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"As the wider Impressionist and modern market slowly withers on the auction vine \u2014 the victim of a paucity of first-rate material \u2014 the international market for Surrealism has started to sizzle. Interest in the erotically preoccupied mid-century movement languished for decades as collectors lavished money and attention on Impressionist and Fauve art. Yet in the last two years, works by the handful of brand name artists associated with Surrealism \u2014 Salvador Dal\u00ED, Max Ernst, Ren\u00E9 Magritte, and Joan Mir\u00F3 \u2014 are taking center stage.In June at the Christie\u2019s London Impressionist and modern sales, for example, Magritte\u2019s darkly menacing \u201CLes jours gigantesques,\u201D 1928, depicting a violent struggle between a clothed man and a naked woman and remarkable for the illusionistic effect of one body superimposed on and merging with the other, sold to the New York financier Wilbur Ross for \u00A37.2 million ($11.3 million) on an estimate of \u00A3800,000 to \u00A31.5 million. Ross outgunned a posse of competitors, including London dealer Daniella Luxembourg. Housed in a private collection since around 1975 (another version of the sinister work resides in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, in D\u00FCsseldorf), the painting suffered a seemingly symbolic tear just below the woman\u2019s bare throat. Apparently condition wasn\u2019t a problem, as the canvas achieved the second-highest auction price ever for Magritte. The price came relatively close to the record $12.7 million set by his later, more decorative, and decidedly calmer \u201CL\u2019empire des lumi\u00E8res,\u201D 1952, at Christie\u2019s New York in May 2002. Prior to the London sale, an early Magritte was considered a tough sell and far less desirable than the artist\u2019s late works, but now \u201Cearly\u201D appears to be in vogue, a view that is likely to gain adherents with the September 2013 opening of \u201CRen\u00E9 Magritte 1926-1938\u201D at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Famed for its Surrealist holdings, MoMA is mounting the first major museum show to focus on those breakthrough years.In the past 18 months, Surrealist records have fallen like dominoes, as Mir\u00F3\u2019s \u201CPeinture (Etoile bleue),\u201D 1927, fetched \u00A323.5 million ($36.9 million) at Sotheby\u2019s London in June; Man Ray\u2019s late oil \u201CImage \u00E0 deux faces,\u201D 1959, made \u20AC2.4 million ($3 million) at Sotheby\u2019s Paris in May; Ernst\u2019s \u201CStolen Mirror,\u201D 1941, soared to $16.3 million at Christie\u2019s New York in November 2011; and Dal\u00ED\u2019s 1929 portrait of the Surrealist poet and early art dealer Paul Eluard realized \u00A313.5 million ($21.7 million) in a single-owner sale at Sotheby\u2019s London in February 2011 \u2014 at the time the highest price ever paid for a Surrealist work at auction.The Dal\u00ED had last sold in 1989, at Christie\u2019s, New York, for a then-record $2.3 million to the Swiss-based collector George Kostalitz, who consigned it to Sotheby\u2019s. Dal\u00ED\u2019s star is likely to shine even brighter with the upcoming retrospective exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, in Paris, on the calendar for November 21 through March 25. Given the recent spike in prices for all these sometimes nightmarish explorations of the 20th-century psyche, one naturally wonders: What is it about Surrealism that speaks to today\u2019s collectors?\u201CSurrealist art used to be reserved for the happy few,\u201D says Olivier Camu, deputy chairman of Christie\u2019s Impressionist and modern art, who initiated the \u201CArt of the Surreal\u201D sale category in February 2001 in London. On that occasion the works were segregated from the rest of the modern fare in a carefully staged pre-auction display, and a separate catalogue was prepared, two practices that have continued. \u201CI felt it was an area of art history that was undervalued and underappreciated,\u201D explains Camu. \u201CA few pro collectors and pro dealers were the only ones focusing on it. I thought it was a very interesting [movement] to resuscitate.\u201DOne of those happy few who pursued Surrealism before it skyrocketed in value is the collector and legendary Paris Match magazine publisher Daniel Filipacchi, whose Manhattan duplex is crammed with museum quality works that trace the historical arc of the movement. The depth and quality of his holdings were duly recognized in the 1999 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum exhibition \u201CSurrealism: Two Private Eyes, the Nesuhi Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections.\u201D Encouraged to cite some of his favorites, Filipacchi, who was intrigued by Surrealist poetry as a youngster and then, at 14, was drawn to its visual manifestation, ticks off four works in the New York apartment: Yves Tanguy\u2019s \u201CSolar Perils,\u201D 1943; Dal\u00ED\u2019s \u201CSurrealist Objects, Gauges of Instantaneous Memory,\u201D 1932; Magritte\u2019s \u201CL\u2019invention collective,\u201D 1935; and Frida Kahlo\u2019s \u201CWhat the Water Gave Me,\u201D 1939. As the collector explains, \u201CAll of these paintings were purchased in my early days of collecting, when prices were low.\u201DThe Kahlo, for example, was bought at Sotheby\u2019s New York in 1983 for $235,000, a fraction of what it would fetch today. (For comparison, Kahlo\u2019s \u201CSurvivor,\u201D 1938, a small and decidedly less important oil-on-metal painting, sold at Christie\u2019s New York in May 2010 for $1,178,500, more than 10 times its low estimate.) When asked if there was a Surrealist work that he coveted, Filipacchi replies serenely, \u201CI don\u2019t remember any particular artwork that eluded me.\u201D A more recent Filipacchi acquisition, Magritte\u2019s \u201CLe chevalier du couchant,\u201D 1926, a Giorgio de Chirico-influenced composition with a cloth-draped mannequin seeming to look over its headless counterpart to examine a painting of a barren landscape, was purchased at Sotheby\u2019s New York in November 2011 for $4,114,500. The painting had been included in Magritte\u2019s first solo show at Brusssels\u2019s Galerie le Centaure in 1927 and appeared in the 1992-93 Magritte retrospective organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This sort of consummate cherry-picking suits a collector refining an already established collection.Camu believes that the growing market interest in Surrealism can be attributed to its \u201Cpresence in everyday media, marketing, and advertising,\u201D as well as to the influx of emerging-market buyers in Asia, Russia, and South America. Surrealism has achieved a paradoxical state, its aesthetic so pervasive as to no longer be off-putting, while the best of the artworks retain something of their original power to cause unease.\u201CArt of the Surreal\u201D generated \u00A38.7 million ($12.7 million) at its Christie\u2019s debut in 2001 and brought \u00A337.2 million ($58.7 million) this past February. Sotheby\u2019s London made its first foray into a specialized Surrealism auction a few months before Christie\u2019s, launching a \u201CSurrealism: Dreams and Imagery\u201D sale in December 2000. The stand-alone theme recurred in 2002, \u201904, \u201905, and \u201907, with Sotheby\u2019s joining Christie\u2019s in the month of February, but then was quietly dropped.\u201CWe\u2019ve always taken a slightly modest view,\u201D explains Andrew Strauss, the Paris-based senior director for Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby\u2019s who organized those sales. \u201CIf we have a sensible group of Surrealists, we\u2019ll make a catalogue, but we never felt happy about just having this empty catalogue to fill once a year.\u201D Strauss observes, \u201CThe reasons these results have gone up over the last 10 years are the lack of decent Impressionist and early 20th century masters and the globalization of the market, which has brought in new buyers and a younger generation who want fun, snappy, mysterious, and appealing wall power. Surrealism provides it all.\u201DAs Strauss and others point out, few art movements have the historical credentials, visual pervasiveness, and cult-worthy personalities of Surrealism. \u201CMTV and video have kept Surrealism alive,\u201D notes the New York dealer Francis Naumann, a specialist in Dada and Surrealist art, \u201Cbecause whenever anyone has to do a video, they want to think out of the box, and thinking out of the box is almost the definition of Surrealism.\u201DThe Surrealist movement arose in Paris during the decade after World War I, a period that saw an explosion of creative activity and competing styles throughout Europe. Built on Dada\u2019s celebration of the irrational and first expressed in literature, Surrealism coalesced thanks to diligent organizing by the writer and Freudian ideologue Andr\u00E9 Breton, whose 1924 \u201CManifesto of Surrealism\u201D became the founding document for artists plumbing the notions of dream imagery and automatism, the exercise of pure creation without the intervention of reason. In 1925 Breton organized the first Surrealism exhibition in Paris. His essays on painting were collected in \u201CLe Surr\u00E9alisme et la peinture,\u201D first published in 1928 and subsequently reissued with Breton\u2019s updates until 1965, the year before his death.Surrealism\u2019s early success in the U.S. was due largely to the efforts of three individuals: the New York dealer Julien Levy; Alfred H.&amp;nbsp; Barr, Jr., the founding director of MoMA; and the Los Angeles dealer William Copley (later known as the artist CPLY). Levy, who opened his gallery in 1931, purchased Dal\u00ED\u2019s iconic \u201CPersistence of Memory,\u201D 1931, for $250 from the Pierre Colle Gallery in Paris and displayed it in New York in his 1932 show \u201CSurrealism: Paintings, Drawings and Photographs.\u201D Barr (a Harvard classmate of Levy\u2019s) staged the comprehensive and authoritative \u201CFantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism\u201D exhibition in 1936.&amp;nbsp; (Among other works, MoMA had acquired \u201CThe Persistence of Memory\u201D in 1934.)Copley, who operated the short-lived Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills from 1948 to 1949, showed the work of Joseph Cornell, Ernst, Magritte, Roberto Matta, Man Ray, and Tanguy. He guaranteed all of the artists the sale of 10 percent of the works in each exhibition, selling nothing to others but assembling a major collection of his own. The canonical Man Ray \u201CObservatory Time \u2014 The Lovers,\u201D 1932-34, featuring the painted lips of Lee Miller floating in the sky, was acquired directly from the artist in 1948 and sold in the Copley estate sale at Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York in 1979 to Greek shipping tycoon Stavros Niarchos for a long-held artist record of $750,000. Est\u00E9e Lauder and Mick Jagger were underbidders, according to Strauss. The work remains in the Niarchos family\u2019s possession. \u201CNo one could believe it could go that high,\u201D recalls Naumann, who attended the historic sale. \u201CPeople were gasping at the price.\u201DAlong with Levy, Pierre Matisse and Alexander Iolas championed Surrealism well into the 1970s. Among Iolas\u2019s clients were John and Dominique de Menil, whose Surrealist holdings are among the masterworks of the Menil Collection, in Houston. Today few galleries specialize exclusively in the movement, although it is indicative of the strong market that the New York gallery Blain|Di Donna opened in October 2011 with an exhibition of Magritte and followed up with a show devoted to Andr\u00E9 Masson that closed this past June.The Helly Nahmad Gallery of New York and London has a deep inventory of Surrealist works, much of it cloistered in the Geneva Freeport (a tax-free haven where a number of high-value art collections are stored) and reserved as part of the Nahmad family collection, according to Helly Nahmad, who runs the New York gallery. \u201CWe have substantial holdings in Surrealists, absolutely,\u201D affirms the dealer,\u201Cbut they\u2019re in the collection and can\u2019t be touched.\u201D Nevertheless, in 2006-07 the gallery staged an exhibition in London and New York of 40 paintings by Ernst, dating from 1926 to 1964 and priced between \u00A3270,000 and \u00A32.7 million ($514,300 and $5.1 million), all of it sourced from the Nahmad inventory.Nahmad holds a dim view of the current availability of truly significant Surrealist art. He says bluntly, \u201CIt\u2019s very difficult for a major collector to buy Surrealist art today. In fact it\u2019s virtually impossible, because the works are either in European, American, or Asian institutions or they belong to collectors who are so wealthy that they have no desire to sell. They\u2019re virtually unfindable.\u201DStrauss, of Sotheby\u2019s, is more optimistic. He believes it\u2019s still possible to build an important Surrealist collection, noting, \u201CIf you look at the number of really great Surrealist paintings that have come to the market in the past five years \u2014 if you bought all of those, you\u2019d have quite a collection of Surrealist work.\u201DThere is another option if you aren\u2019t a billionaire. \u201CI have the best inventory in America of the more affordable, lower-priced things,\u201D says Timothy Baum, the seasoned New York private dealer who fondly recalls the time in the mid-1960s when one could buy a good Magritte painting from the Iolas Gallery for $5,000. \u201CI accommodate anybody who tells me they like Surrealism, from, say, $1,000 and up,\u201D he adds. \u201CBut after the half-million-dollar mark, I pass the hat to some big shot.\u201DUnlike many other modern movements, Baum says, \u201CSurrealism is multimedia, and I deal in everything from manuscripts and illustrated books to prints, drawings, collages, \u2018Exquisite Corpse\u2019 [a form of collaborative automatic drawing], objects, and paintings.\u201D Baum points to the record-setting Dal\u00ED portrait of Eluard in the Sotheby\u2019s London sale of February 2011 as the point when Surrealism became priced beyond the reach of most. \u201CFrom that day on, it was all over. Anything comparable was going to follow suit.\u201DBaum suggests pursuing Surrealists who haven\u2019t hit the stratospheric price range, such as Victor Brauner and Oscar Dom\u00EDnguez, as well as the undervalued women artists in the movement: Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo, and Dorothea Tanning. Except for the French-born Hugo, all were featured in the recent exhibition \u201CIn Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,\u201D at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (January-May 2012).At the Sotheby\u2019s Impressionist and modern evening sale in June, Carrington\u2019s \u201CPersonajes de teatro,\u201D 1941, a painting that depicts the spindly figures of a costumed man and a woman hovering beside the hides of a longhorn steer and a pinto, sold for \u00A3337,250 ($529,000), near the high end of its estimate of \u00A3250,000 to \u00A3350,000 ($392,000-549,000). That same month in London, Alison Jacques Gallery opened \u201CDorothea Tanning: Collages,\u201D which included a 1945 collage incorporating three photographs taken by Julien Levy of a chess tournament at his gallery, with Tanning and her husband, Ernst, competing against a blindfolded chess master, priced at $25,000. \u201CShe\u2019s an under-recognized great artist,\u201D Jacques said while installing the Tanning show, \u201Cand it\u2019s time for people to understand that.\u201D By contrast, a postcard-size Magritte gouache on paper featured in Sotheby\u2019s June 20 day sale, \u201CLa main heureuse,\u201D 1952, depicting a diamond engagement ring encircling a grand piano, sold for a whopping \u00A3529,250 ($835,500).Earlier in June at Art Basel, Surrealist fare was on offer. Galerie Applicat-Prazan of Paris devoted its stand to Masson, selling the hotly colored and mythology-inspired \u201CActeon,\u201D 1943, to a prominent European collector for a sum in the region of its \u20AC580,000 ($727,000) asking price. A Surrealist discovery of sorts was also snatched up during the fair at David and Marcel Fleiss\u2019s Galerie 1900-2000: An untitled canvas, circa 1933, by the rarely seen Jean Marembert that features two nude women, one reclining on a gnarled tree branch and looking up at an enormous eye, was bought by a collector for \u20AC13,500 ($17,000).\u201CIn 50 years of dealing,\u201D says Marcel Fleiss,\u201CI\u2019ve only had two of Marembert\u2019s paintings, and that was one. Nobody knows where his paintings are. It\u2019s a big mystery.\u201D Fleiss affirms it is still possible to build a decent Surrealist collection \u2014 \u201Cby all means, as long as you don\u2019t try to collect the Surrealists who are already expensive but concentrate on artists who are as important: Hans Bellmer, Brauner, Jacques Herold, Marcel Jean, Masson, Matta, Wolfgang Paalen, Kurt Seligmann, Remedios Varo, and many others.\u201D Asked how to determine which are worth pursuing, Fleiss suggests doing it by the book: \u201CGo by the artists included in Breton\u2019s 'Le Surr\u00E9alisme et la peinture,' because he really knew who was great or not.\u201DThis article appears in the September issue of Art+Auction magazine.[content:advertisement-center]"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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