Rating and value of paintings by Leonora Carrington

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Rating and value of the artist Leonora Carrington    

The artist Leonora Carrington leaves behind a rather colorful and figurative oeuvre, she is famous for her canvases and drawings. Now, prices for her works are rising under the auctioneers' gavel.

Her paintings are particularly prized, especially by American buyers. The price at which they sell on the art market ranges from €70 to €22,531,000, a substantial range but one that says a lot about the value that can be attributed to Leonora Carrington's works.

In 2024, La distraction de Dagobert, a 1945 tempera on masonite depicting a fantastic landscape was sold for €22,531,000, against an estimate of €11,035,000 to €16,554,000.

Order of value from a simple work to the most prestigious

Leonora Carrington's style and technique

Leonora Carrington is a major figure of Surrealism, using a meticulous, multi-media technique. She mixes oil paint, tempera, collage, rubbing and automatic drawing to achieve rich, varied textures.

Her brushwork is precise, despite surrealist influences, she retains a fine, crystallized rendering, giving forms a sharp, unusual definition. She chooses mythical iconography that she blends with symbolism.

The artist depicts hybrid creatures, half-human and half-animal figures (horses, hyenas) that embody dreams, transformation and the unconscious. She includes in her compositions esoteric symbols relating to alchemy, Celtic mythology, Mexican religion and magic, used to structure an inner, initiatory imagery.

The tone of her works is dreamlike, with a poetic vein : the tones are earthy or muted, the unreal light seems to come from nowhere and creates a waking dream effect.

There is no single focal point, the scenes are organized like visual narratives with a tangle of signs, without immediate hierarchies, creating a narrative all-over.

We witness in her work a subversion of masculine surrealism. Leonora Carrington feminizes the movement, focusing her forms on subjectivity, the female body, the witch and inner autobiography.

The life of Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was a Surrealist artist born in Clayton Green (Lancashire, UK) into an aristocratic, industrial family. She rejected the strict Catholic upbringing and bourgeois social model imposed by her family.

She studied art in Florence, then at the Chelsea School of Art and the Ozenfant Academy in London, where she trained in modern painting. She met Max Ernst in Lodnres in 1937, became his companion and followed the Surrealist group to Paris.

The artist thus participated in the artistic effervescence of the movement alongside André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Paul Éluard and others. Early on, she created singular works combining dreams, Celtic myths, bestiaries, alchemy and black humor.

She was traumatized by the Nazi arrest of Max Ernst in 1940, and suffered a psychotic break in Spain. She was committed against her will to a psychiatric hospital in Santander, and this experience nourished her book En bas, published in 1943.

She managed to escape from Europe thanks to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon, and went into permanent exile in

Mexico. She settled there in 1942 and spent most of her life. She collaborated with other exiled artists such as Remedios Varo, Kati Horna and Octavio Paz.

Leonora Carrington became a major figure on the Mexican art scene, recognized as much for her painting as for her writing (novels, short stories, plays). She continued to paint well into old age, producing a body of work marked by spirituality, feminism and humor.

From the 1980s onwards, the artist gained international recognition as one of the great female figures of Surrealism. She died in Mexico City on May 25, 2011 at the age of 94, leaving behind a profoundly personal and visionary body of visual and literary work.

Focus on The Pomps of the Subsoil, Leonora Carrigton, 1947

The Pomps of the Subsoil is an oil on canvas from 1947 housed at MoMA in New York. The composition is labyrinthine and fantastical, populated by animal, human and chimerical figures in a subterranean universe.

The visual structure and narrative are organized in superimposed planes, with scenes set in a partitioned space, like a vertical cut through a subterranean world. The layout is frontal, almost theatrical, and guides the eye in a progressive exploration of the pictorial space.

There is an absence of a clear narrative center : the figures all seem animated by a symbolic intention, with no apparent hierarchy. It includes hybrid creatures such as snake-birds, tree-women, animal-spirits, and each figure refers to a mythical or personal bestiary.

She chooses occult references (homunculi, substrances, metaphors) that evoke an inner world in flux, and also incorporates an intertextuality with motifs inspired by Celtic mythology, Kabbalah, alchemy as well as her own experiences of mystical delirium.

The colors are muted and autumnal, with deep ochres, grays, greens and iridescent internal lighting. The clarity seems supernatural, as the light sources appear to be internal to the bodies or emanating from the ground, reinforcing the painting's strangeness.

The textures are meticulous, the painting detailed, almost minimalist despite the abundance of figures. The work can be interpreted as a symbolic self-portrait: Carrington projects herself into her matricial, subterranean, feminine and spiritual universe.

This is a painting of reconstruction, painted after her internment and move to Mexico, and can be read as a tale of rebirth through the imaginary. Today, this painting is seen as a key work of feminine surrealism: an art of metamorphosis, inner resistance and personal myth.

Leonora Carrington's imprint on her period

Leonora Carrington joined the Paris Surrealist movement early on, but soon emancipated herself from it by developing an autonomous, more introspective and feminine vision.

Contrary to many members of the group, she doesn't just paint dreams or desire, but constructs a symbolic and mythical imaginary of her own, which is nourished by folklore, esotericism and intuition.

Through her paintings, stories and plays, she brings out a singular female voice in a surrealism dominated by male figures (Breton, Ernst, Dali), and revalorizes marginal figures (witches, chimeras, priestesses) in order to propose a vision of the world freed from certain codes.

Thanks to her voluntary exile in Mexico in 1942, she played a key role in bridging the gap between the European avant-garde and the Latin American art scene. She exerted a major influence on her Mexican contemporaries, such as Remedios Varo and Kati Horna, and later on the young Mexican intellectual scene.

She thus became an essential literary and pictorial figure in twentieth-century Mexican culture. Her work is not limited to the visual arts, but also includes novels, short stories, plays and essays, all of which are traversed by the same alchemical and feminist imaginary.

Her work is today studied in several fields, and has been showcased in major exhibitions in the 2010s and 2020s, including at Tate Liverpool, MAP Mexico City and the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

She is considered one of Surrealism's most radical and complete artists, at once visual, literary, philosophical and spiritual, and is being revalued alongside female artists such as Judith Reigl or Yvonne Canu.

Her signature

Not all of Leonora Carrington's works are signed.

Although there are variations, here is a first example of her signature:

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