Leonora Carrington's work now worth 23 million

Les Distractions de Dagobert, painted in 1945, two years after Leonora Carrington moved to Mexico, is a marvellous and exceptional example of her work, where surrealism and European mythology are mixing with the bright colours of Mexico. 

The painting has just sold at Christies, New York, for £22,500,000. Now there's a sum of money that Leonora Carrington never saw in her lifetime. She died in 2011 at the age of 94.

The painting was sold to the founder of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires, Eduardo Costantini, who after the sale said of the painting:- 

“An iconic painting, The Distractions of Dagobert is one of the most admired works in the history of surrealism and an unparalleled masterpiece of Latin American art. This masterpiece will be part of a collection where, amongst others, two important works by  Remedios Varo and another record-breaking Frida Kahlo are also found.”

Finding Dora Maar : An Artist, an Address Book, a Life by Brigitte Benkemoun, translated by Jody Gladding - Book Review

 Sue's Reviews 

Finding Dora Maar: An Artist, an Address Book, a Life
by 

Brigitte Benkemoun,

 

Jody Gladding (Translation)

Sue's review

Jul 05, 2023  ·  edit

really liked it

bookshelves: biog-memoir, art-history, art-and-artists

Fascinating book about the Surrealists in Paris especially photographer Dora Maar who knew them all. Her photographs are every bit as strange as the more contrived work of some of the others associated with the surrealist movement.

The fascinating thing about Brigitte Benkemoun's book is that it's based on a chance find at an online auction. She bought a used vintage diary and found Dora Maar's address book at the back. This happenstance is pure Surrealism, I love it.

As for the book, some great research has gone into the writing and I will definitely read it again.

The Lives of the Surrealists by Desmond Morris - book review

 I will return to this book more than once, I'm sure. It contains brief but useful biographies of a number of the surrealists, 32 in all, compiled by an author who was one of them, albeit a late comer. Desmond Morris shows us that some very famous artists, including Francis Bacon, Henry Moore and Picasso, who are not generally described as surrealists were nonetheless closely engaged in surrealism. 

Morris was part of the British tranche of surrealism and personally knew many of those he writes about, giving the writing sometimes a humorous, gossipy quality. As an anthropologist and the author of The Naked Ape, he knows about we humans with our quirks and urges.. Some people have criticised this slightly irreverent take but he says himself, in his introduction, that his intention was not to contribute to the vast quantity of tomes on Art History, but to tell briefly the human lives of his chosen Surrealist artists, which he does in a readable and entertaining way. He's also been criticised for the inclusion of only one work of art by each artist. Anyone who has ever tried to compile such a book about artists will understand why he hasn't included more; getting permission to include works by known artists is incredibly difficult and printing good colour reproductions is expensive.  

Just a shame he didn't chose to write about a few more of the women involved in the movement. To include Roland Penrose with barely a mention of Lee Miller is impolite and to largely ignore such artists as Toyen, Ithyll Colquhoun, Dora Maar, Remedios Varo, Kay Sage and Claude Cahun - not to mention Frida Kahlo, which he doesn't - is almost inexcusable.

Leonora - a Novel by Elena Poniatowska (review)

This novel, expertly translated by Amanda Hopkinson, seems to me to capture the essence of this fascinating and sometimes troubled artist in a way that no straight biography ever could. Leonora Carrington was a true surrealist, though she rejected their political and sexist ideology; Surrealism was fundamentally about plumbing the depths of the human psyche and her depths were greater than most. So were her heights; she was the anarchic, ambidextrous child, the White Mare, the rebellious hyena and the Giantess.

Leonora’s imagery is extraordinary in its density, its obscurity and Elena Poniatowska, who knew the artist well in the last decades of her life, comes close to explaining Leonora’s meanings by divining the origins of her thinking. The author’s writing is densely descriptive, like the artist’s painting. It takes the reader on a journey beginning just below the surface of family life in Crookhey Hall, Leonora’s childhood home, where the infant Leonora is convinced she is a horse and ends with Leonora communing with dolphins in Mexico. That necessity for a journey is the novelist’s prerogative, there are no pictorial illustrations but why should there be when the writing is so vivid?

I have studied Leonora Carrington over a number of years and seen as many of her paintings as is possible in Europe; my knowledge of the subject has not been challenged by this novelization of her life. I picked up a single minor inaccuracy in the title of a painting, which faced with the sweep of the story is insignificant. I won’t read a straight biography of Leonora Carrington again, the basic facts are already known and for the rest, this remarkable, imaginative account by Elena Poniatowska will do for me.