Sotheby’s is once again tapping into the robust market for works by top female Surrealists. The auction house expects to smash Leonora Carrington’s auction record when it offers one of her most dramatic canvases during its evening sale of Modern art on 15 May in New York.
Even if Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945)—which a Sotheby’s spokesperson confirmed is backed by a guarantee—sells for the auction house’s low estimate of $12m, the result would more than triple the artist’s current auction record of $3.2m (including fees), achieved by the tenebrous composition The Garden of Paracelsus (1957) two years ago at Sotheby’s in New York. Should interest in Les Distractions de Dagobert push the price towards its $18m high estimate, the result could sextuple Carrington’s auction record.
“The recent surge of interest in previously overlooked women artists connected with the Surrealist movement marks a profoundly significant cultural shift,” Allegra Bettini, the head of Sotheby’s Modern art evening sale in New York, said in a statement. “Leonora Carrington has proved to be a lightning rod of attention, setting the stage for Les Distractions de Dagobert, the apotheosis of Carrington’s oeuvre, to take its place as a masterpiece of 20th-century art.”
Drawing inspiration from the fantastical scenes depicted by Hieronymus Bosch, Carrington painted Les Distractions de Dagobert just three years after emigrating to Mexico, as did so many Surrealists fleeing the Second World War (including Remedios Varo, Alice Rahon and others). Two years later, the painting was included in her solo show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York.
Although the composition recalls Bosch in its combination of multiple scenes, Carrington’s imagery is more eclectic and mystical than the Dutch painter’s biblical tableaus. Its title refers to a 7th-century Merovingian king and ruler of Gaul; the vignettes are organised according to the four elements (water, air, earth and fire) and borrow from sources including Irish mythology, Indigenous Mexican symbolism, alchemy, paganism and more.
“Leonora studied with great care and attention both the northern Renaissance painters and the Quattrocento, and Les Distractions de Dagobert combines these influences in an extraordinary exploration of objects and textures, conjuring chromatic fire and illuminating our inner space in a fiery meditation,” Gabriel Weisz Carrington, the artist’s son and a professor at Universidad Autónoma de México, said in a statement.
The painting featured prominently in the major exhibition Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity, which was on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice in 2022 and the Museum Barberini in Potsdam in 2022-23. Its forthcoming appearance at Sotheby’s will mark the first time it will have been offered for sale in nearly three decades.
Sotheby’s has notched a string of successes bringing works by women Surrealists to auction in recent years. In addition to establishing Carrington’s current high price under the hammer, the auction house set a new record for Remedios Varo when it sold her mystical, musical self-portrait Armonía (Autorretrato sugerente) (1956) in 2020 for $6.1m. The firm set the highwater mark for Argentine Surrealist Leonor Fini’s work at auction when, in 2021, it sold her painting Autoportrait au scorpion (1938) for $2.3m. That same year, Sotheby’s established a new auction record for any work by a Latin American artist when it sold Frida Kahlo’s Diego y Yo (1949) for $34.8m.
So far, Carrington’s painting is the only major lot by a woman that the three major auction houses—Sotheby’s, Christie’s and Phillips—have announced they will offer in their spring sales in New York. All three have works by Jean-Michel Basquiat coming up for sale at similar or higher price points to Les Distractions de Dagobert. Christie’s evening sale of 20th-century art will feature multiple Monet paintings with seven- and eight-figure estimates. Sotheby’s Modern evening sale will also include a major Lucio Fontana work from Dallas collectors Howard and Cindy Rachofsky that is expected to make $20m to $30m and Francis Bacon’s first full-scale portrait of his lover George Dyer, with a $30m to $50m estimate.
