Dorothea Tanning's Auction Record Jumps 63%

Dorothea Tanning's Endgame (1944) sold for $2.35m, more than twice the low estimate at Christie's in New York on May 12. The oil on canvas work has been traded twice in the past.

Dorothea Tanning's first attempt to meet the Surrealists was ill fated. She set sail from New York in the summer of 1939, so arrived on the eve of WW2. The conflict meant that many of the artist's she admired escaped to New York, where in 1942 she met the recently arrived émigré artist and Dada pioneer Max Ernst.

Ernst was looking for works for a planned exhibition dedicated to female artists at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century. Ernst and Guggenheim were married at the time. On a studio visit he spotted a photograph of Tanning playing chess. A shared passion for the game, and art, led to a great love affair and their eventual marriage.

"So the next day and the next saw us playing frantic chess... decorum, kept me sitting in the prim chair instead of starred on the bed. Until a week went by and he came to stay,” Tanning recalled.

Endgame was first shown in "The Imagery of Chess", a star-studded exhibition in late 1944 organized by Marcel Duchamp at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. It was first owned by the German Dada artist and filmmaker Hans Richter, who went on to collaborate with Tanning and Ernst.

The sale beat Tanning’s previous auction record by $909,000, a 63% rise. The previous record was set by Le mal oublié (1955), which sold for $1.44m at Christie's on May 14, 2022. The work had been traded once in the past.

A Brief History of Dorothea Tanning at Auction