Leonora Carrington‘s 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for $28.5 million with fees on Wednesday night during Sotheby’s evening sale for modern and contemporary art, setting a record for the Surrealist artist at auction.
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.
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“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.