Gallerist Thessa Herold: ‘You must follow a guiding thread and remain faithful to it’

In 2017, Thessa Herold received a Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts from the Spanish government. This prestigious annual award celebrates excellence in ‘the promotion, development or dissemination of art and culture’. Previous recipients had included Joan Miró, the opera singer Plácido Domingo and the film director Pedro Almodóvar.

Thessa Herold was 89 when she received her award, and it marked a pinnacle in a long and highly successful career as a gallerist. Born in the city of Málaga in southern Spain, to a Spanish mother and French father, she worked in the antiques business in Paris as a young woman, before making the transition to art.

In 1970, she founded the Galerie de Seine with her husband, Jacques‑Yves Herold, in the Saint‑Germain‑des‑Prés district, at that time the beating heart of artistic and intellectual life in Paris. She was renowned for the intuition, conviction and single-mindedness with which she picked the artists she showed, and she recommended that collectors adopt a similar approach. ‘You must buy with your heart, not with your wallet,’ she said. ‘You must follow a guiding thread and remain faithful to it. You must show great patience and strong conviction.’

After closing the gallery, she opened another, bearing her own name, in 1993. This was located near the Musée Picasso Paris, in the Marais district, a hub of contemporary creativity.

The Galerie Thessa Herold presented art from avant-garde movements of the recent past — first and foremost, Surrealism — as well as work by numerous emerging artists. Exhibitions were devoted to the likes of Jean Arp, Paul Klee, Roberto Matta, César Domela, Henri Michaux, Toyen, Max Ernst, Wifredo Lam, Man Ray, Jean‑Paul Agosti, Béatrice Helg and Carmen Calvo.

Thessa Herold’s commitment to these artists went beyond hanging their works on her walls. She also personally conceived and published catalogues for each show, inviting poets, novelists, philosophers and art historians to contribute texts entering into a dialogue with the works.

Intrepid and free‑spirited, she remained committed across her life to sharing a vision of forward-looking art. She celebrated works that offered viewers an invitation simultaneously to dream and to discover.

A pioneering female figure in Paris’s art scene, Thessa Herold died in 2025, aged 97. Around 170 works from her personal collection, by artists close to her heart, are being offered in the Christie’s online sale Thessa Herold, une femme d’intuition, until 2 June 2026.

Below, we pick out five lots for special attention.

Alberto Savinio, Sans titre (Paradis terrestre), 1928

Alberto Savinio was a man of many talents. The Italian, who moved to Paris as a young man, was a poet, novelist, set designer, pianist and composer. It’s said that he played the piano so violently while giving the debut performance of an avant-garde operetta he had written, in 1914, that the instrument fell apart.

Between the mid-1920s and mid-1930s, Savinio devoted himself principally to painting. Works such as Sans titre (Paradis terrestre) exhibit robust paint-handling and a mix of different styles, most notably showing an interest in Surrealism. (Savinio was the younger brother of the artist Giorgio de Chirico, and a close friend of the writer Guillaume Apollinaire — both of whom are considered forefathers of that movement.)

Sans titre (Paradis terrestre) suggests a state of earthly bliss. However, nothing about this scene is straightforward: a copse of trees appears to be growing on the top floor of a rickety, multi-storey structure, beside a seated mannequin holding a sword.

Josef Šíma, Sans titre, 1967

One can observe in Sans titre a treatment of light that is typical of Josef Šíma’s work. It is a misty, quasi-material glow, which fuses forms in delicate sfumato. There’s a distinct sense of the oneiric about this scene, though the predominantly blue colouring also hints at a seabed on which small rocks lie.

Born in the town of Jaroměř, in what is today the Czech Republic, Šíma came of age artistically in Paris between the two world wars. Landscapes recur throughout his oeuvre. At first, these showed an affiliation with Surrealism, but towards the end of his career (in works such as Sans titre), they veered towards abstraction.

Ostensibly devoid of figurative reference, Šíma’s later works are imbued with a deeply meditative quality.

Jean Arp, Source, 1962

‘Seeing Jean Arp’s work for the first time freed me of inhibitions,’ the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth once said. Arp was renowned for his deliberately playful and ambiguous creations, which had a far-reaching influence. He was a poet, painter, sculptor and collagist, who often — as in the case of Source — combined different disciplines at once.

At first glance, this work resembles a conventional painting on canvas, presented in a wooden frame. However, it actually consists of a relief of cut wood, onto which the artist applied oil paint.

Arp was resistant to all forms of classification, and what — if anything — Source depicts is left open to conjecture. The artist was wont to use a modernist vocabulary of biomorphic shapes, and this work suggests, among other things, a cell structure viewed under a microscope.

Roberto Matta, Sans titre, 1957

Born in the Chilean capital of Santiago in 1911, Roberto Matta started out as an architect. Upon moving to Paris in the early 1930s, he took up a job with Le Corbusier. Before long, however, he switched careers and became an artist. He found himself attracted to Surrealism, in particular.

Reflecting his professional roots, structures and buildings of various kinds appear in pictures throughout his career — Sans titre included. Over the years, Matta’s work grew more abstract, and having left Europe for New York at the start of the Second World War, he was an influence on that city’s nascent Abstract Expressionist movement.

The artist was also interested in outer space, and Sans titre might well be considered a cosmic wonderland occupied by a handful of figures, some of them resembling insects, others machines.

Thessa Herold had a deep affinity for Latin American artists, and exhibited work by the likes of Wifredo Lam and Leonora Carrington, as well as Roberto Matta.

Simon Hantaï, Peinture, 1956

As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest in the early 1940s, Simon Hantaï was briefly arrested by the Gestapo for anti-Nazi activity. After the Second World War, he grew unhappy with the Soviet-led clampdown on art that was in any way progressive. He and wife Zsuzsa duly left their native Hungary for Paris.

There, his work revealed the influence of expressive abstraction by the likes of Jackson Pollock and Georges Mathieu. Not that Hantaï ever considered himself part of an artistic movement or nexus. ‘I have always lived and worked in the margin,’ he said.

Created in 1956, Peinture is an all-action painting. It features what appear to be three jarring vertical forms, set against a dark background. It is painted with a mix of drips, squiggles and energetic gesture.

Thessa Herold, une femme d’intuition is live for bidding online until 2 June 2026, and on view from 30 May to 2 June at Christie’s in Paris