Salvador Dali, autograph notebook (around 1930-35) R. and B.L. Dada-Surrealism Library, Sotheby’s, Paris, 26-27 April
Est €40,000-€50,000 (sold for €74,000 hammer, €91,800 with premium)
As an art movement founded by poets, it should come as no surprise that Surrealism produced a rich seam of artists’ books and other publications. In collaboration with the French auction house Binoche et Giquello, Sotheby’s Paris is staging the fifth in a series of sales from a French books and manuscripts collection dedicated to the movement and its revolutionary precursor, Dada, featuring illustrated first editions, original drawings, letters, magazines and posters. Among almost 500 lots is an unpublished autograph diary kept by Salvador Dali between 1930 and 1935 and littered with ink sketches, notes on art and records of daily expenses in the artist’s cramped hand. Sotheby’s describes the notebook as an “exceptional document, as much for the texts as for the number and beauty of the original drawings that illustrate them”.
Kahlil Gibran, Portrait of Mrs Alexander Morten (1914) The Art of Lebanon, and Modern and Contemporary Middle Eastern Art, Bonhams, London, 27 April
Est £20,000-£30,000 (sold for £150,000 hammer, £182,500 with premium)
Bonhams held its first dedicated auction of Modernist Iraqi art last April during Indian and Islamic art week in London. The sale, the brainchild of Modern and contemporary Middle Eastern specialist Nima Sagharchi, raised the profile of Iraqi artists in a market led by Iranian and Egyptian art. Bonhams is due this week to launch the first sale of Lebanese Modern art at an international auction house. This portrait by the Lebanese-American artist, poet and writer Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) of the New York socialite and arts patron Marjorie Morten has been hidden from view for 100 years. The oil painting featured in Gibran’s first exhibition in the city, organised in 1914 by Morten’s art dealer husband Alexander and the gallerist Newman Montross. Its dreamlike style draws on the 19th-century Symbolist tradition that Gibran studied in Paris from 1908 to 1910.
Chinese Yongzheng mark and period porcelain vase (1722-35) Chinese, Indian, Islamic and Japanese art, Mallams, Cheltenham, 27-28 April
Est £20,000-£30,000 (sold for £750,000 hammer, £900,000 with premium)
In the 1950s this Yongzheng mark and period porcelain vase (1722-35) was valued at just £12-£15 by its owner, Charles George, an art and antiques collector who kept a meticulous handwritten inventory of his purchases. Now consigned to auction by George’s family, it has an estimated price of between £20,000 and £30,000. Typical of the restrained ceramics of the period, this 24cm-tall celadon-glazed vase was made when the Yongzheng emperor personally oversaw the introduction of new forms and colours at the Jingdezhen kilns. The vase is inspired by a Longquan prototype from the Southern Song period, with bands of chrysanthemum petals at the base and ribs imitating bamboo around the neck.