She was worshipped as a muse by renowned surrealists including André Breton and Max Ernst, but the Lancashire-born artist Leonora Carrington quickly shrugged off the label to achieve an unprecedented level of mastery and freedom in her own painting.
Now, on the 100th anniversary of Bretonâs publication of the Surrealist Manifesto, Carrington has become the most valuable British-born female artist at auction after one of her paintings sold for more than £22.5m.
Les Distractions de Dagobert sold at Sothebyâs modern auction in New York after a 10-minute bidding battle to the Argentine businessman Eduardo Costantini, the founder of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires (Malba).
The painting is widely recognised as the defining masterpiece of Carringtonâs career, showcasing rich surreal imagery and luminous colour on a large scale. Julian Dawes, Sothebyâs head of impressionist and modern art in New York, called it âthe definitive masterpiece of Leonora Carringtonâs long and storied career, bearing all the hallmarks of the artist at her absolute heightâ.
The workâs title is a reference to Dagobert, a Merovingian king who ruled Gaul in the early seventh century, popularly remembered as a king whose taste for sexual excess was matched by a love of luxury.
Sothebyâs describes the painting as a tapestry of meticulously crafted vignettes corresponding to the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. The scenes vary from ghostly extinct volcanoes to a watery world where a giant with a double animal head holds a human-faced puffer fish.
âAn iconic painting, The Distractions of Dagobert is one of the most admired works in the history of surrealism and an unparalleled masterpiece of Latin American art,â said Costantini, after the sale. âThis masterpiece will be part of a collection where, amongst others, two important works by [the Spanish surrealist painter] Remedios Varo and another record-breaking Frida Kahlo are also found.â
Carringtonâs visual language was first formed when she discovered the surrealist movement at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. Here, she found kindred artistic spirits in Breton, Salvador DalÃ, Man Ray and Ernst, who like her were fascinated by dreams, the subconscious and the occult.
She and Ernst went on to form a romantic relationship and travelled to France, where their circle included Pablo Picasso, DalÃ, Joan Miró, Breton, Leonor Fini and Marcel Duchamp. However, their relationship soon turned tumultuous, marked by Ernstâs imprisonment at the outbreak of the second world war, and resulting in Carringtonâs institutionalisation in Spain in 1940.
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Les Distractions de Dagobert was painted in 1945, just two years after Carrington moved to Mexico and joined a community of âexiledâ surrealists including Varo, Wolfgang Paalen and Alice Rahon, as well as modern Mexican painters such as Kahlo and Diego Rivera.
Gabriel Weisz Carrington, Leonoraâs son and a professor of comparative literature at Universidad Autónoma de México, said Carringtonâs works âdeveloped a very personal interpretation of surrealism, influenced by her motherhoodâ. He said the artist, who died in 2011 at the age of 94, had given âbirth to her creationsâ.
Wednesdayâs auction follows an increased interest in the long-overlooked female artists associated with the surrealist movement. In recent years they have been honoured by museum exhibitions around the world including the recent Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, where this painting was a centrepiece.
Female artists associated with the movement have also garnered increasing success at auction in recent years â in 2021, Kahloâs Diego y yo achieved a record-breaking $34.9m at Sothebyâs in New York, marking the highest price ever for a Latin American artist, and the second highest price achieved at auction for a female artist.
Allegra Bettini, the head of the modern art evening auction in New York, said: âThe recent surge of interest in previously overlooked women artists connected with the surrealist movement marks a profoundly significant cultural shift.â