The $28.5 million result obliterated the artist’s previous auction high of $3.3 million, established two years ago, also at Sotheby’s.
Leonora Carrington, Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945). Courtesy of Sotheby’s.
The frenetic scene is Carrington’s version of a Boschian garden of earthly delights, illustrating the decadent life of Dagobert I, the storied 7th-century Frankish king of the Merovingian dynasty. The artist was 28 and pregnant with her first child when she made the work.
“It’s one of her great paintings,” said dealer Emmanuel Di Donna, who included it in “Surrealism in Mexico,” a 2019 exhibition at his Manhattan gallery. “It’s got very complex imagery, all those different vignettes.”
That imagery is wild and specific: Hybrid creatures, which appear to be part-human, part-animal, part-plant, carry out mysterious rituals. The artist drew on medieval European history, scientific literature of the time, and Celtic and Mexican mythology to create the iconography.
At the center of the composition is a king in a red robe, surrounded by a panoply of visions or hallucinations, like a flying woman with a stag head, a man consumed by flames, and another woman stretched out on a boat with a baby’s face painted on her head.
Prices for female Surrealists, some of whom flocked to Mexico during World War II, have been steadily rising, and fresh records have been set in recent years for Frida Kahlo ($34.9 million, notched in 2021) and Leonor Fini ($2.3 million, also in 2021).
No comments:
Post a Comment