NEW YORK, NY.- This May, Sotheby’s will offer works from the collection of Adele and Enrico Donati, two leading figures in New York’s creative circles. A highly important presence within the Surrealist milieu, Enrico Donati, often referred to as “the last Surrealist”, was at once an artist and trusted confidant to many of the movement’s leading figures, counting Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and André Breton among his close friends. Alongside him was his wife Adele Donati, a designer and artist, who viewed the collection with a discerning eye, informed by her work across advertising and fashion.

The collection, which was rarely exhibited publicly, reflects the breadth of Enrico’s close friendships and influences. It is led by Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste), est. in the region of $40m, one of the artist’s most significant early Cubist portraits, created just two years after Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is among the most important works from this decisive moment to appear at auction in recent decades.

Alongside Arlequin (Buste) is Wassily Kandinsky’s vibrant Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) (est. $12 – 18m), a dynamic example of the artist at the height of his Bauhaus era. There is also Yves Tanguy’s Aux Aguets le jour, gifted by Tanguy to Donati (est. $800,000 – 1.2m), and Alexander Calder’s, Untitled, given to Donati in exchange for one of his drawings (est. $700,000 – 1m). These works, along with additional pieces from the Donati collection, will be offered across Sotheby’s marquee sales this May, including the Modern Evening and Modern and Contemporary Day sales.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Donati was drawn to the art and cultures of Africa and Oceania, and the Americas, building a collection with the same passion he brought to modern European art. Sotheby’s will also offer 14 pieces from the Donati collection, including a large Yup’ik or Inupiaq Shaman’s Mask from Alaska and an exceptionally fine Bete-Guro Mask from the collection of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield in the 1930s, during the Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas auction on 18 June 2026.

Enrico Donati:

“In 1943, I had a show at the NY School of Social Research. Venturi came and told me I should meet André Breton. He introduced us, and Breton decided I was a surrealist. He wrote a preface for a show at Passadoit where he wrote “I love the paintings of Enrico Donati as I love a night in May.” All the surrealists came to the show: Tanguy, Max Ernst, Ozenfant, too. From then on, I was in the group.” – Enrico Donati, 2007

Heralded as one of the last members of the Surrealist movement, Italian American Enrico Donati’s career began in the 1930s in Paris, where he immersed himself in the city's cultural avant- garde and he first encountered the work of the Surrealists. However, in 1939, with the threat of war rising in Europe, Donati relocated with his young family to New York, joining the wave of European artists and intellectuals fleeing the continent. In 1942 he held his first solo exhibition in the city at the New School for Social Research. It was seen by André Breton, who immediately proclaimed him to be a Surrealist, and welcomed Donati into the movement.

Thereafter Donati became enmeshed with the close circle of European émigré artists and writers in New York, including Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy, contributing to the city’s vibrant artistic life during the war years. He and other artists would meet for daily lunches at Larre’s on 56th Street and Sixth Avenue. These convivial gatherings became a space for exchanging ideas, and were often followed by excursions to nearby antique shops to look for ‘found’ or ‘surreal’ objects.

As he developed his own practice, he worked together with his artist friends on collaborations and exhibitions while amassing a much-cherished collection of his own - buying the work of artists he loved, but also acquiring pieces through his friendships - via exchanges, gifts, or acts of support - or sometimes just buying a painting simply to help out a friend.

The Surrealist group had lunch together every day at Larre on 56th and 6th Avenue. We all sat at a large table near the window and we could see everyone coming in (Breton, Callis, Gorky, Seligman, Julio Diego who married Gypsy Rose Lee). One day, Breton gets up suddenly and starts to bow to someone walking in – Marcel Duchamp! He sat next to me and asked me my name. He said call me Marcel and we were best friends ever since. “ – Enrico Donati, 2007

Insatiably curious, Donati reinvented his style multiple times over his six-decade career, oscillating between the influences of Surrealism, Constructivism and Abstract Expressionism, yet always maintaining a uniquely Surrealist style. In 1947, he returned to Paris as one of the organisers of the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme, where three of his works were included.

In 1961, he had a major retrospective at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and often took part in group exhibitions in the U.S. and abroad. Today his works are held in important museum collections, including at The Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American art in New York.

Enrico & Adele:

Adele Schmidt Donati’s life was closely intertwined with that of Enrico Donati, beginning with their meeting in the early 1950s when, as a young art student and emerging creative professional, she was encouraged to show her paintings to him. He was immediately captivated, and after a long courtship they married in 1965.

Though Donati was already an established Surrealist artist, Adele brought her own artistic training and sharp visual sensibility to their shared world. She built a successful career in New York as a designer and later as Creative Director at the French perfume house Houbigant, while remaining deeply engaged with art. Adele was also a passionate philanthropist, and animal rights advocate, serving on the board of The Fund For Animals and The Humane Society Legislative Fund.

Throughout their life together, Adele was a constant supportive presence for Enrico, and they formed a partnership of mutual inspiration led by their independent creative pursuits. After his death in 2008, she continued to oversee his legacy until her own passing in 2025.

Highlights From the Collection:

Modern Evening Auction, 19th May

Pablo Picasso
Arlequin (Buste)
1909
In the region of $40m

Leading the group of works is Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste), a striking portrait featuring one of the artist's most enduring motifs. Created in the Spring of 1909, just two years after Picasso had established himself with Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, the work stands at a pivotal moment, poised on the threshold of one of modern art’s defining breakthroughs: the emergence of Cubism.

Donati encountered the Picasso harlequin work at Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris and was captivated; soon after he made a visit to the Galerie Louise Leiris, where he met Picasso’s legendary dealer, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. When he explained to Kahnweiler how much he wanted this work and asked its price, Kahnweiler asked him how much he had, and promptly suggested that the price was exactly what Donati had in his pockets. It then remained in his collection for over sixty years.

“At the Musée of Modern Art they had the first Cubist exhibit… I only went into the first room, which had Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. Under an Arlequin reclining figure by Picasso, a label read ‘Galerie Leiris’… When I arrived at the Galerie Louise Leiris, an old man welcomed me. It was Mr Kahnweiler, the owner of the gallery and Picasso’s dealer. ‘Who are you?’ he asked. I gave him my name, and he said Marcel Duchamp wanted me to meet you. I asked him about the Cubist painting by Picasso. He said, ‘I will show you a black-and-white photo of the only Cubist Picasso I have.’ That was it.” – Enrico Donati

In the painting, Picasso takes one of his most legendary motifs, the harlequin, and transforms it through a radical early Cubist lens. Traditionally associated with 17th-century theatre, the wandering circus performer became a recurring figure in Picasso’s oeuvre, often representing outsiders and those on the margins of society. Picasso himself felt a particular affinity for the harlequin, even using it as a veiled self-portrait in masterworks such as Au Lapin Agile (1905). In Arlequin (Buste), he distills the figure to its essence, reducing it to a series of geometric forms.

Wassily Kandinsky Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) 1925
Est. $12m - 18m

Executed in 1925, while Kandinsky was a leading influence at the Bauhaus, Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) is among the finest works by the artist to appear on the market in recent years.

By the mid-1920s, Kandinsky had become one of the intellectual pillars of the Bauhaus, the influential school founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius to unite art, architecture and design for a modern era. Having returned to Germany from revolutionary Moscow in 1921, Kandinsky joined the faculty in 1922 and quickly assumed a central role in shaping its theoretical and artistic direction.

Completed in June 1925, the very month the school relocated from Weimar to Dessau, Rote Tiefe belongs to the final group of paintings Kandinsky produced that year, just as his focus increasingly shifted toward teaching and his mature artistic theory.

Donati was no doubt drawn to the scale and vibrancy of the work, as well as to Kandinsky’s practice, which was so deeply intertwined with music. Donati himself had undertaken studies in musical composition at the Milan Conservatory in 1929, and initially traveled to Paris to compose avant-garde music.

Yves Tanguy
Aux Aguets le jour
1939
Est. $800,000 - 1.2m

Painted in 1939, Aux Aguets le jour marks a pivotal moment in the career of Yves Tanguy, created the year he arrived in New York, under the looming threat of war in France. Together with his soon-to-be wife, Kay Sage, Tanguy became part of a vibrant circle of avant-garde artists and intellectuals — many of them fellow Surrealist émigrés—who would come to define the cultural landscape of wartime America.

Aux Aguets le jour is one of the most fully realized expressions of Tanguy's Surrealist style, with a composition anchored by biomorphic forms positioned within an expansive landscape. The setting evokes a world that feels otherworldly, no doubt inspired by his childhood on the Brittany coast as well as the stark terrains encountered during his trip to North Africa in 1930.

The work also carries an undercurrent of exile and isolation, themes that permeated the work of many Surrealists during the war years. In 1946, Tanguy and Sage settled at Town Farm in Woodbury, Connecticut, which became a gathering place for avant-garde artists, including Donati. The two were close friends, and Tanguy gifted Donati this work.

Contemporary Art Day Auction, 15 May

Alexander Calder
Untitled
1950
Est. $700,000 - 1m

By the 1950s, Calder had fully developed his mobiles into a clear and confident style, bringing together abstract forms, balance, and movement. This work is a strong example of that use of simple industrial materials and carefully arranged shapes to create a delicate sense of motion and harmony.

Unlike his large public sculptures, this piece shows how Calder could achieve a poetic sense of movement on a more intimate scale. The red base and yellow elements are not just decorative, they guide the viewer’s eye and help ground the composition, creating a subtle tension between stability and fragility within the delicately balanced wired elements.

This work was acquired by Donati for a drawing of his, as he recalls: ‘[Calder’s] studio was a mess, but he knew exactly where everything was… He gave me one of his sculptures in exchange for a drawing.”

Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, 18 June

Yup’ik or Inupiaq Artist Shaman’s Mask Alaska, 19th century Est. $300,000-500,000

"The story of the cubist's discovery of West African art is familiar. The story of the surrealists' discovery of American Indian art, and especially [Arctic] art, is equally important.” - Edmund Carpenter

The highly imaginative Shamanic masks of the Yup’ik and Inupiaq people of present-day Alaska combine human and animal forms, depicting a refined spiritual concept of the universe and providing a gateway between the physical world and the world of spirits.

Enrico Donati acquired a number of Arctic masks from the legendary Madison Avenue dealer Julius Carlebach, who provided access to works deaccessioned from the Heye Foundation Museum of the American Indian, which is today part of the Smithsonian Institution. Along with Donati, his friends and colleagues Yves Tanguy, André Breton, Robert Lebel, and Roberto Matta also bought Arctic artworks from Carlebach.

Bete / Guro Artist
Mask with Horns
Côte d’Ivoire, 19th century Est. $100,000-150,000

This exceptional mask was previously in the collection of socialite and journalist Frank Crowninshield, the early and defining editor of Vanity Fair who was one of the first proponents of African Art in the United States.

Crowninshield was guided by the painter John D. Graham, and exhibited his collection, including the present mask, at the Brooklyn Museum in 1937. Graham had acquired this mask for Crowninshield from the Parisian doyen of dealers,

Charles Ratton, who shaped the field of collecting African Art. Of an extremely rare type, and dating to the 19th century, this mask comes from the region between the Guro people and the Bete people between Bouafle and Daloa in the center of present-day Côte d’Ivoire. It expresses both the formal and conceptual ideas which appealed to early 20th century avant-garde artists, in its cubistic representation of a human- animal hybrid, reminding us of how these styles informed the vocabulary of Surrealism.