Leonora Carrington’s death at the age of 94 in May of last year — together with Dorothea Tanning’s, at 101, this past January — marked the end of an era. The New York Times, in its obituary, described Carrington as “one of the last living links to the world of André Breton, Man Ray, and Miró,” but the eccentric artist and writer wasn’t just a link to that world — she lived it. Historically, Carrington and her Surrealist sisters have been both overshadowed and vastly outsold by their male counterparts. But with museum exposure and auction prices on the rise, Carrington is fast approaching a tipping point. She’s been featured in several well-received recent Surrealism surveys, including “In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States,” which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in January and will travel to Quebec and Mexico City. "Leonora," a historical novel based on her life by Elena Poniatowska, has been a hit in Mexico, and a boat-shaped cradle sculpture with the punning title "La cuna (The Cradle)," 1945, was offered in last month’s Latin American art sale at Christie’s New York with her highest ever estimate, $1.5 million to $2.5 million. According to Wendi Norris, of Frey Norris Contemporary & Modern, in San Francisco, which in 2008 hosted “The Talismanic Lens,” the artist’s first major U.S. show in 10 years, “Leonora is emerging in the public consciousness as the iconoclast she was.” The long-deferred attention is a bittersweet coda to a life that Carrington’s friend, the art historian and child psychiatrist Salomon Grimberg, says, “personified Surrealism.”
Carrington’s unusual personality emerged early. Born in 1917 to a family of wealthy British industrialists, she began to draw avidly by age 4. By 9 she’d been expelled from the first of several boarding schools, having been deemed “mentally deficient,” according to the 2004 monograph "Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy, and Art" by Susan L. Aberth, for such proclivities as writing with her left hand, in mirror image. Her parents tried to tame their strange, beautiful daughter, even formally introducing her to aristocratic society, but at 18 she set off against their wishes for art school in London. Ironically it was a gift from Carrington's mother — a catalogue of the First International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 — that turned her on to both the movements and Max Ernst, whose work affected her so viscerally that she described the reaction as being "like burning, inside," Aberth recounts. They met at a London party in 1937, and it didn't take long for Ernst, 26 years her senior, to leave his wife.
Swept into his circle in France, the young student blossomed as an artist and a Surrealist, distinguishing herself with actions like serving overnight guests omelets filled with their own hair, cut off in the night, or slathering her feet in mustard at a restaurant. Amid these theatrics, her paintings from this period deepened in symbolism. "The Inn of the Dawn Horse," 1937–38, an early self-portrait in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows Carrington willful and wild haired, communing with a lactating hyena, a galloping horse, and a flying white rocking horse, with a mysterious smear suggesting supernatural activity. This “era of paradise,” as she later called it, lasted only until 1939, however, when the German Ernst was interned by the French. Carrington suffered a nervous breakdown, which was followed by a harrowing incarceration in a Spanish mental institution, recounted in a 1944 memoir titled "En bas" (“Down Below”).
Carrington’s work does suggest a mind unhinged, albeit a highly educated one. Animals rule, symbols of alchemy and the occult abound, art-historical referents run rampant, and humans are often replaced by otherworldly creatures such as the Sidhe of Irish legend — fairy people from whom, Carrington’s Irish grandmother told her, the family was descended. “She was a bit fey,” says Carmen Melián, senior specialist in the Latin American department at Sotheby’s. “[Her imagery] can get quite dark, while other times it has that flight of fancy and that special duende, as they say in Spanish, that magic spark.”
When Carrington escaped the asylum she headed straight for diplomat Renato Leduc, a friend of Picasso, at the Mexican embassy. The two entered a marriage of convenience and fled for New York, where Carrington’s early supporter, the English eccentric Edward James, would later help her get her first solo show, at Pierre Matisse’s gallery in 1947. But she spurned commercial success, retreating to Mexico in 1943 and ensconcing herself among the community of European émigrés, including fellow artists Remedios Varo and Kati Horna and film director Luis Buñuel. She later married the Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz, with whom she had two sons.
Although Carrington’s iconography stayed true to her Anglo roots, because of her long association with Mexico she has historically been included in sales of Latin American art. “I’m a little bit guilty of that,” says New York dealer Mary-Anne Martin, who founded the Latin American art department at Sotheby’s. Back in the 1970s, works by Mexican artists didn’t begin to gain traction until they were marketed together as a category, and “now it’s sort of hard to undo it,” she says. Carrington works do appear in some Impressionist and modern sales, but, says Melián, she benefits from being a comparatively bigger fish in the Latin American pond.
Today, Martin says, “If you get a really prize example” of a Carrington work — paintings from the 1940s being the most coveted — “it should be easily over $1 million.” Currently available at her New York gallery is "999," from 1948, priced at $1.6 million. Numerology was a recurring theme in Carrington’s early work; according to Grimberg, the number 999, alluding to past, present, and future, signifies eternal evolution. “It’s very well painted and very mysterious and amusing,” says Martin.
The challenge with such prizes is to get them to the market. “People don’t want to let them go,” explains Virgilio Garza, head of Latin American art at Christie’s New York, “and when they do sell, they expect important prices.” Christie’s holds Carrington’s auction record, set in 2009 when "The Giantess," also known as "The Guardian of the Egg," circa 1947, realized $1,482,500 (est. $800,000-$1.2 million), more than twice her previous record, set a year earlier.
But experts agree that there is room for growth for later works, which have historically been less valuable. In fact, Raman Frey, co director of Frey Norris, believes that the artist reached her full flower only later in her career, “once she had established herself independently from the European Surrealists.” Last spring, El arbol de la vida, 1960, a densely layered, mature canvas, earned $578,500 at Sotheby’s New York. Garza points to works on paper as another underappreciated sector of her market. “Sometimes they’re watercolor, sometimes they’re more ink-based, but they have the sense of strangeness and the magical narratives, and they’re beautifully done,” he says. “You can get a great, interesting work on paper for $20,000 to $50,000.”
Carrington collectors tend to buy in depth, and more than once a work has come up in an obscure sale and achieved an astounding result. “People think they’re the only ones who know about something, and then they all bid against each other,” says Martin. One such offering was "Oleo sobre tela," 1953, a petite oil on canvas that nine bidders at Rago Arts and Auction Center sent soaring past its $20,000 high estimate to earn $117,800, the sale’s top price, just days before the artist’s death.
Such successes — and those anticipated for the spring auctions — may coax sellers out of the closet, as should long-overdue scholarly attention. Grimberg is currently at work on a catalogue raisonné, and in 2013 and 2014, a Frey Norris – organized show will tour internationally. In the meantime, “In Wonderland,” on view at the Musée National des Beaux-Arts in Quebec City from June 7 through September 3, is exceeding expectations; its LACMA iteration received 90,000 visitors before it closed.
It’s impossible to know what Carrington would make of her works’ newfound desirability, but she would certainly prefer to be remembered for her art, having soundly rejected the notion of being merely a muse to her more famous male consorts. As she once scoffed, “All that means is you’re someone else’s object.”
To see works by Leonora Carrington, click the slide show.
This article appears in the June issue of Art+Auction.