MEXICO · ART

A painting bought for the price of a nice dinner has become the center of a million-dollar legal fight, exposing the murky, high-stakes world of art authentication just as the late surrealist’s market reaches record highs.

A work attributed to Leonora Carrington is at the centre of an authentication lawsuit. (Photo: Internet reproduction)

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How the flea-market find began

According to a report in the Mexican magazine Proceso, the story began during the 2020 pandemic, when a man identified as Jesús Rodríguez came across a painting on Facebook Marketplace. Drawn to the image rather than to the signature, he bought the piece — “Chapeau chaud pour le ski,” a 1952 gouache — for 2,000 pesos, about $106, as a gift for his wife.

Only afterward did he begin to suspect what he might have: a work attributed to Leonora Carrington, the English-born surrealist who spent most of her life in Mexico City and became one of the most celebrated artists of the movement.

Rodríguez set out to confirm the attribution. He contacted the Leonora Carrington Foundation, run by the artist’s son, but the foundation told him it does not issue certificates of authenticity.

It pointed him instead toward the Galería de Arte Mexicano, one of the institutions it works with. The gallery examined the piece and authenticated it as a genuine Carrington, valued, by various accounts, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

For a buyer who had spent barely $100, it looked like one of the great flea-market windfalls.

When authentication turned into a fight

The windfall did not materialize. Rodríguez says that when he tried to sell the work, the sale was blocked, and he attributes the obstruction to the foundation.

An initial auction offer was cancelled. In the course of an earlier lawsuit against an auction house — which Rodríguez lost — the foundation stated that the work was, in fact, false.

The owner now alleges he has been unable even to reach the foundation, which he says is effectively uncontactable, and has launched a moral-damages claim valued at up to $1m.

The dispute sits squarely in one of the art world’s grayest zones. A gallery’s authentication and an artist foundation’s verdict are pulling in opposite directions, with no neutral arbiter and a great deal of money at stake.

Carrington’s foundation has publicly stated that it does not sign certificates of authenticity and works only with a small set of institutions — a position that leaves owners of unverified works in a difficult limbo. The case, observers note, could set a precedent for how private owners, certifying galleries and artist foundations resolve such standoffs.

A market at record highs

What makes the fight so charged is the trajectory of Carrington’s market. Once overshadowed by male contemporaries, the surrealist has become one of the most sought-after names in the field.

In 2024 her painting “Les Distractions de Dagobert” sold at Sotheby’s in New York for a record sum widely reported in the tens of millions of dollars, and her sculptures have since fetched eight-figure prices too. Interest in the women of surrealism, led by the soaring values attached to Frida Kahlo, has lifted Carrington into the rarefied territory once reserved for Dalí and Max Ernst.

The renewed attention extends beyond the saleroom. Separately, Mexican outlets have reported the surfacing of a previously unseen Carrington oil, “Villa Pilar,” which the artist is said to have given to a doctor after a period of hospitalization and which remained in that family’s keeping for decades.

Such discoveries deepen the fascination — and raise the financial stakes — around any work that can credibly be tied to her name. For Rodríguez, the controversy has become about more than money; but in a market this hot, the question of whether a $106 purchase is worthless or worth a fortune is precisely what the courts may have to settle.