[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-83100479.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n
\n\tA $40 million Pablo Picasso painting from the artist\u2019s Cubist period will hit the block at Sotheby\u2019s this May during the marquee New York auctions.<\/p>\n
\n\tPart of a cache of works from the collection of late Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and his wife Adele, who died last year, Arlequin (Buste)<\/em>, from 1909, is likely to be one of the most expensive works by Picasso sold during the marquee sales this season. It features a harlequin that appears to emerge from a cascade of three-dimensional geometric forms.<\/p>\n \n\tThe auction house said on Monday that the work was valued within \u201cthe region of $40 million,\u201d suggesting that it has increased dramatically in monetary worth since Enrico bought it for around $12,000 in the 1940s. He purchased it through Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, one of Picasso\u2019s most famous dealers, having become enamored of the piece upon seeing it at the Mus\u00e9e National d\u2019Art Moderne in Paris.<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s the second high-profile attempt by Sotheby\u2019s to sell Arlequin<\/em>, which made its way to market at the auction house in 2008, not long after Enrico died. Then valued at more than $30 million, the painting was unexpectedly withdrawn just a week before a November Impressionist and modern art auction by Sotheby\u2019s, which stated only that the work would not make it to the block for \u201cprivate reasons.\u201d <\/p>\n \n\tAt the time, according to the New York Times<\/em>, Sotheby\u2019s was selling the work without a guarantee, an agreement that entitles the seller to a sum whether or not the work finds a buyer. Christie\u2019s, the house\u2019s main rival, reportedly offered the Donati estate a guarantee, plus \u201cother types of financing.\u201d But the work headed to Sotheby\u2019s, anyway, with the stipulation that its consignor could remove it from auction.<\/p>\n \n\tThis time, the painting has a guarantee and an irrevocable bid, a Sotheby\u2019s spokesperson told ARTnews<\/em>. The painting heads to sale in an auction of modern art on May 19.<\/p>\n \n\tThirteen other works from the Donati collection are also headed to auction at Sotheby\u2019s, including two more paintings that will appear in the May 19 sale. The first, a 1925 Wassily Kandinsky abstraction called Rote Tiefe (Red Depth)<\/em>, has a $12 million\u2013$18 million estimate. The second, a 1939 Yves Tanguy work titled Aux Aguets le jour<\/em>, has a $800,000\u2013$1.2 million estimate.<\/p>\n \n\tMeanwhile, an untitled Alexander Calder stabile with a high estimate of $1 million is coming to a May 20 day sale of modern art, and two masks\u2014one by a Yup\u2019ik or Inupiaq artist, the other by a Bete-Guro artist, both from the 19th century\u2014will be auctioned in a June 18 sale for art from Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-news\/news\/sothebys-picasso-donati-collection-may-2026-sales-1234781069\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/GettyImages-83100479.jpg?w=1024″] A $40 million Pablo Picasso painting from the artist\u2019s Cubist period will hit the block at Sotheby\u2019s this May during the marquee New York auctions. Part of a cache of works from the collection of late Surrealist artist Enrico Donati and his wife Adele, who died last year, Arlequin (Buste), from 1909, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1880426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1880426"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1880426\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1880426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1880426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1880426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}