On Wednesday, October 14, 2025, at 7 p.m., PIASA will have the privilege of auctioning the second part of the Geneviève and Jean-Paul Kahn collection.
"Then there is the predestination of objects. All great collections possess a considerable attractive force." — Anatole Jakovsky
I don’t know whether Geneviève and Jean-Paul Kahn collected objects according to a code of their own, or if the objects came to them through a form of secret correspondence, where the choice seems so obvious: to place a gouache-collage by Esteban Francès alongside another gouache-collage by Remedios Varo, followed by a very rare collage by the poet Benjamin Péret.
The collection of Geneviève and Jean-Paul Kahn was not built in the sense of a premeditated search — it has its source in dreams.
This second sale, centered on the surrealist woman as artist or as image, opens with those anthropomorphic faces with eyes full of suffering from an inner beyond by Frida Kahlo; the dream boxes of Mimi Parent; a decalcomania by Jacqueline Lamba facing one by André Breton; exquisite corpses where Jeannette and Tanguy respond to Jacqueline and Breton; or this painting by Meret Oppenheim, born of an erotic night.
A woman is also her own sublimated representation — weightless in a painting by Roland Penrose, unsettling and devouring in one by Wilhelm Freddie, or with a hallucinogenic mushroom head in the painting by John Melville. And then there's this totem by Leonora Carrington — a surrealist object that pays tribute to the mystery of femininity: the woman-lute, an enigmatic body covered in mysterious symbols, paintings that seem to go back to ancestral times, to the very birth of woman in all her emotional weight of suffering and beauty.
This second sale offers us the feminine universe of the surrealist constellation, with its many ramifications and correspondences, as seen through the collection of Geneviève and Jean-Paul Kahn.
Philippe Luiggi
