Leonora Carrington - Editions & Works on Paper New York Thursday, February 15, 2024 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • “I didn't have time to be anyone's muse...I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”
    —Leonora Carrington

    Carrington’s childhood home, a Gothic-revival mansion in northwest England called Crookhey Hall, appears repeatedly in her artwork, reflecting the troubling memories of her youth that remained with her throughout her life. The ominous building in this lithograph – based on an earlier painting from 1947 – also carries associations with the mental asylum in Santander, Spain to which Carrington was committed after she suffered a psychological breakdown in 1940. Here, ghostly figures eerily walk, float, swim and stand in the pastoral landscape surrounding the building, as if haunted by Carrington’s memories of her past. The running white figure in the foreground, dashing away with urgency, mirrors the artist’s early desire to escape the stifling expectations of her life at Crookhey Hall for the uninhibited life of an artist.

     

    “I’m not interested in style... I’m interested in looking.”
    —Robert Bechtle 

    The collection of Robert Bechtle and Whitney Chadwick, assembled over their nearly forty-year marriage, reflects Bechtle’s legacy as a preeminent Photorealist along with Chadwick’s expertise as a historian and scholar. With works by Wayne Thiebaud, Ed Ruscha, and Leonora Carrington, among others, their extensive collection of editions and works on paper represents many of Bechtle’s fellow Bay Area artists, notable names in Pop, and female figureheads of Modernism and Surrealism whom Chadwick championed through her writings and teachings.   

     

    Known for his tightly detailed renderings of suburban landscapes and vintage cars, Bechtle is considered one of the founding Photorealists, a set of artists who used photographs as a point of departure for their hyperrealist art. Such interest in notions of realism permeate the works on offer, presenting a multitude of the artistic methodologies for interpreting the world: a visual interpretation of the musicality and movement of a ballet, postmodern representations of landscape, a surreal memory of a childhood home, and even different artists’ renditions of Bechtle himself. Following his passing at the age of 88 in 2020, Bechtle’s legacy persists through his collection, inspiring the continued search for unexpected beauty in the everyday. 

    • Artist Biography

      Leonora Carrington

      British / Mexican • 1917 - 2011

      At the core of Leonora Carrington's Surrealist oeuvre is a preoccupation with gender and feminist issues. Born to a wealthy family in Lancashire, England, Carrington demonstrated an interest in art at a young age and enrolled at Chelsea School of Art in London. Carrington first became interested in Surrealism after having attended the 1939 International Surrealist Exhibition, and later entered into a relationship with German Surrealist painter Max Ernst.

      Like many European intellectuals and artists, Carrington fled war-torn Europe and settled in Mexico where she was greatly influenced by the cultural and religious syncretism. Carrington's unique Surrealist aesthetic is one that often features females as the central figure and includes fairytale-like imagery.

      View More Works

Property from the Robert Bechtle and Whitney Chadwick Trust, San Francisco, California

12

Crookhey Hall

1987
Lithograph in colors, on wove paper, with full margins.
I. 17 x 30 in. (43.2 x 76.2 cm)
S. 23 3/4 x 35 3/4 in. (60.3 x 90.8 cm)

Signed and numbered 18/50 in pencil (there was also an edition of 150 in three colors and 50 in Roman numerals), published by Brewster Editions, New York, framed.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$1,500 - 2,500 

Sold for $5,080

Editions & Works on Paper

New York Auction 15 February 2024