Hidden 70 Years, Carrington’s ‘Fil d’Or’ Heads to Auction

The latest:

A Leonora Carrington painting that has stayed out of public view for seven decades is going under the hammer in New York. Heritage Auctions has set a $250,000–$350,000 estimate on Fil d’Or, a 1953 canvas that will lead the house’s modern and contemporary art sale on November 10, according to Heritage and artnet News.

Details:

• The work: Fil d’Or, painted in 1953, builds an otherworldly owl out of a web of intersecting lines, with heavy eyes dominating the canvas and the body extending into delicate wings and twisted appendages, according to artnet News.
• The title: Fil d’Or is French for gold thread, a reference to the fine marks running through the composition. The painting is rendered in gold lines set against a brown ground, Heritage said in its material on the work.
• The technique: Carrington built the picture using grattage, a method of scraping through layers of wet paint to expose the textures underneath. The approach accounts for the delicate linear marks that give the painting its name.
• The house’s reading: Aviva Lehmann, deputy chairman of fine art at Heritage, said by email that Carrington’s creatures appear to inhabit “a world with its own beliefs and logic,” and that the elusive quality on display is characteristic of the artist’s work.
• The provenance: The painting was acquired in 1953, the year it was made, from the Galería de Arte Mexicano in Mexico City by a family of art patrons in California. It has remained in that family’s collection ever since, Heritage said.
• The gap: Seven decades passed with the work outside public view, which is why its reappearance is being treated as a rare event for a Surrealist whose market and museum profile have risen sharply in recent years.
• The sale: Fil d’Or leads a Heritage auction of modern and contemporary art scheduled for November 10 in New York. The house has not named the California family, and no reserve figure beyond the published estimate has been disclosed.
• The estimate: Heritage set the pre-sale range at $250,000 to $350,000. The house did not publish a comparison with prices paid for other Carrington works, nor did it say whether the painting has ever been exhibited since 1953.

Background:

Leonora Carrington, born in Britain in 1917, spent most of her career in Mexico, where she became a central figure in Surrealism. The Galería de Arte Mexicano, which sold Fil d’Or in 1953, was among the country’s leading commercial galleries for modern art.

Between the lines:

The selling point here is scarcity rather than scale. A single family held the work from the year it was painted, meaning it never passed through the resale market that establishes price history. That absence, combined with the grattage surface Heritage emphasizes, is what the house is leaning on when it frames the painting as leading the November sale.

What’s next

The November 10 sale in New York will show whether the hammer price clears the $250,000–$350,000 estimate, and whether a museum or private collector takes a work that has not traded since 1953.