Sotheby’s has announced the upcoming auction of a major work by underappreciated Surrealist painter, novelist and mage, the late Leonora Carrington. The posted announcement says:
The most significant work by the celebrated Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, Les Distractions de Dagobert, will be offered during Sotheby’s Modern Evening Auction in New York, where it will become the most valuable work by the artist ever offered at auction with an estimate of $12 – 18 million. Appearing on the market for the first time in nearly 30 years, the work is widely recognized as the defining masterpiece of Carrington’s career, showcasing rich surreal imagery and luminous color on a large scale. The work was painted in 1945, just two years after Carrington’s arrival in Mexico from Europe as part of a wave of Surrealist artists who emigrated to the Americas in the wake of the war, signaling the beginning of a period of transformational productivity and artistic independence for the artist. Once in Mexico City, alongside the community of “exiled” Surrealists including Remedios Varo, Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, and others, as well as modern Mexican painters including Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Carrington shook off the role of “muse” assigned to her by André Breton to achieve an unprecedented level of mastery and freedom in her painting. Les Distractions de Dagobert is the crowning achievement of this critical period, the most significant milestone in her artistic career, and a major landmark in Surrealism.
