Record Breaker: The Fantastic Journey of Leonora Carrington

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Record Breaker: The Fantastic Journey of Leonora Carrington

Courtesy Sotheby's

Leonora Carrington, Les Distractions de Dagobert, 1945.

Born in England, formed as a surrealist in Paris, residing in Mexico since 1942, Leonora Carrington had her first solo exhibition in New York in 1948. It was held at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, arranged by her patron, Edward James, an eccentric English collector who also championed the work of Salvador Dalí. The works Carrington created in this show are considered to be among the best of her long career (she died at the age of 94 in 2011). Among them is Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945), an exquisitely detailed, extravagantly imagined composition that seems to channel Hieronymus Bosch, fairytales, occultism, and the personal dreamworld of its creator. This magisterial work set the auction record for the artist at Sotheby’s New York on May 15, 2024, when it sold for $28.3 million against an estimate of $12–18 million.

The titular Dagobert, red-robed and white-bearded, rides a chariot with an equine figurehead, pulled on a cord by a small blue gowned person. Around them, fantastic scenes open out in multiple spaces, with creatures half-plant, half-animal cavorting amid glowing fires burning—evidently the distractions referred to in the title. The iridescent colors and sharpness of detail are enabled by egg tempera, a challenging medium used in the Renaissance and rediscovered by a number of mid-20th century figurative painters. Of Carrington’s works, Edward James said that they “are not merely painted, they are brewed. They sometimes seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.” And yet, while avidly pursuing the surrealist project of “pure psychic automatism”—as André Breton expressed it—she always did so with a great degree of technical refinement and precision.

Born in 1917 in Lancashire, the daughter of a textile tycoon, Carrington rebelled early and often. Her parents pushed her into society. At 18, she was presented as a debutante to King George V and Queen Mary; she remembered the tiara she wore for the occasion as “biting into my skull.” An escape route presented itself in 1937, when she found herself seated next to the artist Max Ernst at a London dinner party. Almost instantly, the two fell in love and set off for the Continent, settling in Paris. He called her “the bride of the wind” and encouraged her study art as well as more arcane subjects like alchemy, astrology, and the Tarot. During the chaos of the Nazi invasion of France they were separated, after which Carrington had a psychotic break and ended up in a hospital in Spain. A marriage of convenience to a Spanish diplomat enabled her to escape Europe for Mexico, where she spent the rest of her life. There she fell in with a group of like-minded local and emigré artists including the Hungarian photographer Imre “Chiki” Weisz, who became her husband in 1946. In Mexico, Carrington found a congenial cultural atmosphere which reawakened her desire to plumb the depths of the unconscious and and the realms of the fantastic.

Despite the attention she received for the Pierre Matisse show, Carrington remained little known outside Mexico for most of her life. Recently, however, amid surg ing interest in female surrealists, she is being given her proper place in art history, and her works are being seen in major museum shows. In 2022, Les Distractions de Dagobert was the thematic centerpiece of the exhibition “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity” at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. Now that it has changed hands, the painting has been requested for an upcoming exhibition, “Surrealism," to be held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from November 8, 2025–February 15, 2026.

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