This May, Sotheby’s will offer works from the collection of Adele and Enrico Donati across its marquee sales in New York. The group is led by Pablo Picasso’s Arlequin (Buste), estimated in the region of $40 million, one of the artist’s most significant early Cubist portraits, painted in 1909 just two years after Les Demoiselles d’ Avignon. Rarely exhibited publicly, the collection reflects the friendships and influences of Enrico Donati, an Italian American artist often called “the last Surrealist” who counted Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and André Breton among his close friends.
Donati acquired the Picasso from the artist’s dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler at the Galerie Louise Leiris in Paris, and it remained in his collection for more than sixty years. Traditionally associated with 17th-century theatre, the harlequin was a recurring figure in Picasso’s work, often standing for outsiders and those on the margins; here he distils the figure to a series of geometric forms at the threshold of Cubism.
Alongside it is Wassily Kandinsky’s Rote Tiefe (Red Depth) (est. $12 million to $18 million), painted in June 1925 while the artist was a leading figure at the Bauhaus, in the very month the school relocated from Weimar to Dessau. Also included are Yves Tanguy’s Aux Aguets le jour (est. $800,000 to $1.2 million), painted in 1939 the year Tanguy arrived in New York and later gifted to Donati, and Alexander Calder’s Untitled (est. $700,000 to $1 million), a 1950 mobile that Calder gave to Donati in exchange for one of his drawings.
These works will be offered across Sotheby’s sales this May, including the Modern Evening auction on 19 May, where the Picasso and Kandinsky lead, and the Contemporary Art Day auction on 15 May, which carries the Calder.
Like many of his contemporaries, Donati was also drawn to the art of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Sotheby’s will offer 14 pieces from the collection in the Art of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas auction on 18 June 2026, including a Yup’ik or Inupiaq Shaman’s Mask from Alaska (est. $300,000 to $500,000) and a rare Bete or Guro mask from Côte d’ Ivoire (est. $100,000 to $150,000), once in the collection of Vanity Fair editor Frank Crowninshield.
Donati’s six-decade career began in 1930s Paris, where he first encountered the Surrealists, before he relocated to New York in 1939 amid the threat of war. His first solo exhibition in the city, at the New School for Social Research in 1942, was seen by Breton, who welcomed him into the movement. His work is today held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His wife, Adele Schmidt Donati, was a designer and later Creative Director at the French perfume house Houbigant; after Enrico’s death in 2008 she oversaw his legacy until her own passing in 2025.
(Press Release)
