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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Dr. Salomon Grimberg for his assistance cataloguing this work.
I put my being into my painting. For me, the value of a work is the labor it takes to become yourself, making something honest. It’s the work of a lifetime.--Leonora Carrington1
“Can I light your cigarette?” offers the interviewer as he bent forward, Bic lighter in hand. “I prefer to light my own” rebuffed the then-94-year-old artist Leonora Carrington in courteous, yet firm, British-accented English.2 Carrington was her own person always, succinctly described as a “nonconforming feminist.”3 The only daughter of four children born to the Irish Mairi Moorhead and English textile magnate Harold Carrington, she resisted the social mold she was expected to fit into. Her self-described “allergy to cooperation,” got the schoolgirl expelled by the Mother Superior, twice.4 As Carrington recalls, at the convent she was deemed neither “capable of study or play,”5 and had only “managed” with karate.6 When presented as a debutante at the court of King George V at Buckingham Palace, bored, Carrington remembered having spent the evening reading, apropos, the entirety of Aldous Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza.7 Today, her non-compliant behavior might have been named Oppositional Defiant Disorder, but it was her determination and strong sense of self-preservation that supported her life-long artistic production where beast and human commune in imagined worlds.
“Does anyone escape their childhood? I don’t think we do,” Carrington answered her own question.8 Telling of where her child’s imagination resided, in grade school she created a book with lined paper, titling it “Animals of a Different Planit by M.L. Carrington.” She filled it with invented creatures, planets, and distant lands; on one page, for example, accompanying a green animated bird, forked legs reaching skyward, eye fixed on its bug prey are the carefully penciled words, “The Hootdum is found in east Loogo. flies up-side-down. Eats insects.” Primarily self-taught, she studied in Florence, Italy for nine months in 1932 regularly visiting the Uffizi and major museums in Siena, Rome and Venice viewing paintings and frescoes. She then honed her drawing skills as Amadée Ozenfant’s first student in London in 1936; his academy “was very important because we did exact line drawings. We had to study with a single drawing and a single model for many weeks. Foremost, the model was an apple and as long as the drawing was not perfect in line, exact, there we were contemplating the apple, until the apple dried out,” she recalls.9 When she broke with family, church, and state, escaping England at age 20 to join her married, older lover Max Ernst (1891-1976) and the Surrealist movement first in Paris, and then New York City, she remained unwilling to become anyone’s muse. She was equally uncompromising in her search on canvas for freedom from this world’s gravity.
In her mind Carrington would forever wander the rooms of Crookhey Hall, the mansion built in 1874 in Lancashire, England where she lived from ages 3 to 10 under the care of her Irish nana Mary Kavanaugh and a French governess.10 Late in life she described Crookhey Hall as a “rather dark, exciting place” where north of the house “there was a lake. We had the myth that it was bottomless and we weren’t allowed to go there alone.”11 Perhaps it was on that lake that Carrington’s La joie de patinage was set, a Cockerham farmhouse in the distance.
Carrington was resistant to explaining her artwork. Her close study of self through her artistic expression, as she indicates in the above epigraph, was a spiritually esoteric, experiential one. She also warned against intellectual games as a path to understanding the meaning of her imagery; but rather, she encouraged visual readings of her artwork, and that the viewer concentrate on their feelings for a canvas, while also considering the visual relationship of its objects in space.12 Even so, Carrington acknowledged that all of her writing was autobiographical.13 At times she built bridges between her writing—elusive, provocative, biting in its dark humor—and her visual art; case in point are the frequent parallels scholars draw between her short story The Debutante of 1937-38 and her contemporaneous self-portrait Inn of the Dawn Horse. But neither Carrington’s writing or her artwork is illustration, description, or direct narrative; rather, it is fragmentary, puzzle-like, and relational. She identified as Surrealist, her imagery emerging from a dream-like, limbatic place; her texts appeared intuitive, born from free association and automatic writing, yet grounded in subtle, and at times grizzly, satirical wit.
Tentative connections can be found between La joie de patinage and Carrington’s writing. In the novella Little Francis of 1938 “During Ubriaco’s (Ernst’s) long silences, Francis (Carrington) would amuse himself (herself) by looking back at the brighter periods of his (her) life spent at Crackwood (Crookhey Hall). They were not many. He (she) remembered skating on the lake north of Crackwood one hard winter.”14 At the core of Waiting, a short story Carrington wrote concurrently with La joie de patinage’s painting during her stay in New York City late-July 1941 to January 1942, is a romantic conflict between two women, Elizabeth and Margaret (Peggy Guggenheim and Carrington) over Fernando (Ernst). The painting foregrounds two figures, one bears three heads (recalling in form Salvador Dali’s Soft Self-Portrait of 1941 as well as Carrington’s long-necked horse-women of her The Meal of Lord Candlestick15 of 1938), a black soay sheep, jaguar fur, and two British red foxes. Wrapped loosely in a green cloak, the other figure is masked and bare-breasted with the legs of a dark soay sheep. Les patineurs (the skaters) balance on their right leg, left leg raised in a balletic arabesque.16 Six horses cavort on the snowy bank as Carrington’s darkened white horse avatar (perhaps), is a fixed weathervane.
Significantly, La joie de patinage’s turquoise-hued winter landscape echoes that of her Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst, painted circa 1939 at the farmhouse where she had lived with Ernst in Saint Martin d’Ardèche, France. The fish-tailed Ernst’s incongruous, single yellow sock with its horizontal green stripes curiously complements the skater’s loud, fuschia skirt with its flowing sea green bands. The two paintings belong to the same mindscape. Bird Superior was almost certainly in Carrington’s hands in New York City in 1941 as she painted, signed and dated (11-12-41) La joie de patinage.17 Together they can be read as companion pieces telling a tale of complex relationships, loss, love, and Carrington’s journey towards independence.
The artist’s time in New York City was one of healing. She had suffered and survived a tremendous crisis the previous year when forcibly interned in a psychiatric hospital in Santander, Spain for six-months following Ernst’s arrest by the Nazis. There she was inhumanely injected multiple times with the barbiturate Luminal and the seizure-inducing Cardiazol.18 As her family maneuvered to move Carrington to an institution in South Africa, she foiled them, escaping war-torn Europe for the Americas by marrying the diplomat Renato Leduc. In 1942, she again leapt into unknown territory, leaving New York to head south to Mexico City, where she built a life, a family, and populated a fantastic, ethereal world on canvas.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio
I put my being into my painting. For me, the value of a work is the labor it takes to become yourself, making something honest. It’s the work of a lifetime.--Leonora Carrington1
“Can I light your cigarette?” offers the interviewer as he bent forward, Bic lighter in hand. “I prefer to light my own” rebuffed the then-94-year-old artist Leonora Carrington in courteous, yet firm, British-accented English.2 Carrington was her own person always, succinctly described as a “nonconforming feminist.”3 The only daughter of four children born to the Irish Mairi Moorhead and English textile magnate Harold Carrington, she resisted the social mold she was expected to fit into. Her self-described “allergy to cooperation,” got the schoolgirl expelled by the Mother Superior, twice.4 As Carrington recalls, at the convent she was deemed neither “capable of study or play,”5 and had only “managed” with karate.6 When presented as a debutante at the court of King George V at Buckingham Palace, bored, Carrington remembered having spent the evening reading, apropos, the entirety of Aldous Huxley’s novel Eyeless in Gaza.7 Today, her non-compliant behavior might have been named Oppositional Defiant Disorder, but it was her determination and strong sense of self-preservation that supported her life-long artistic production where beast and human commune in imagined worlds.
“Does anyone escape their childhood? I don’t think we do,” Carrington answered her own question.8 Telling of where her child’s imagination resided, in grade school she created a book with lined paper, titling it “Animals of a Different Planit by M.L. Carrington.” She filled it with invented creatures, planets, and distant lands; on one page, for example, accompanying a green animated bird, forked legs reaching skyward, eye fixed on its bug prey are the carefully penciled words, “The Hootdum is found in east Loogo. flies up-side-down. Eats insects.” Primarily self-taught, she studied in Florence, Italy for nine months in 1932 regularly visiting the Uffizi and major museums in Siena, Rome and Venice viewing paintings and frescoes. She then honed her drawing skills as Amadée Ozenfant’s first student in London in 1936; his academy “was very important because we did exact line drawings. We had to study with a single drawing and a single model for many weeks. Foremost, the model was an apple and as long as the drawing was not perfect in line, exact, there we were contemplating the apple, until the apple dried out,” she recalls.9 When she broke with family, church, and state, escaping England at age 20 to join her married, older lover Max Ernst (1891-1976) and the Surrealist movement first in Paris, and then New York City, she remained unwilling to become anyone’s muse. She was equally uncompromising in her search on canvas for freedom from this world’s gravity.
In her mind Carrington would forever wander the rooms of Crookhey Hall, the mansion built in 1874 in Lancashire, England where she lived from ages 3 to 10 under the care of her Irish nana Mary Kavanaugh and a French governess.10 Late in life she described Crookhey Hall as a “rather dark, exciting place” where north of the house “there was a lake. We had the myth that it was bottomless and we weren’t allowed to go there alone.”11 Perhaps it was on that lake that Carrington’s La joie de patinage was set, a Cockerham farmhouse in the distance.
Carrington was resistant to explaining her artwork. Her close study of self through her artistic expression, as she indicates in the above epigraph, was a spiritually esoteric, experiential one. She also warned against intellectual games as a path to understanding the meaning of her imagery; but rather, she encouraged visual readings of her artwork, and that the viewer concentrate on their feelings for a canvas, while also considering the visual relationship of its objects in space.12 Even so, Carrington acknowledged that all of her writing was autobiographical.13 At times she built bridges between her writing—elusive, provocative, biting in its dark humor—and her visual art; case in point are the frequent parallels scholars draw between her short story The Debutante of 1937-38 and her contemporaneous self-portrait Inn of the Dawn Horse. But neither Carrington’s writing or her artwork is illustration, description, or direct narrative; rather, it is fragmentary, puzzle-like, and relational. She identified as Surrealist, her imagery emerging from a dream-like, limbatic place; her texts appeared intuitive, born from free association and automatic writing, yet grounded in subtle, and at times grizzly, satirical wit.
Tentative connections can be found between La joie de patinage and Carrington’s writing. In the novella Little Francis of 1938 “During Ubriaco’s (Ernst’s) long silences, Francis (Carrington) would amuse himself (herself) by looking back at the brighter periods of his (her) life spent at Crackwood (Crookhey Hall). They were not many. He (she) remembered skating on the lake north of Crackwood one hard winter.”14 At the core of Waiting, a short story Carrington wrote concurrently with La joie de patinage’s painting during her stay in New York City late-July 1941 to January 1942, is a romantic conflict between two women, Elizabeth and Margaret (Peggy Guggenheim and Carrington) over Fernando (Ernst). The painting foregrounds two figures, one bears three heads (recalling in form Salvador Dali’s Soft Self-Portrait of 1941 as well as Carrington’s long-necked horse-women of her The Meal of Lord Candlestick15 of 1938), a black soay sheep, jaguar fur, and two British red foxes. Wrapped loosely in a green cloak, the other figure is masked and bare-breasted with the legs of a dark soay sheep. Les patineurs (the skaters) balance on their right leg, left leg raised in a balletic arabesque.16 Six horses cavort on the snowy bank as Carrington’s darkened white horse avatar (perhaps), is a fixed weathervane.
Significantly, La joie de patinage’s turquoise-hued winter landscape echoes that of her Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst, painted circa 1939 at the farmhouse where she had lived with Ernst in Saint Martin d’Ardèche, France. The fish-tailed Ernst’s incongruous, single yellow sock with its horizontal green stripes curiously complements the skater’s loud, fuschia skirt with its flowing sea green bands. The two paintings belong to the same mindscape. Bird Superior was almost certainly in Carrington’s hands in New York City in 1941 as she painted, signed and dated (11-12-41) La joie de patinage.17 Together they can be read as companion pieces telling a tale of complex relationships, loss, love, and Carrington’s journey towards independence.
The artist’s time in New York City was one of healing. She had suffered and survived a tremendous crisis the previous year when forcibly interned in a psychiatric hospital in Santander, Spain for six-months following Ernst’s arrest by the Nazis. There she was inhumanely injected multiple times with the barbiturate Luminal and the seizure-inducing Cardiazol.18 As her family maneuvered to move Carrington to an institution in South Africa, she foiled them, escaping war-torn Europe for the Americas by marrying the diplomat Renato Leduc. In 1942, she again leapt into unknown territory, leaving New York to head south to Mexico City, where she built a life, a family, and populated a fantastic, ethereal world on canvas.
Teresa Eckmann, Associate Professor of Contemporary Latin American Art History, University of Texas at San Antonio