On 5 March 2026, a painting hidden from the market for four decades quietly stole the night — as Surrealism's flagship sale marked 25 years by selling out completely.
On 5 March 2026, a painting hidden from the market for four decades quietly stole the night — as Surrealism's flagship sale marked 25 years by selling out completely.
March 5, 2026
The Art of the Surreal Evening Sale has been a Christie's fixture for 25 years, and its anniversary edition delivered a clean sweep — 100% sold by both lot count and value — pulling in nearly £43 million, at the high end of pre-sale estimates. The session opened with Joan Miró's Peinture (1949) more than doubling its low estimate, and René Magritte's Les grâces naturelles led the room at £7 million with fees.
But the night's most quiet remarkable result belonged to Dorothea Tanning. Her Children's Games (1942) is a small, unsettling canvas — two young girls tearing wallpaper away from a wall to reveal patches of flesh beneath, a typically charged Surrealist image that sits somewhere between innocence and dread. The painting had spent more than four decades in the same private collection and had been on long-term loan to the Dallas Museum of Art since 2012, largely invisible to the market.
When it finally came up for bidding, it took nearly ten minutes to resolve. The hammer fell at £3.8 million — £4.6 million, with fees — against a pre-sale estimate of £1 to £2 million, setting a new world auction record for the artist. Toyen's Le devenir de la liberté (1946) also set a record in the same session, selling for £3.7 million with fees.
The 25th edition of a sale dedicated entirely to Surrealism selling out completely feels like its own kind of statement — that a movement born from disruption and irrationality has become one of the art market's most dependable categories.
