcoat and other belongings, at the close of World War II. It last sold in 2004, also at Christie’s New York, for $11.8 million. Despite representing a 50 percent jump in just four years, the June price is hardly headline material when Francis Bacons are going for more than $80 million.

“Surrealism is dramatically undervalued,” says the New York dealer Richard Feigen. “It has been considered too cerebral, and the supply is fairly limited. Plus, Surrealism is not terribly decorative. Your typical hedge-fund manager isn’t going to find much prestige in hanging a Tanguy on his wall.” Tanguy, who was born in France, developed a painting style quite distinct from the bright, realistic precision of Magritte and de Chirico, creating dreamy landscapes in a muted palette, as exemplified by his 1944 Les derniers jours, which sold at Christie’s London in 2004 for £4 million ($7.6 million), an auction record for the artist.

Certainly, the Surrealists never aspired to marketability. The revolutionary Surrealist Manifesto, first published in 1924, advocated “the superior reality of... previously neglected associations, and the omnipotence of dreams.” Like the Dadaists, Breton and his friends blamed an excess of rational thought for bringing the world to its knees on the battlefields of World War I. If the established cultural and political modes produced this hellfire, the Surrealists reasoned, then it was time for radical change. Breton called for “pure psychic automatism, by which one expresses, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought.” The subconscious was the new territory to be mined in art. This was in the context of the recent revolution created by Sigmund Freud, with whom Breton had studied.

Benedict Leca, the curator of the upcoming exhibition “Dreamstates: Surrealist Art from the Israel Museum, Jerusalem,” February 15 through May 17, 2009, at the Cincinnati Art Museum, emphasizes that “both Dada and Surrealism have provided a huge foundation for contemporary art.” With its power to shock, Surrealism opened doors for the art of the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s; there would be no Damien Hirst tiger shark in formaldehyde without the earlier movement’s groundbreaking aesthetic. Nevertheless, “many contemporary collectors still will not pay a small fortune for a Max Ernst word collage,” says Leca, referring to the German Surrealist who many dealers say is a must-have in any important modern-art collection. Ernst was well known for both collage and painting, but his auction record belongs to a sculpture: Le roi jouant avec la reine, 1944, a nearly 40-inch-high bronze depicting a chess-playing king protecting his queen while hiding another piece behind his back (Ernst, like many of the Surrealists, was an avid chess player), which made  $2.4 million (est. $2.5 million) at Sotheby’s New York in 2002.