Translation: Jon Alkorta Martiartu, PhD (EHU/UPV)
Leonora Carrington. Revelation
Exhibition at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid
Leonora Carrington, a member of the surrealist ranks of art, had a great relationship with Max Ernst, although she belonged to a later generation. She did share a period with Remedios Varo, however, another woman painter of dreams who was also passionate about magic and the world of the occult. In fact, both artists also collaborated with each other.
Biography
Painter, sculptor and writer among many other things, Leonora Carrington (Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, 1917-Mexico City, 2011) was one of the most relevant artists of Surrealism. Her artistic career was always marked by her agitated biography, which made her an eccentric and tragic person. As a creator of an aesthetic, symbolic and conceptual world not always easily decipherable, her work is the fruit of an extraordinary imagination. Her paintings, drawings, writings, tapestries and sculptures speak to us of aspects of the human being such as fear, pain, joy, strangeness and happiness.
Mythology
Leonora Carrington. The Magical World of the Mayas, 1964
Leonora Carrington was always fascinated by the world of mythology. In the first stage of her life, she was captivated by the Celtic world, from which she extracted some iconographic elements representing Celtic deities such as the horned god Cernunnos. She also paid attention to real characters like Queen Boudica, with whom she identified herself, vindicating the role of women in history. We can also affirm that Leonora Carrington was a champion of the cause of women and vindicated their rights, empowering herself with her art and her messages.
But the key to understanding the importance that the mythological tradition had in her work can be found in her reading of The White Goddess, that magnificent treatise on the primordial feminine deities by Robert Graves, which was a bedside book for Carrington as well as an inspiration for her search for the eternal feminine.
Some time later, while living in Mexico, she found the second great mythological influence in her thought and work: the Maya. And we can say that there she found new references that she would capture through her painting. A major work, in this sense, is The Magical World of the Mayans, a large choral canvas dedicated to this pre-Columbian culture, which we were able to admire in the Mapfre exhibition together with a smaller canvas and a series of preparatory drawings.
Magic
The world of magic and esotericism also captivated Leonora Carrington and constituted the pillars of her work. Besides the influence of Graves’s The White Goddess, reading The Mirror of Magic (1948) by Kurt Seligmann opened the doors of occultism to her. Another aspect of this censored knowledge was her study of the Hebrew Kabbalah from a very young age. In addition, she was able to deepen her knowledge of it by marrying “Chiki” Weisz, a Hungarian Jew, as well as that of other esoteric currents such as Gnosticism, the Rosicrucians or, especially, the doctrines of the Russian mystic George Gurdjieff. If you are interested in Rosicrucianism, I have published a book about the Rosicrucian salons that took place in Paris at the end of the 19th century, a little before the birth of Leonora Carrington.
Tarot
Molly Malone’s Chariot, 1975
If we talk about her interest in magic, it is logical to think also of this painter’s fondness for the Tarot. In the exhibition there was a more than revealing image in this sense: Molly Malone’s Chariot, a canvas full of arcane symbolism, mainly animal and evoking one of the major arcana of the Tarot: the Chariot. Carrington, towards the end of her life, decided to create her own deck of Tarot cards. It is a collection of twenty-two major arcana in which, following the typical scheme of the Marseilles Tarot, Leonora reinvents its iconography to make these symbols her own. If you are interested in this subject, there is a book published on Leonora Carrington’s Tarot. Although out of print and expensive, it is well worth getting your hands on it if you are interested in the subject.
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Dr. Pedro Ortega (8 de enero de 2024). Leonora Carrington. Revelación. El blog de Tartalo. Recuperado 19 de marzo de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/vjsz