'Surrealist' discovery of ten lithographs by Dalí in a London garage

The illustrations had been gathering dust for over five decades in a garage in central London and only came to light during a clearout before a house move

R.C.

Monday, 2 September 2024, 17:40

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They had been gathering dust in a garage in central London for more than five decades. They are a dozen lithographs by Salvador Dalí that would have continued to sleep the sleep of the just if their owner had not thought of moving and getting rid of some of his possessions in the process. The lithographs were completed by Dalí as illustrations for a deluxe edition of Ovid's The Art of Loving, an ancient classic written in Latin in which men were given advice on how to seduce women.

It was Chris Kirkham, an expert in art, antiques and auctions, who came across the lithographs when he was invited to the home to assess and value other assets, according to the report by The Times.

"I thought it was quite surreal," the associate director of London auctioneers Hansons Richmond said wryly. "You never know what you're going to discover on a routine visit to a home," was the auctioneers' comment about such an unusual find in a statement.

The owner of the house took Kirkham to a garage in Berkeley Square, in the elegant and exclusive district of Mayfair, where "this surrealist treasure", which the expert considers an "astonishing" find, had laid forgotten. There were fifteen prints in the garage in total, ten by the Spanish surrealist genius and another five by the French painter, engraver, illustrator and sculptor Theo Tobiasse.

Kirkham said that the buyer "paid a modest £500 (about 600 euros) for the unframed lithographs at a central London gallery liquidation auction in the 1970s." Although he intended to have them framed, he never did, and so the prints ended up in his garage, where they have been idling away for over 50 years.

The works of art will be auctioned in London on 30 September with a starting price of between 350 and 600 euros for each signed lithograph by Dalí and between 120 and 350 euros for those by Tobiasse. The auctioneers estimate that the entire collection could fetch around 6,000 euros.

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