But in 2002, when dealer Wendi Norris visited the British-born artist at her home in Mexico, Carrington was known primarily to Surrealism enthusiasts. One was the art historian Whitney Chadwick, who wrote what is now regarded as the most important book about female Surrealists (now in its second edition); Chadwick recommended that Norris seek out Carrington.

Norris, who was just getting her start as a dealer, followed Chadwick’s tip, expecting to spend just a few hours with the artist. She ended up chatting with Carrington all day—mostly about politics and literature, not art, as was Carrington’s preference. But because Norris did not initially come out of the art world, she brought a perspective to Carrington’s paintings that the artist prized.

“I don’t have an art history background. I have an economics background,” the San Francisco–based dealer told ARTnews, speaking by phone. “She really appreciated my way of viewing her paintings. She knew I was seeing something in a way that wasn’t through a scholarly lens, but in the way most people probably would.”

That first visit was the start of a friendship and business relationship between Norris and Carrington that lasted through the artist’s death in 2011, and continues to this day via her estate. In 2022, Norris’s gallery lent one of the five paintings by Carrington—Portrait of Madame Dupin (1949), featuring a lithe figure whose neck sprouts a flowering branch—that featured in the 2022 Venice Biennale. This week, her gallery will spotlight Carrington’s art once more, this time at Art Basel, the world’s most preeminent art fair, where Norris’s dealership is making its Swiss debut.

The booth will feature Portrait of Madame Dupin and other gems by Carrington, including one piece that includes text Carrington wrote backwards, so that it is only legible when a mirror is held to it. (“I think only Carrington and Leonardo da Vinci were able to do that,” Norris conjectured.) Dealers regularly bring older works to Art Basel, but these Carringtons are likely to be some of the most art historically important pieces at the fair this year.

Their presence in Norris’s booth testifies to her commitment to Surrealism, a movement which her gallery has quietly helped rewrite in the past decade. Although Norris’s gallery is not limited to Surrealism specifically, with contemporary artists such as Chitra Ganesh and María Magdalena Campos-Pons on her roster, it is shows for modernists such as Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Wolfgang Paahlen, Alice Rahon, and Remedios Varo that have defined her programming. Norris has been exhibiting these artists for over a decade, but only recently have they begun appearing regularly in blockbuster exhibitions that reassess Surrealism, often by adding more women and non-European artists to the movement’s canon.

But, Norris said, “I didn’t start out wanting to represent Surrealists.” In fact, she didn’t start out in the art world at all.

While studying economics during the ’90s, she spent time abroad in Madrid, where she was given the option to take one class outside her chosen discipline. She chose to take an art history course, and as part of it, she visited the Prado. “I remember just standing in front of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas,” she recalled. “I had goosebumps.”

Though she had a strong attachment to art, Norris continued to pursue a business career, graduating in 1996 from Georgetown University with an MBA and soon taking a job as a Paris-based director of strategic planning for the biopharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb. After that, she worked for several years at Scale Eight, which she recalls as a “really geeky data storage company that was probably ahead of its time.”

Then the dot-com bubble burst, and Norris sought a new direction. “I decided I needed to change what I was doing and do something that I loved, and I just kind of came to it naturally,” Norris said of her transition to the art world. “I had no real idea about the art industry—and it is an industry. Thankfully, I had a business background where I analyzed industries, so I was able to get a sense of it. But it took a while.” She went on to open her eponymous gallery in 2002.

Gallerists are generally not fond of talking publicly about their businesses in percentages and numbers, but Norris credits her business background with making her comfortable with doing just that. In 2017, amid a wave of gallery closures, Norris made the decision to turn her space nomadic, staging shows beyond one base in San Francisco. In an Artsy op-ed, she said that “less than 10 percent” of the gallery’s sales were actually done in its space in San Francisco. “The data,” she wrote, “is not adding up for me or for my artists with respect to maintaining a stationary gallery space.”

It was a gamble, and Norris said it paid off. Through the offsite program, she has staged shows by Carrington and Varo in New York. The Carrington one, held in 2019, ended up in New York Times critic Roberta Smith’s list of the top art shows of the year. The Museum of Modern Art bought a Carrington painting from that show that now hangs in the institution’s Surrealism gallery.

Since the pandemic, however, most of Norris’s shows have been staged in San Francisco, whether at the gallery’s headquarters or elsewhere in the city. She said she is now more focused on “helping my artists realize their visions and meeting them where they are.”

And part of that project has been finding unusual forms of crossover between her Surrealists and the contemporary artists she represents.

Norris said that María Magdalena Campos-Pons, who recently had a Brooklyn Museum survey, joined the gallery in the first place because it had shown work by Remedios Varo, a Spanish-born Surrealist who made a name for herself in Mexico. Campos-Pons’s first show was with Norris’s gallery in 2017; the catalogue for her 2023 Brooklyn show ended up featuring a reproduction of a Varo painting within its first few pages.

Last year, Campos-Pons won a MacArthur “genius” award, a moment that Norris has continued to celebrate alongside the record-breaking Sotheby’s sale of the Carrington painting earlier this year. “I want to continue to be the catalyst for these momentous art moments for each and every one of my artists,” Norris said.

Before the Blade helicopters disembark Friday for a Memorial Day of rosé and white linen Out East, this week provides time for reflection now that the marquee New York auction sales are over. These few weeks before Art Basel—when the art world decamps for Switzerland for what is widely considered the world’s most important fair for modern and contemporary art—are typically a time for considering how the market is doing. And, while top collectors (and dealers) head to the evening sales to make their big purchases, the day sales are a far better instrument for measuring the market’s current temperature and spotting upcoming squalls.

At Christie’s, the postwar and contemporary day sales had 296 lots—almost 30 more than this past November’s sales—with an aggregate estimated total between $66.5 million and $99.8 million. The final hammer price for the collected works was $59.7 million, just below estimate. With premiums, that climbs to $77.7 million, a figure comfortably in the estimated range. Add in a healthy sell-through rate of 84 percent, a few ticks lower if including the withdrawn lots, and the picture is that of a functional market. Sotheby’s contemporary day sale proved even more successful: the aggregate total for its 345 lots (compared to 338 last fall) was just over $78 million with fees, against a $63.8 million–$90.8 million estimate. Sell-through rates there reached 83 percent, again, a few ticks lower including lots withdrawn.

With their lower values, day sales may not be as sexy as evening sales, where artworks regularly sell for tens of millions, but they carry indicative trends. As we noted in January, Indigenous art is seeing a long-overdue rise in recognition, which the market is reflecting. That’s one reason to explain why, even as numerous market stars have struggled in recent seasons, Emmi Whitehorse’s Canyon Lake I  (2001) sold for nearly 10 times its $18,000 high estimate, to bring in $177,800 with fees at Phillips modern and contemporary day sale.

But this season, as a dealer told me earlier this week, wasn’t so much about setting records—though a couple were set—but rather living to fight another day. It’s been clear since the lots were announced last month that specialists at all three houses were scrounging to find the best work they could to auction and, given the number of guarantees and irrevocable bids at the sales, fighting just as hard to sell them.

“What you saw this season was a defensive posture, where the houses decided to trade the possibility of breakout bidding and competition for certainty and security,” Alex Glauber, an art adviser and president of the Association of Professional Art Advisors, told ARTnews. “Sure, there isn’t a lot of appetite for risk right now, but this isn’t two or three years ago.”

There have been a lot of high-value estates coming to market in the past few years, from the $1.5 billion Paul Allen sale at Christie’s in 2022 to last year’s sale of Emily Fisher Landau’s collection at Sotheby’s. But this season’s big prize, to the extent there was one, was the modestly valued Rosa de la Cruz collection: that put pressure on the houses to source works, which drove consigners to think hard about the economic lay of the land before putting up a work. The houses accurately took the temperature of a collector class that was finally coming down to earth after riding a low-interest-rate wave into the stratosphere, and wisely responded with reasonable reserves and estimates that resonated with those collectors happy to spend if the price was right.

“The market relearned the value of a dollar,” Glauber said. “People, I think, are much more thoughtful about the value of their money and what they can do with that and what they can get.”

The takeaway from many advisers and market-watchers seems to be that, in place of the frothy post-Covid market, we now have a more cerebral collectors’ market shorn of the finance and tech bros who treat artworks more as commodities and points on a stock chart. It’s worth wondering, then, if or how this new line of thinking will affect galleries in the near future, especially for those dealers who jacked up primary prices for early and midcareer artists amid the 2021 and 2022 secondary-market bonanza.

“Galleries and artists need to understand that three or four stellar auction results don’t mean the price should automatically move up. You need to play this a little more like a chess game,” art adviser Ralph DeLuca told ARTnews. “Often you see younger artists go to bigger galleries, and prices go up because they’re used to selling at a higher price point and they have more overhead. But I don’t know if that’s the best thing for a younger artist’s career in most cases.”

The one major estate on sale this season, that of Rosa de la Cruz, did admirably, and it included real cornerstones of contemporary art history like Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose 1992 work“Untitled” (America #3) hammered at $11.5 million ($13.6 million with fees).

Of course, there were casualties this season too. At the last moment, Christie’s withdrew its top lot, Brice Marden’s Event(2004–07), which was estimated at $30 million to $50 million and had been set to break the artist’s $30.9 million auction record. After the sale ended with a $114.7 million total, Christie’s chairman of 20th- and 21st-century art Alex Rottersaid that decision was made by the house.

“It wasn’t Brice’s evening, and we’re not willing to jeopardize the market of an artist like that,” Rotter said in the post-sale press conference.

Some pointed to the withdrawal of the Marden as a sign that the market was still suffering from post-Covid-induced anxiety fueled by a lack of masterpieces and collectors willing to part with the cash. In short, the estimate may have just been unrealistic.

“Often, there are aspirational estimates which come from the houses trying to meet a consignor’s aspirational expectations,” one insider told me. “This season’s estimates were much more reasonable, but in this case the market pushed back.”

If the market is in a malaise, you wouldn’t have known it from the sale of Leonora Carrington’s 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert, which went for $28.5 million with fees this past Wednesday at the Sotheby’s modern evening sale, a record for the artist and a wonderful price for a painting that was universally praised as brilliant.

“For every example of a weak market, there’s an example to prove the opposite,” Sara Friedlander, deputy chairman of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s, told ARTnews. “There were surprises this week across all three auction houses, and that’s the magic of the auction.”

Friedlander pointed to the sale of a 1964 Andy Warhol “Flowers” series painting—auction sales of which there have been many—that hammered at $30 million, its high estimate, with four bidders competing. With premium, the price totaled $35 million.

Christie’s deserves special mention for dealing with a “technology security issue” (that’s hacking, folks, most likely a targeted cyberattack) that may have unforeseen ramifications. No one would have begrudged a delayed sale or two on the house’s part, but they soldiered on. And rightly so. These houses are in the business of making consignments and selling art. Not every sale can be a blockbuster. It’s impossible. And comparing year-over-year to the recent past, when it was effectively free to borrow money—and the world was going through a (hopefully) once-in-a-lifetime crisis—seems callously dishonest.

“In the most public way possible, all three auction houses had to do some very heavy lifting to answer the question that’s been asked over and over again, ‘Is there a still market?’” art adviser Gabriela Palmieri told ARTnews a few days after the sales, when everyone had caught their breath.

“The simple answer, against all naysayers, is yes. In many cases the houses were able to sell works that had been sitting on the market and hadn’t sold because of different expectations and prices. They found the buyers. At the end of the day I really believe that people need to look at the fact that now we’re back to establishing trends, and stop focusing on outliers.”

THE HEADLINES

CARRINGTON’S SURREAL NIGHT. The Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington is the talk of last night’s otherwise mostly mixed auction at Sotheby’s in New York. Her 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert surpassed previous records with $28.5 million paid with fees, reports Harrison Jacobs for ARTnews. Surrealism is getting a lot of love this year with exhibitions marking its centennial, but the fact that a female artist like Carrington is setting impressive auction records is also a positive sign of change. In fact, “the recent surge of interest in previously overlooked women artists connected with the Surrealist movement marks a profoundly significant cultural shift,” stated Allegra Bettini, head of Sotheby’s New York modern art evening sales. Overall, Wednesday’s sale yielded $235 million, led by a Monet hammering at $34.8 million with fees, though there continued to be signs of nervousness from buyers, following tepid sales and Christie’s website security crisis during the first two nights of New York’s marquee art auctions.

BEAM ME UP, JUDGE. Two men who found the lost, first model of the USS Enterprise prototype for the TV series Star Trek are now blasting towards court and suing Heritage Auctions for fraud and deceptive trade practice, reports the South China Morning Post. In April, the auction house announced with joy that they were returning the model to Eugene Roddenberry Jr, the son of the series creator, Gene Roddenberry. But the two men who found the model in a storage unit, Dustin Riach and Jason Rivas, claim the auction house questioned their title to the model, and convinced them to sell it for a low price of $500,000 to Roddenberry Entertainment, violating property law, according to their lawyer, an allegation the auction house has denied.

THE DIGEST

Spain’s ministry of culture is unveiling a trove of Roman archaeological treasures that researchers were able to recover from the temporarily drained reservoir of Valdecañas in Cáceres province, in a race against looters and rising water levels. The Roman city of Augustobriga was flooded by the 1957-built reservoir, but between 2019 and 2023 much of it resurfaced due to drought, making it possible for researchers to save precious remnants, including a megalithic dolmen, the complete cartography of Augustobriga, and stone boars made by the pre-Roman Vettones people. [El Pais]

A believed-lost, over 40-year-old statue of retired Queens resident and Italian-American ‘master seamstress’ Maria Pulsone was found by the model’s granddaughter, and will go on view at the Italian American Museum in New York, when it reopens this summer. The work will be included in the museum’s exhibition about the garment district and the story of the Italian immigrant experience. [WWD]

The new Kunstsilo modern and contemporary art museum has opened in a former 1930s grain silo in southern Norway. Vertiginous concrete tubes in the massive, vacant waterfront structure have gone from housing 15,000 tons of grain to displaying one of the most important collections of Nordic modern art in the world, including the holdings of collector Nicolai Tangen, whose foundation co-funded the museum. [The Guardian]

Hoor Al Qasimi will be the next artistic director of the 2026 Biennale of Sydney. Qasimi is currently the president and director of the Sharjah Art Foundation, and the daughter of the Emir of Sharjah, Sheikh Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi. [The Art Newspaper]

The Joan Mitchell Foundation has announced Sarah Roberts will become its inaugural senior director of curatorial affairs. Roberts previously worked at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as Andrew W. Mellon Curator and Head of Painting and Sculpture. [Artforum]

Curator and author Lou Stoppard discusses her current exhibit, Annie Ernaux and Photography at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, which bridges Ernaux’s observant, impersonal writing style with photography. Inspiration for the project came with Ernaux’s own description of her writing in Exteriors, as an attempt “to describe reality as through the eyes of a photographer and to perceive the mystery and opacity of the lives I encountered.” [Literary Hub]

THE KICKER

HOCKNEY’S DRAGONS. The biggest star attraction at this weekend’s opening of “Turando” at the Los Angeles Opera, are not the singers. It’s the artist David Hockney, or more accurately, the set design he made for the opera in the 1990’s. Compared to German Expressionist filmmaking, Hockney’s design is a “virtuosic testament to the artist’s lifelong exploration of abstract figurative painting and his abiding love of opera,” writes David A. Keeps for The Los Angeles Times. In his biography, Hockney also talks about the project: “I had seen many productions of ‘Turando,’ most of them kitsch beyond belief, overdone Chinoiserie, and too many dragons … I suggested that we take the dragons away and put them into the roofs, in forms that felt like dragons.” The resulting “harsh edges, strong diagonals, mad perspectives,” a fantastical scene of red and ultramarine, will be brought back to life during this weekend’s first performance.

While 96 percent of lots sold and several bidding wars broke out, nervousness continued to be evident among buyers through the large number of incremental bids, 32 out of 50 works sold with guarantees and/or irrevocable bids, as well as several works by blue-chip artists that passed or sold well below estimates, including two by Pablo Picasso. Two oil paintings, Georges Braque’s Anvers, le mât (1906) and Sam Francis’ Yellow, Orange and Blue (1958), were also withdrawn prior to the auction.

The first bit of drama in the evening occurred when five bidders competed for Calder’s 5-foot-high, 25-foot-wide mobile Blue Moon (1962), which carried an estimate of $7 million to $10 million. After more than five minutes, Lot 3 sold for $12.2 million, or $14.4 million with fees, to a buyer in the room. Auctioneer Oliver Barker would later openly ask a former staffer in the audience, “Are you bidding or just pointing at the Calder?”

Later, three bidders on the phones chased after Claude Monet’s Meules à Giverny (1893) for even more time at eight minutes. The colorful Impressionist painting of haystacks would hammer at $29.8 million, or $34.8 million with fees, an amount that prompted cheers and applause. It went to a buyer on the line with Sotheby’s deputy chairman for Asia, Jen Hua, on an estimate “in excess of $30 million.” The auction house said after the sale the painting sold to a buyer in Asia.

Shortly afterwards, interest in Leonora Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) proved to be even more competitive among six parties, including two in person.

The Surrealist painting featured behind Barker’s rostrum was already set to be a record-breaker with its estimate of $12 million to $18 million. But during the nearly ten-minute bidding war, Barker oversaw bids between senior vice president Alejandra Rossetti, Hua, and a person in the room, before the latter finally offered $24.5 million. Barker gave Rosetti and Hua time to counter-bid before raising his hammer, but there were no more new offers from the phones. “The gentleman has waited long enough,” Barker said.

That amount was finally enough to secure the Surrealist painting. At about $28.5 million with fees, Carrington’s previous auction record of $3.25 million set at Sotheby’s New York two years ago was obliterated and it even surpassed the auction records for fellow Surrealists Max Ernst ($24.4 million in 2022) and Salvador Dali ($21.7 million in 2011). And it turned out the purchase was three decades in the making.

After the sale, Sotheby’s identified the buyer as Top 200 collector Eduardo F. Costantini, an Argentinian developer, businessman and the founder of the Museum of Latin American Art in Buenos Aires.

“An iconic painting, The Distractions of Dagobert, is one the most admired works in the history of surrealism and an unparalleled masterpiece of Latin American art. I was the underbidder when she reached the artist’s record 30 years ago and tonight once again, we made a new auction record! This masterpiece will be part of a collection where amongst other two important works by Remedios Varo and another record breaking Frida Kahlo are also found,” Constantini said in a statement.

(When Sotheby’s sold Les Distractions de Dagobert to its anonymous consignor in 1995, it went for $475,000.)

After Monet and Carrington, René Magritte’s Le Banquet (circa 1955 to 1957) was the third highest lot of the night, selling for a hammer price of $15.5 million, or $18.1 million with fees, on an estimate of $15 million to $20 million. It also had a third-party guarantee.

Other lots which achieved eight figure sums were Monet’s Antibes vue de la Salis (1888) for $12 million hammer, $14.1 million with fees (estimate of $12 million to $18 million); Picasso’s Buste d’homme (1969) for a hammer price of $10.8 million, $12.7 million with fees (estimate of $8 million to $12 million); an untitled painting by Mark Rothko from 1969 which hammered at $9.5 million or $11.25 million with fees (estimate of $10 million to $15 million); as well as Édouard Manet’s Vase de fleurs, roses et lilas (1882) which sold for $10.1 million with fees (estimate of $7 million to $10 million).

Les Distractions de Dagobert wasn’t the only Surrealist work to get a bidding war. Varo’s Esquiador (Viajero) (1960) garnered bids for more than five minutes, including from Lulu R.C. de Creel, head of Sotheby’s Mexico. The work sold hammered for $3.4 million or about $4.2 million with fees, on an estimate of $1 million to $1.5 million. The auction house said Varo’s work went to a buyer in Asia.

Activity after the major Carrington sale was noticeably more subdued, with works like Picasso’s L’Enlèvement (1933) hammering at $600,000 or $762,000 with fees (estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million); Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure: Umbilicus getting a hammer price of $785,000 or just under $1 million with fees (estimate of $1.5 million to $2 million); and Vincent Van Gogh’s Tête de paysanne (1882) selling for a hammer of $620,000 or $787,400 with fees on an estimate of at least twice that at $1.5 million to $2.5 million.

Two works by blue-chip artists immediately prior to the van Gogh portrait would also fail to sell: Picasso’s Femme au chapeau (1941) (estimate of $6 million to $8 million), and the Henry Moore sculpture Working Model for Mother and Child: Block Seat (estimate of $1.2 million to $1.8 million).

One of the most notable declines in market value was seen in Hans Hofmann’s Lava (1960). The six-foot-tall oil-on-canvas painting sold at Christie’s for more than $8.8 million during a November evening sale in 2017, setting a record for the artist. The work was even featured on the cover of an exhibition catalogue for a survey at the Museum of Modern Art in 1963, and included in several retrospectives at the Tate, the Whitney, and the National Gallery in Washington. But, at Sotheby’s Thursday, Lava wasn’t that hot even with a third-party guarantee. It hammered at $3 million, or just under $3.7 million with fees on an estimate of $3 million to $5 million, going to a buyer on the phone with Sotheby’s Chairman of the Americas and former Guggenheim Museum director Lisa Dennison.

Near the end of the night was a reminder about how much one online bidder can mean amidst the ongoing website issues at Christie’s. Interest for Pierre Bonnard’s Nu s’habillant (1925) involved multiple Sotheby’s staffers on the phone which led to a back-and-forth between head of contemporary marquee private sales Charlotte van Dercook and an online bidder. After nearly three minutes, the online bidder with paddle number 25 would secure a hammer price of $2.5 million, or just over $3 million with fees, well above the estimate of $800,000 to $1.2 million.

“Thank you so much for your patience,” Barker said.

The painting, carrying a $12 million–$18 million estimate, hit that price after 10 minutes of bidding. Argentinian developer and businessman Eduardo F. Costantini—who was in the room—bid against buyers on the phone with Alejandra Rossetti, senior vice president for business development for the auction house in Miami, and Jen Hua, Sotheby’s deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Asia.

“An iconic painting, The Distractions of Dagobert, is one the most admired works in the history of surrealism and an unparalleled masterpiece of Latin American art. I was the underbidder when she reached the artist’s record 30 years ago and tonight once again, we made a new auction record! This masterpiece will be part of a collection where amongst other two important works by Remedios Varo and another record breaking  Frida Kahlo are also found,” Constantini said in a statement after the sale.

Costantini is an ARTnews Top 200 collector known for founding Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires. In 2001, he donated over 220 works of Latin American art to the museum, including numerous pieces by Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Costantini has been known to set records for Latin American artists by purchasing key works at auction.

In 2020, Costantini set records when he bought works by Remedios Varo and Wilfredo Lam. In 2020, at Sotheby’s, he purchased the latter’s Omi Obini (1945) for $9.6 million, making it the highest price ever achieved for a work by a Latin American artist at the time. Connstantini then broke that record in 2021 when he bought Frida Kahlo’s Diego y yo (Diego and I) at Sotheby’s for $34.9 million.

The price achieved for the Carrington on Wednesday far surpassed her previous record at auction, which was set two years ago for The Garden of Paracelsus (1957), when it sold for $3.2 million.

“The recent surge of interest in previously overlooked women artists connected with the Surrealist movement marks a profoundly significant cultural shift. Leonora Carrington has proved to be a lightning rod of attention, setting the stage for Les Distractions de Dagobert, the apotheosis of Carrington’s oeuvre, to take its place as a masterpiece of 20th-century art,” Allegra Bettini, the head of Sotheby’s modern art evening sales in New York, said in a statement prior to the sale.

As Bettini noted, the upsurge in prices for Carrington, who was born in England and based in Mexico for much of her career, tracks with a surge in interest in women Surrealists, a trend best exemplified by the 2022 edition of the Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani. That show was titled “The Milk of Dreams,” after a book of the same name by Carrington.

Les Distractions de Dagobert was featured in the exhibition “Surrealism and Magic: Enchanced Modernity,” which was on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, also in 2022.

Of the entire grouping of 58 works offered, 33 were backed by the auction house with a guarantee or an irrevocable bid. By the end of the two-hour sale led by auctioneer Oliver Barker, 7 lots went unsold.

The group of works surpassed the house’s $339.9 million collective low estimate for the sale, which drew of room only half full of spectators. Records were set for under-recognized artists whose secondary markets are less established, including Milton Avery, Leonora Carrington, Maximilien Luce and Jared French. Three lots were withdrawn prior to the sale’s start.

Claude Monet, Le Grand Canal et Santa Maria della Salute, 1908.

The work which fetched the highest price was Pablo Picasso’s 1932 canvas Femme nue couchée, which depicts the Spanish modernist’s muse Marie-Thérèse Walter in repose. It sold for $67.5 million, reaching its $60 million estimate and going to ex-Sotheby’s chairman and art advisor Amy Cappellazzo who was bidding in the room. Artnet News reported that the painting was being sold by the hedge-funder Steve Cohen.

Another big-ticket item was Paul Cézanne’s woodsy landscape The Glade (ca. 1895), which sold for $41.7 million with fees, against an estimate of $30 million. Coming to the sale with a guarantee, the work was one of three being deaccessioned by Ohio’s Toledo Museums of Art to benefit its acquisition fund, in a move that drew criticism ahead of the sale. The Cézanne and the other works by Henri Matisse and Pierre-Auguste Renoir being deaccessioned generated a total of $59.7 million.

Meanwhile, Claude Monet’s lush garden landscape Les Arceaux de roses, Giverny (1913) hammered at its low estimate on a bid of $20 million, going to a buyer on the phone with Sotheby’s Asia chairman Patty Wong. It went for a final price of $23.3 million. Another bidder on the phone with Wong won a four-foot-tall bronze sculpture by Alberto Giacometti, titled Femme de Venise II, for a final price of $17.5 million with fees. The result doubled the estimate of $8 million.

Pablo Picasso, Femme nue couchée, 1932.

A 1958 oil painting on paper by Willem de Kooning, titled Leaves in Weehawken, sold for $10 million to a bidder on the phone with Sotheby’s New York contemporary specialist Bame Fierro March, who triumphed over vice chairman of Sotheby’s fine arts division, Simon Shaw and another in the room, to win it. The hammer price was more than three times the low estimate.

Given his just-opened retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Philip Guston’s 1958 painting Nile was expected to be a major attraction at tonight’s sale. Offered in the sale with an irrevocable bid and sold to benefit a Texas philanthropic foundation, the work saw only tepid interest. The piece hammered below its $20 million estimate, ultimately selling for $18 million with fees.

Eight works came to sale under the descriptor “Eternal Style: A Private American Collection.” A UCC filing by Sotheby’s that was reviewed by ARTnews shows that the seller was the estate of the Florida philanthropist and museum benefactor Diane Belfer, however. The collector, who died at 94 in January, held onto several of the works for decades.

From Belfer’s holdings, two paintings by Jean Dubuffet, both depicting human limbs appearing in abstracted forms, sold for a collective $8.1 million. A bidder on the phone with Sotheby’s New York contemporary specialist Jackie Wachter won a 1964 canvas of two figures by Picasso, titled Nu allongé et buste d’homme, which sold for $4.2 million, hammering below its estimate of $4.5 million and likely going to the irrevocable bidder.

Leonora Carrington, The Garden of Paracelsus, 1957.

From the same grouping, Milton Avery’s 1945 canvas The Letter, which depicts an interior scene featuring a woman reclining on a bed, sold for $6 million, three times the low estimate of $2 million. In the process, a new auction record for the artist was set. The result surpassed the artist’s previous auction milestone of $5.6 million, set at Sotheby’s in 2014 by the sale of his 1950 painting March and Sally Outdoors, and it comes ahead of an Avery retrospective due to open at London’s Royal Academy of Arts in July.

While brand-name artists like Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso anchored the modern art sale, the spotlight is shifting to artists who have been historically undervalued and rising at auction. This was especially apparent at the Sotheby’s sale on Monday, which included a painting by Surrealist Leonora Carrington, whose market has ben ascending alongside renewed institutional attention to her legacy. (Her writings and art provided the inspiration for the title of this year’s Venice Biennale, which also includes her work.)

Carrington’s 1957 painting The Garden of Paracelsus, an eerie scene riddled with ghostly figures, some headless and others with animal features, sold for $3.3 million. That sum is more than double its $1.5 million estimate. The result surpassed Carrington’s previous auction record of $2.4 million, set at Sotheby’s New York in 2014.

The show takes its name from a series of drawings that the British-born Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington did while she was living in Mexico during the 1950s. Later on, these drawings were published as a children’s book; an English-language edition came out in 2017.

In a statement, Alemani said, “Told in a dreamlike style that seemed to terrify young and old alike, Carrington’s stories describe a world set free, brimming with possibilities. But it is also the allegory of a century that imposed intolerable pressure on the individual, forcing Carrington into a life of exile: locked up in mental hospitals, an eternal object of fascination and desire, yet also a figure of startling power and mystery, always fleeing the strictures of a fixed, coherent identity.”

Carrington, who died in 2011, outlived many of her Surrealist colleagues, but it is only in the past few years that her vast artistic output—ranging from paintings and sculptures to novels, poetry, plays, and costumes—has been recognized internationally. Historically, her career as an artist has been overshadowed by her short relationship with fellow Surrealist Max Ernst.

In her paintings, Carrington presents mystical and fantastical scenes filled with androgynous beings and animals. They drew on her interests in alchemy, the occult, healing rituals, Jungian theory, and the lore of Celts and the Maya’s Popol Vuh. In 2015, Tate Liverpool mounted a retrospective of her work, and Carrington’s art was prominently featured in the Surrealist galleries when the Museum of Modern Art in New York reopened in 2019. Last month, Mexico City’s Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM) announced that it would turn her former home into a museum.

[How Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist art imaginatively reclaimed female perspectives.]

In May 2020, shortly after announcing that the Venice Biennale would be delayed from 2021 to 2022, Alemani told ARTnews, “I’m interested in what artists are interested in, so if artists are interested in talking about what’s happening, that will of course be [relevant]. I’m not interested in being remembered for doing ‘the coronavirus biennial.’ Often, during times of crisis, there is a shift in artistic production, and if that happens, I want to try to capture it.”

In her statement today, Alemani said that the show will look at three themes in particular: “the representation of bodies and their metamorphoses; the relationship between individuals and technologies; the connection between bodies and the Earth.”

These ideas have evolved from her conversations with artists over the past year. She added, “The questions that kept emerging seem to capture this moment in history, when the very survival of the species is threatened, but also to sum up doubts that pervade the sciences, arts, and myths of our time. How is the definition of the human changing? What constitutes life, and what differentiates animals, plants, humans, and non-humans? What are our responsibilities towards the planet, other people, and the other organisms we live with? And what would life and the Earth look like without us?”

The Mexico City home of famed Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington is set to become a museum. Though the museum’s opening date has yet to be decided, it will display 45 sculptures by the artist as well as hundreds of her personal objects.

In a statement, Alejandra Osorio, cultural director at Mexico City’s Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (UAM), which owns the home, said, “This space contains the daily life of the Weisz Carrington family, who lived here for more than 60 years.”

In 2017, the painter’s son, Pablo Weisz Carrington, sold the house to the university for $500,000, on the condition that it would be converted into a museum. Weisz Carrington also mandated that his mother’s studio and kitchen—the site of many occult forays experienced with fellow Surrealist Remedios Varo—be untouched in order to “remain as close as possible to the artist’s daily life”.

[How Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist art imaginatively reclaimed female perspectives.]

Born in Lancashire, England, in 1917 into a wealthy family that owned a mill, the prodigiously talented Leonora Carrington moved to Paris in 1938. There, in the company of the Surrealists, she developed a singular visual vocabulary that comprised fantastic human-animal hybrids cavorting in mysterious dreamscapes. Her immense body of work includes paintings and sculptures, as well as novels, plays, and costumes.

Her intense affair with artist Max Ernst ended in 1939 amid the outbreak of World War II. She then fled to Mexico after marrying the Mexican poet Renato Leduc, out of convenience. In Mexico City, her painting practice flourished among a tight-knit circle of artistic émigrés, including painter Remedios Varo and the photographer Kati Horna. Carrington lived in Mexico City until her death at the age of 94.

Correction, May 27, 2021: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported the year in which Pablo Weisz Carrington sold Leonora Carrington’s home to UAM. It was in 2017, not in 2021. 

“The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the throat is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess, or Muse, the Mother of All Living, the ancient power of fright and lust—the female spider or the queen-bee whose embrace is death.”

Graves’s scholarly methods were suspect, his tone one of reverence and perhaps obsessive conviction, his sentences elaborate, his sources arcane. T.S. Eliot called the book “prodigious, monstrous, stupefying, indescribable,” and Laura Riding, Graves’s former literary collaborator and romantic partner, disliked it very much. Riding felt her own spiritual convictions had been parodied by her ex in what amounted to a “whorish abomination.” Graves seems also to have invented his translations of Celtic poetry, relying on a limited grasp of the language. A series of deductions based on a purported relationship between letters of the Celtic alphabet and certain trees enabled him, he claimed, to uncover divine names hidden in ancient writing. Yet his entirely reasonable overall conclusion—that modern monotheistic religion has effaced other, pluralist systems dedicated to matriarchy and the worship of nature—found resonance with many nonacademic readers, and the book went into multiple editions in 1948, ’52, and ’61. It has since become a classic of Contemporary Paganism.

Carrington, who had previously written a number of short stories in a piquant Surrealist vein—many of them critical of Christianity—took notice. Having absorbed Graves’s fantastical investigation, the British artist went on to write her first and only novel, The Hearing Trumpet, a tale of the apocalyptic upending of an elderly woman’s life. It’s clear The Hearing Trumpet was strongly influenced by Graves’s revisionist mythology: the manuscript, according to Carrington scholar Susan L. Aberth, was completed in 1950. However, it was not published until 1969, in a French translation titled Le Cornet acoustique. In 1974, it appeared simultaneously in the US and the UK, in the original English.

Cover of The Hearing Trumpet (1974/2021) by Leonora Carrington.

Printed in more than twenty editions and some six languages over the past forty-plus years, Carrington’s story was once again rereleased in January by New York Review Books, with an afterword by Polish novelist and Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk. After glowing reviews in the New York Times and the New Yorker by Blake Butler and Merve Emre, respectively, the first printing sold out in a month. This feat, along with recent republications of Carrington’s two other major pieces of literary work—her memoir of detention in a Spanish mental institution during World War II, Down Below (NYRB, 2017), and her collected short stories (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, also 2017)—suggests that her authorial star is yet again on the rise, perhaps due to a renewed interest in the occult among Gen Z and millennial readers. But how should we think of what Emre calls Carrington’s tendency to be continually “reborn,” if never fully domesticated or canonized? Given her status as both a brilliant painter and an enchanting storyteller, might Carrington be more at home—and, therefore, more recognizable as a major artist—in our own increasingly interdisciplinary age? And why did she herself wait nearly two decades to publish her most fully realized literary work?

Butler and Emre both wax enthusiastic about Carrington’s novel. For Butler, it is a discovery: a “mind-flaying masterpiece,” full of humor and rare events that leave the reader “reconfigured.” Emre, already a convert, sees it as a testament to Carrington’s uncanny ability to mate “the artificial to the natural”—a capacity that reflects the perpetual human ambivalence regarding technology and our animal nature. Both reviewers question Carrington’s reputation as the girl who beat the Surrealists at their own game, to paraphrase a bit glibly. She was heralded in Paris by André Breton et al., who prized her beauty and educated wit, as an example of the intersection of femme enfant and femme sorcière, realized in living flesh. Although she had a famed youthful relationship with the artist Max Ernst in the late 1930s and early ’40s, Carrington eventually rejected the role of muse. Still, it was through Surrealism that she found her way to her remarkably expressive painting practice: the endeavor which, in 1938, produced her well-known Self Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), a striking image of the artist consorting with a hyena and rocking horse while clad in an iconic pair of white jodhpurs.

That painting, with its reliance on unmixed colors and psychological oneirism, is a prelude to Carrington’s more lyrical and fantastical mature work, produced in Mexico City after World War II and characterized by delicate application of egg tempera. In Mexico City, Carrington collaborated closely with Spanish-Mexican painter Remedios Varo and photographer Kati Horna. And she set up her living space to accommodate her various roles, as mother to her two sons (by her second husband, photographer Csizi “Chiki” Weisz), keeper of the house, and painter. Carrington’s studio encompassed all these activities: it was kitchen, laboratory, nursery, salon, and study, all rolled into one. In this sense, it expressed Carrington’s changing orientation to imagery, history, and artistic work. Less concerned with the shocking figurative juxtapositions and revelation of unconscious psychological drives so dear to the Breton-led version of Surrealism, Carrington’s Mexican tableaux meditate upon magic and the divine, primarily as these are manifest in an internationalist array of folk traditions. It is in this context that The Hearing Trumpet should be read.

This first-person novel concerns the fate—which we at first take to be unhappy—of a ninety-two-year-old woman named Marian Leatherby who lives in Mexico with her son and his unpleasant English wife. Marian, as she informs us, has a gray beard and limited hearing. Thanks to a timely gift—the titular trumpet—from her friend Carmella, an elderly artisan of cat-fur sweaters, Marian overhears her family plotting to send her to an old folks’ home. But what a place this turns out to be! The residents are ensconced in fantastical cabins (“bizarre dwellings—shaped like a toadstool, a Swiss chalet, an Egyptian mummy, a boot, a lighthouse—impossible and absurd, straight out of a Bosch painting”); the director, Dr. Gambit, is a Gurdjieff-influenced evangelical fixated on aerobics; and there is a murder plot involving toxic chocolates. However, lest Carrington’s tale appear a mere wacky caper watering down Ernst’s own critique of Victorian mores in his 1934 collage novel, Une Semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness), she quickly leaves the institutional narrative behind. An ice age abruptly threatens all earthly life, even as animals and humans are magically drawn together by the imminent return of the White Goddess, a massive beelike being who demands orgiastic worship via dancing and dining, usually both at once.

The Hearing Trumpet’s nonsense is less surreal than synthetic. What had seemed like a novel becomes, in conclusion, a sort of cyclical prose poem of adoration, not unlike the Celtic works Graves bent to his will in The White Goddess. Carrington seems to allude to the Tuatha Dé Danann deities of Irish legend, with their mother goddess Dana, whom she had heard about as a child from her Irish nurse and read about in James Stephens’s comic quest-narrative The Crock of Gold (1912). Carrington’s novel combines elements of Arthurian legend, Mexican culture, Irish myths, and proto New Age spiritualism, with a glimmer of the spirit of the European fairy tale.

In this sense, The Hearing Trumpet seems particularly at home in the context of other folk-related works of feminist Anglophone fiction published in the 1970s, and one wonders if Carrington was at the vanguard of a sort of zeitgeist. The 1970s saw a number of notable works of fiction and criticism related to fairy tales and folklore, in which these vernacular forms are more or less elaborately reimagined. Most famous among these are Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977) and Angela Carter’s short story collection The Bloody Chamber (1979). (Carter happened to own a first, 1974, edition of The Hearing Trumpet.) Also published during the decade were Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), a psychoanalytic reading of fairy tales now thought to be in large part plagiarized from other scholarly works, and Marina Warner’s Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary, released the same year. All these works explore the significance of folklore in relation to the formation of personal identity. Unlike Graves, however, their authors have absorbed the lessons of Structuralism and construct their arguments by describing broader social systems, rather than attempting to trace elaborate genealogies back to a singular source of belief.

Although I share some of Butler’s and Emre’s enthusiasm for The Hearing Trumpet, today it feels more dated than Carrington’s earlier short stories; it is less annoyed with the social strictures of Western civilization and more utopian and wondering, and at times this wonder is obtained by way of a celebratory mysticism that can feel a bit forced. What neither recent review mentions is that it is also a tale of the end of the world—which Carrington foretells, ambivalently, as a time when women will at last, and once more, take control of the story.

Carrington had more metaphysical matters to pursue. She sought to capture fleeting scenes of the subconscious where real memories and imagined visions mingle. In Carrington’s rich universe, ethereal beings enact rituals with unknown purposes; these creatures have characteristics of women and animals, and seem to be somewhere between humans and beasts. There’s a soft glow and sensuality to her paintings, and some critics have said that this emphasizes Carrington’s femininity, not as a crutch but as a gift.

Carrington outlived many of her Surrealist colleagues, and when she died in 2011, she left behind an immense body of work—novels, prints, plays, costumes, and hundreds of sculptures and paintings. For a while, their importance was overshadowed by her relationship with artist Max Ernst. Art institutions have since rectified the oversight. As part of its recent rehang, for example, New York’s Museum of Modern Art hung a painting by Carrington in its remixed Surrealist gallery alongside work by Remedios Varo (who, like Carrington, was an expat living in Mexico), as well as art by their better-known male colleagues René Magritte, Miró, and Salvador Dalí. The work shown at MoMA, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953), shows a titular creature that beckons Carrington’s two children toward crystal balls on a table, all while an apparition dances in the wings. The impression is of stumbling into another’s dream, as is often the case in Carrington’s work.

But Carrington resisted explaining her art. When prodded to speak about the sources of her inspiration in a 2002 interview with the New York Times, she threw up her hands: “I am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others.”

The mystery endures. Below is guide to life and times one of Surrealism’s most revolutionary innovators.

Leonora Carrington in her studio.

Early Life

Carrington was born in Lancashire, England, in 1917 to a wealthy mill owner, though later in life she liked to say that she had never been born—she was made, the product of a union between mother and machine.

As a child, Carrington was prone to fantasy. She was thrown out of two convent schools; according to the nuns, she claimed to be the reincarnation of a saint. Ill at ease in her aristocratic household, she turned to painting and writing, steeped in the stories of Lewis Carroll and folktales learned from her Irish mother and nanny. Her mother was a vaguely sympathetic figure; of her father she wrote, “Of the two, I was far more afraid of my father than I was of Hitler.”

Exasperated, her parents sent her to a finishing school in Florence, and then to another one in Paris, but neither experience could tame her. Defeated, they enrolled her at art school in London under the French modernist Amédée Ozenfant.

In the Times interview, Carrington said two writers had proven formative to her. One was Alexandra David-Néel, the first European woman to visit Lhasa in Tibet, still a forbidden site for foreigners in the 1920s. In disguise, David-Néel crossed the Tibetan border, and after immersing herself in Buddhist religion, she became a llama. Carrington described her tale as “electrifying.”

The second source of inspiration was given to her by her mother: a copy of Herbert Read’s new book, Surrealism. It included contributions from some of the progenitors of the field—André Breton, George Hugne, Paul Éluard. On its cover was a reproduction of a work by Ernst.

Carrington and Ernst in France

In 1938, the same year Read’s Surrealism was published, Carrington visited the first Surrealist Exhibition in London, where Ernst was showing. She described an instant “affinity” for his work, particular for his painting Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924), which is now owned by MoMA. The pair later met at the dinner of mutual friend. Their ensuing affair—Ernst was married, Carrington was a 19-year-old student—is a well-known story. Her family nicknamed her Prim; to Ernst, she was the Bride of the Wind. He promptly separated from his wife and the pair ran off to Paris.

There they rejoined the tight-knit group of writers, photographers, and painters who called themselves Surrealists. Their doctrine, with its celebration of disorientating juxtapositions, was fertile ground for Carrington’s imagination. There was beauty, they believed, in comical and curious couplings of human, myth, and machine.

She and Ernst eventually retreated to a farmhouse in the Rhône Valley. They painted its interior with creatures in mid-transfiguration: women turning into horses, many-limbed lizards. A mermaid sculpture was erected in the terrace.

In 1938, she finished her first Surrealist breakthrough, Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse). In it, she is perched on the edge of a chair, face stern and hand extending toward the maw of a female hyena (a reoccurring character in her work). A tailless rocking horses hangs still behind her, a shadow of the stallion galloping freely beyond the open window. Horses and hyenas appear frequently in her writings and paintings (“I’m a hyena,” she once said. “I get into the garbage cans. I have an insatiable curiosity.”) There’s tension in meeting: a clash of the domestic and wild.

There was tension, too, between Carrington and her male peers. The women on their periphery were viewed as femmes enfants, muses and objects of lust. In their art, a women’s anatomy was dissected, distorted, rearranged—raw material that was both carnal and inanimate. Ernst, for his part, had carved into the façade of their home an image of himself beside a faceless woman. In Carrington’s art, women were granted interiority. They expressed desire, and their figures, even when freed from earthly confines, were made whole.

To Mexico and Beyond 

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the German-born Ernst was arrested by French authorities under suspicions of espionage. After a period of internment, he fled to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. Ernst and Carrington would not reunite. In her 1944 memoir, Down Below, she recounts the strange rituals that developed following their separation: for weeks she drank herself sick with orange-blossom water. She ate and napped sparingly. As German troops grew closer to her village, she feared that her enduring spirit “betrayed an unconscious desire to get rid for the second time of my father: Max, whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to live.”

She traveled to Spain, but was admitted to a psychiatric ward in Santander amid a psychiatric break. (“I was made a prisoner in a sanatorium full of nuns,” she wrote.) She returned to that period frequently in short stories and painting, such as Green Tea (1942), which depicts the sanitarium grounds as a dizzying labyrinth.

Having entered a marriage of convenience with the poet Renato Leduc, she arrived in Mexico City in 1942. It was a frosty welcome; Frida Kahlo reportedly called Carrington and her circle of émigrés “those European bitches.” Carrington later remarried the Hungarian photographer Emeric “Chiki” Weisz, with whom she raised two children. Accompanied by the Varo and the photographer Kati, she embarked on research into the occult.

They studied alchemy, the Popol Vuh (an epic of Mayan mythology), and kabbalah. They conjured potions from recipes learned from local curandera, female healers who treat sicknesses of body and soul. They read Celtic lore, Carl Jung, and Robert Graves. She labored over inedible recipes, like one for an omelette stuffed with human hair. They smoked the marijuana she grew on her roof and painted.

Her work had grown lush with its own lore and androgynous beings. A menagerie of animals abounded as symbols of her own “inner bestiary.”

Leonora Carrington, Operation Wednesday, 1944.

Anonymous No More

Carrington’s Mexico City studio wasn’t the utopia of her dreams, but it was a workshop unlike any other on earth. The effort was not without a cost: “I am an old lady who has lived through a lot and I have changed,” she wrote to a friend in 1945. She was only 28. Carrington didn’t attend her first major solo exhibition in New York in 1947, explaining to her dealer Pierre Matisse that, while the outside world hadn’t much been altered by the war abroad, she felt different, even alien. She struggled with the artist as a public figure. Her painting, The Artist Traveling Incognito (1949), glorifies anonymity, which ended for Carrington after the smash success of her New York debut.

In it, her face is obscured behind a five-eyed mask. A second body grows from her chest and her shoulders are covered by a Spanish mantilla. Layer of tiny brushstrokes build texture and depth to the atmospheric backdrop. A transparent structure holds her pet parrot, and her cat, Safiro, nestles her feet.

“Cats speak with me, they are cleaner than humans,” she once said.