Henrietta Leon Girshman's Carnet de Salon leads Bonhams Russian Literature Auction

Art Daily Newsletter

Most coveted was Henrietta Leon Girshman’s Carnets de Salon, which raised paddles to $230,500. Photo: Bonhams. NEW YORK, NY.- Bonhams auction of Russian Literature and Works on Paper brought spirited bidding for many of the sale’s significant lots, underscoring and celebrating the perennial interest in this area of collecting. Most coveted was Henrietta Leon Girshman’s Carnets de Salon, which raised paddles to $230,500. Society doyenne and hostess, Girshman captured the early 20th-century artistic scene in her two-volume set of autograph albums. More than 100 inscriptions, sketches, musical passages, literary quotations and autographs tell of the creative and cultural luminaries who gathered at her and her husband’s salons at their “Red Gates” mansion in Moscow. Their gatherings of creative and cultural luminaries continued after the couple’s exile to Paris with the 1917 Russian Revolution. Symbolist poet Andrei Belyi’s (Boris Nikolaevich Bugaev) four poems titled To Anthroposophy drew ... More