In 1936, while planning a visit, André Breton asked the Guatemalan writer and diplomat Luis Cardoza y Aragón for an introduction to the city’s dynamic cultural scene. Aragón’s famous reply painted the metropolis in an appealingly mystical light: “We live in a land of convulsive beauty, the land of edible delusions,” he wrote, “a place for the mutable, the disturbing… in short, a land of dream, unavoidable by the surrealist spirit.” Soon after, Breton moved there with his wife, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, and Surrealism found its second home. The City of Palaces would soon play host to a cast of European expatriates who fled fascism to live among a vital community of Mexican artists and intellectuals.

“Mexico City in the 1940s was a fascinating nexus of different artistic currents, home to some of the most exciting avant-garde movements in the world at that moment,” says Emily Nice, an AVP specialist in Latin American art at Sotheby’s. “In this decade, which scholars of Western art tend to think of as a dark period, Mexico City is a thriving hotbed of creativity as an old guard of established artists, the Muralists, mix with younger painters like Rufino Tamayo and Frida Kahlo, the influx of Surrealists from Europe and American artists like Robert Motherwell and Edward Weston.”

Against this backdrop of cultural syncretism and experimentation, many artists were inspired to channel new modes of creative expression. Now, a group of exceptional works by Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo, Leonor Fini and others will feature in Sotheby’s upcoming New York Sales this May. 

By Christoper Alessandrini | May 10, 2024