“They were very much in this Surrealist circle starting in the mid-1950s and because of their personal relationships, there’s a really tight narrative to the collection,” Allegra Bettini, an associate vice president and specialist in the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Christie’s New York, tells. “The works have never been on the market before. They were stewarded over the decades and really loved.
Rosalind Gersten Jacobs, known as “Roz,” was introduced to Surrealism in 1954, when she met William and Noma Copley in New York. “She credited this meeting as life-changing,” says Bettini. “She was introduced to them at a dinner party and then ran into them at an opening of a Jerome Moross show called ‘The Golden Apple.’”
The Copleys were living in Paris at the time, in a suburb called Longpont, where they regularly hosted gatherings of artists and creatives. “Through this meeting with the Copleys in New York, Roz traveled to Paris that same year, and called on them,” Bettini says. “They were planning a dinner party with Man Ray and his wife, Julia. They said to her, ‘Why don’t you join us? You’ll get along fantastically.’ And they were right.