Les Distractions de Dagobert is to be offered with a $12-18 million estimate CREDIT: Leonora Carrington
By Colin Gleadell
May 7, 2024
A British artist who was expelled from several schools, rejected by her family, hospitalised for psychosis, and believed her work to be unsaleable, is set to become the most expensive British female artist in history.
Next week at Sotheby’s in New York, a 1945 surrealist painting by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) – Les Distractions de Dagobert – is to be offered with a $12-18 million estimate (£9.6-14.3 million), and is guaranteed, which means it will sell. This will propel Carrington into the top tier of artists, male or female, who can fetch eight-figure prices and, after the auctioneer’s commission is added, will place Carrington above Barbara Hepworth ($11.6 million) and Jenny Saville ($12.4 million) at the top of Britain’s women’s art tables.
It will also make a tidy profit for the American seller who bought it in 1995 for a record $475,500. In the realms of international female surrealists, Carrington will stand second only to Frida Kahlo, whose record $34.9 million was set in 2021.
Carrington was born in 1917 to a well-to-do Catholic family in Lancashire where she felt constricted by convention. She did, however, grow up on a diet of Celtic mythology, folklore and witchcraft fed to her by her Irish Catholic mother, grandmother and nanny. This was to become an influence on her art in which animals, fairies, goddesses and druids pursue fantastical adventures.
At the age of 20, Carrington was disowned by her family after she formed a relationship with the older German surrealist, Max Ernst, and went to live with him and study in Paris where she embarked on writing dream-like short stories and painting her wondrous allegories.
But tragedy struck when, after the outbreak of the Second World War, Ernst was interned in France as an enemy alien and she fled to Spain where she suffered a breakdown, hearing voices and experiencing hallucinations for which she was given convulsive therapy. Thankfully she remained of sound enough mind to escape and find her way to America and thence to Mexico where she married, made a new home and had two children.
Although she became well-known as an artist in Mexico, she received limited wider recognition for most of her life. Her main supporter was the wealthy collector Edward James, who bought some of her paintings and followed her to Mexico City after the war.
Looking at her market through the prism of the auction room, her work reached five figures in the early 1980s, when she was in her seventies. It hit six figures in 1988. But when it finally broke the $1 million barrier when she was in her nineties, the artist told her dealer, Wendi Norris, that she “couldn’t care less”. As James described her, Carrington was “a ruthless English intellectual in revolt against bourgeois fears and false moralities”.
For dealers and collectors, though, there were encouraging price increases. In 1987, The Ordeal of Owain (the Arthurian Knight of the Round Table) sold for $28,600; 23 years later, it sold for a record $722,500. In 2014, The Temptation of St Anthony, which had set a new record $440,00 for Carrington in 1992, sold for $2.6 million.
But it was only during this decade, once it became known that the 2022 Venice Biennale’s prestigious main exhibition would be named The Milk of Dreams after a book by Carrington based on her imaginary mystical drawings, that she became the focus of the art world’s zeitgeist. Thereafter, works consistently sold for over one million dollars, peaking in 2022 at $3.25 million.
Sotheby’s explains the leap to eight figures with a barrage of superlatives. Les Distractions de Dagobert (the seventh-century Merovingian king), it says, is “unparalleled in the richness of its imagery; it is the apotheosis of her dynamic career”. Divided into four parts that represent the elements of nature, Earth, Water, Fire and Air, it draws on medieval Irish tales, Mexican cosmology and the Kabbalah, as well as direct quotations from Hieronymus Bosch’s classic The Garden of Earthly Delights.
That said, the painting’s appearance at auction and its estimate have not come as a surprise to Norris, who offered the work to a museum in 2021 for a price not dissimilar to Sotheby’s estimate. The museum didn’t bite, but it served as a better reference for Sotheby’s than auction prices when negotiating a guarantee for the seller.
The question now is not whether it will sell, but for how much.
