"Surrealist women continued their triumphant rise, and those who have believed in them reaped rewards.
A haunting sculpture by Leonora Carrington, La Grande Dame (The Cat Woman), 1951, sold for $11.4 million, blowing past its presale range of $5 million to $7 million. The bidding war drew five hopefuls and lasted for five minutes. Its winner was Eduardo Costantini, a leading collector of Latin American art, bidding through Sotheby's head of Latin American Art, Anna de Stasi. Six months ago, Costantini bought Carrington's record-breaking painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) for $28.5 million at Sotheby's.
Another Carrington painting, Temple of the Word (1954), fetched $4.6 million tonight, within its presale range of $3 million to $5 million. The consignor bought the work for $365,500 in 1993 at Christie's, just short of its low estimate of $400,000.
The consignor of Leonor Fini's Les stylistes (1976) bought the work for about $130,000 in 2007 at Sotheby's in London. On Monday, it hammered at $600,000, $720,000 with fees."
