Christie’s will hold Thessa Herold, une femme d’intuition, an online sale in Paris running from 22 May to 2 June. The sale pays tribute to a notable figure of the Parisian art scene. Born in Malaga to a Spanish mother and a French father, Thessa Herold founded the Galerie de Seine in 1970 with her husband, Jacques-Yves Herold, in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district, then a centre of Parisian artistic and intellectual life. In 1993 she opened a gallery bearing her name in the Marais, where several times a year she presented artists from the historical avant-gardes, foremost among them Surrealism, alongside emerging contemporary figures.
Major exhibitions devoted to Jean Arp, Paul Klee, Roberto Matta, Serge Charchoune, César Domela, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Man Ray, Jean-Paul Agosti, Béatrice Helg, and Henri Michaux took shape at the gallery. The exhibition catalogues she personally conceived, to which poets, writers, and art historians contributed, were a defining feature of her approach.
In total, 170 works by the artists closest to her are offered, in a selection spanning Modern Art and Contemporary creation. The overall estimate for the sale is €2 million to €3 million. The tribute continues at Drouot in Paris, at Maître Thierry de Maigret’s auction house, on 5 June 2026, with additional works from the Thessa Herold Collection.
The sale includes 12 works by Jean Arp, reflecting the range of an artist resistant to classification. A 1962 oil on cut and relief wood, Source, is estimated at €50,000 to €70,000; a 1950 wooden relief, Fleur de Chartres, at €70,000 to €100,000; a 1960 bronze, Tête florale, at €40,000 to €60,000; and Paysage de Trèves, a bronze from 1961, at €8,000 to €12,000. A Papier déchiré from 1946, emblematic of a mode of expression unique to Arp, carries an estimate of €1,500 to €2,000. Arp’s works are shown alongside those of friends including Camille Bryen, Wolfgang Wols, and Raoul Ubac.
Eight works by Roberto Matta are offered, the majority previously included in the 2015 exhibition Thessa Herold devoted to the artist and in the 2019 retrospective at the Hermitage Museum. Two canvases from 1957 each carry an estimate of €100,000 to €150,000: Untitled, from the Cécile de Rothschild Collection, and Enlevons les cartes. Clavier d’interruption of 1961 is estimated at €50,000 to €70,000, with drawings including Heraclion at €4,000 to €6,000 and Oefficiency at €2,000 to €3,000. The sale also presents works by Wifredo Lam, Agustín Cárdenas, and Leonora Carrington, reflecting Herold’s work on behalf of Latin American artists.
(Press Release)
