Another Surrealist rediscovery is joining New York’s busy November auction calendar. Leonora Carrington’s “Fil d’Or” (1953), which spent about seventy years in a private collection, will be offered at Heritage Auctions in New York on 10 November 2026. The estimate is $250,000–$350,000.
A bird made of golden thread
The French title means “gold thread”, a term for the fine metal wire once used to decorate luxury fabrics. Carrington turns it into an image: a cosmic bird that seems to be woven from crossing lines, all of them radiating from a golden galaxy where its heart should be.
To build that shimmering surface she used grattage, a technique developed by her former partner Max Ernst. Layers of still-wet paint are scraped back with a blade or spatula, so that textures and shapes appear almost by chance. The effect is restless, as if the picture were still in the process of making itself. Heritage’s catalogue note argues that the title is a deliberate sidestep: Carrington points the viewer away from the obvious and towards other, more private meanings of a single word.
Painted in Mexican exile
Carrington made the work in Mexico, where she settled after fleeing Europe at the outbreak of the Second World War. There she found close friends among fellow émigrés, including the painter Remedios Varo and the photographer Kati Horna, and the three shared a fascination with alchemy, the occult and esoteric symbols. Carrington stayed in Mexico for the rest of her life and died in Mexico City in 2011, aged 94.
A market that has caught up
Although she was successful as a painter and writer during her lifetime, the market for women Surrealists has grown enormously over the past decade. A turning point was the 2022 Venice Biennale curated by Cecilia Alemani, which took its title, “The Milk of Dreams”, from one of Carrington’s books. Two years later, her 1945 painting “Les Distractions de Dagobert” sold at Sotheby’s for $28.5 million, far above her earlier record of $3.2 million set in 2022.
“Fil d’Or” is a much smaller proposition in price, but its long absence from public view makes it a genuine discovery. For collectors who missed out on the headline lots, it offers a way into the work of one of Surrealism’s most original voices.