There is a painting by Leonora Carrington (Chorley, 1917-Mexico City, 2011) now hanging in the Tate Modern that nicely sums up the reason for the current brilliance with her work.
It is titled
Self-Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse)
and the artist appears sitting in an anthropomorphic chair gesturing towards a rearing hyena that seems to be under her spell.
She looks like a witch.
Few images in art are more powerful than this one, an uncompromising declaration of independence, that compass that the artist spent her entire life chasing.
The painting dates from 1937, but it functions as a mirror for this threatening halo of 2022. The world may have been slow to wake up to Carrington's unrepentant ecological awareness and feminism, but as the planet grapples with the growing climate crisis and the vindication of bodily diversity, his work is increasingly pertinent.
The world of art surrenders to this hopelessly and there are reasons.
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When Leonora Carrington threw the tarot cards
The story is known.
Born in 1917 in Chorley, Lancashire, UK, Leonora Carrington refused to bow to convention early on.
She rejected the future of wife and mother that her parents expected her to fulfill and instead headed to London to study art.
She fell in love with a much older artist, Max Ernst, and moved with him to Paris, refusing to assume the role of muse or
femme enfant.
a childish term that the surrealists imposed on the young women of their milieu.
After enjoying a promising start, Carrington faced great adversity and suffered a mental breakdown after Ernst, as a German living in France, was interned as an enemy alien at the start of World War II.
She was confined to a Spanish asylum against her will (an experience she recounted in detail in her memoir,
Down Below
) and fled to Mexico in 1943. By this time, Ernst had already married Peggy Guggenheim, and she threw herself into it. in his interest in the occult, the Kabbalah and shamanism, which has had so much influence since then.
Portrait of Leonora Carrington at the National Portrait Gallery.
The fervor grows by the day and the studies on his work do not stop multiplying.
In addition to the two ongoing exhibitions on his work at the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice (
Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernity
) and the Tate Modern in London (
Surrealism: Beyond Borders
), there is a monograph to be published next fall by the scholar and artist specialist Catriona McAra (
The Medium of Leonora Carrington: A Feminist Haunting of the Contemporary Arts
).
Auction prices are also skyrocketing.
Her last record was made in May, when Sotheby's sold the painting
The Garden of Paracelsus
(1957) for 3.2 million dollars (3.1 million euros).
The margin is very high if you consider that Carrington made history in 2005 when his painting
Juggler
(1954), from the same period, was sold at auction for $713,000 (700,000 euros), the highest price paid for a work of art. a living surrealist artist.
An auctioneer holds Leonora Carrington's 'The Garden of Paracelsus' ahead of its auction.
Alexi Rosenfeld (Getty Images)
Why that pull?
Much has to do with the rescue of Cecilia Alemani, curator of the exhibition
The milk of dreams
for the current Venice Biennale.
The title pays homage to one of her workbooks made in the 1950s that was not published until 2013, two years after she died at the age of 94.
That's where the
boom started.
In 2018 she opened a museum dedicated to her work in San Luis de Potosí, Mexico, and biennials began to take a look at her legacy.
She says she did it in 2020 and the Venice Biennale, two years later.
There is a logic attached to these times that has to do with feminism, gender fluidity and ecological awareness.
Carrington populated her work with sorceresses who symbolize female empowerment and with mystical and androgynous creatures who suggest the transformative possibilities and limitations of the gender binary.
A fighting and uncompromising spirit from which many contemporary artists and, in particular, female painters drink.
In fact, a genealogy of the new 21st century surrealism could already be done: Lucy Skaer, Anne Walsh, Julie Curtiss, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Marianna Simmett, Dominque Funs, Jessie Makinson, Mary Reid Kelley, Nathaniel Mary Quinn...
Carrington's feminism is strongly tied to her ecological concerns.
Her female figures act as protectors of nature and are today revered as true bridges between the earth and the universe, two frames where contemporary art lives today.
There are some documents for this that have become topical again.
In 1970, Carrington wrote the essay
Female Human Animal
(also known as
What Is a Woman
), in which she further articulated her ideas that women must defy patriarchal authority for the planet to survive.
That same decade she started the first women's liberation group in Mexico and she designed a poster called
Mujeres Conciencia
(1972), promoting the feminist movement.
Room dedicated to surrealist women, with works by Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning and Remedios Varo, at the current Venice Biennale.
Roberto Marossi (Venice Biennale)
Although that contemporary return to that surrealism has more crumb.
The movement grew out of the angst of the 1920s and the pandemic that, two years earlier, turned the world upside down.
The world was still recovering from the devastation of the First World War, and new and radical forms of art, such as Cubism and jazz, were beginning to proliferate.
From this chaotic mixture of progress and loss, André Breton established a new philosophy.
In his
Surrealist Manifesto
In 1924 he outlined the movement's contours and wrote of how dreams and reality would resolve into "a kind of absolute reality, a surreality."
If that term is applied to the reality of the moment, it can be seen that it fits almost perfectly with the rise, also in contemporary art, of alchemy and oracles.
Leonora Carrington liked them very much.
She is also into the occult sciences and the tarot, as will be seen in the fall at the Design Museum in London, which is preparing a major exhibition on the visionary objects left behind by surrealism under the title
Objects of Desire: Surrealism and Design.
1924-Today
.
The investigations into the tarot painted by Leonora Carrington are also recent and began in the summer of 2018, when the curator Tere Arcq was preparing the
Magical Tales
exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico, the retrospective with which the birth of the artist was commemorated .
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