Shock therapy survivor’s painting sets record

Les Distractions de Dagobert, a painting by British-born Mexican surrealist artist Leonora Carrington sold at Sotheby’s in New York in May 2024 for £22.5 million, a record for a British-born female artist. The winning bidder was Eduardo Costantini, the founder of the Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires.

Carrington was born in 1917 into the family of a wealthy industrialist in Lancashire and as a young woman was presented at court. She studied art and ran away to France with the surrealist artist Max Ernst. When he was arrested at the beginning of the second world war, she went to Spain and was incarcerated in a mental hospital in Santander, where she underwent cardiazol therapy, an early form of shock therapy. She eventually escaped, married, and settled in Mexico.

Cardiazol therapy, a precursor to electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), was invented by Hungarian psychiatrist László Meduna in 1934. Patients were given the drug cardiazol (called metrazol in the United States) in order to induce seizures, based on a theory that epilepsy and schizophrenia were incompatible. Carrington later wrote a memoir, Down Below.