They had been gathering dust for more than five decades, stored away in a garage in central London, a dozen lithographs by Salvador Dalí that would have continued to lie undiscovered if their owner had not decided to move and offload some of his belongings. The lithographs were printed to illustrate a luxury edition of ‘The Art of Loving’ by the Latin writer Ovid, an ancient classic in which men were given tips on how to seduce women.
The prints were discovered by art expert Chris Kirkham, when he was invited to the house to evaluate other assets, according to The Times. “I found it quite surreal,” said the associate director of Hansons Richmond, a London auction house, ironically. “You never know what you’re going to discover on a routine visit to a house,” said the auctioneer of his unusual find in a note.
The owner of the house took Kirkham to a garage in Berkeley Square, in the exclusive district of Mayfair, where “this surrealist treasure” had been forgotten, and which the expert considers an “amazing” find. There were fifteen prints in the garage, ten by the Spanish surrealist and another five by the French painter, engraver, illustrator and sculptor Theo Tobiasse.
Kirkham said the buyer “paid a modest £500 (about €650) for the unframed lithographs at a central London gallery clearance sale in the 1970s.” Although he had intended to frame them, he never did so and the prints have lounged in his garage, unfinished for more than 50 years.
The works will be auctioned in London on September 30 with a starting price of between 350 and 600 euros for each signed Dali lithograph and between 120 and 350 euros for the Tobiasse lithographs. The auctioneers estimate that the entire collection could fetch around 6,000 euros.
