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Lot Essay
A modern-day Renaissance woman, Leonora Carrington grew up in the waning years of Britain’s Occult Revival, which had stirred interest in esoterica across the long nineteenth century from the Romantics through the fin-de-siècle. Nurtured on fairy tales and Celtic lore as a child by her Irish mother and nanny, she explored themes of enchantment and transformation across a venerable career, her paintings inculcating a reality at once magical and miraculous. Finding a parallel between the hybrid Celtic Catholicism of her youth and the syncretic religious practices of Mexico, her adopted home beginning in 1942, Carrington evolved a multivalent and pan-cultural religious symbolism across her work, informed by her study of world religions from medieval Christianity to Gnosticism and the Cabbala. Among her enduring fascinations was the tarot, which she may have encountered as an erstwhile debutante in London and through Surrealist circles during her time in Europe. In Mexico, her studies and practice of the tarot manifested in a hand-painted deck of the 22 Major Arcana and in a number of paintings, Hierophante, Pour Dauphine among them.
‘Carrington often used her artistic practice hand-in-hand with her various magical practices and thus her paintings can be construed at times as actual magical workings,’ explain art historians Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq. ‘So, when images from the tarot are seen in her work over and over again…we must surmise there is a significant reason for those esoteric lessons to be brought to the fore. Furthermore, tarot images appear not only in her paintings, drawings and prints, but in her fiction, plays, theatrical scenery and costumes’ (S. Aberth and T. Arcq, ‘As in a Mirror with Multiple Facets: Leonora Carrington and the Tarot,’ in The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, Somerset, 2020, p. 65). Carrington engaged with the tarot within the close-knit circle that she cultivated in Mexico, spiritual kindred that included the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, the poet Octavio Paz, and above all the Spanish painter Remedios Varo. By the mid-1950s, Carrington and Varo had immersed themselves in studies of the occult, reading the Russian mystics P.D. Ouspensky and George Gurdjieff and beginning to address the tarot in their painting: Carrington with her deck (only two cards are dated, both to 1955) and Varo in works such as Carta de Tarot (1957).
Long held privately, Carrington’s Major Arcana premiered to great fanfare in the recent retrospective, Carrington: Magical Tales, which opened at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno in 2018. ‘Carrington’s interpretation of the tarot has significant diversions in terms of color use, arrangement and symbology,’ Aberth and Arcq explain. ‘She felt free to transform the deck in accordance with her own ideas and needs, and with a thoughtfulness and confidence that reveal her long and deep involvement with this divinatory system. Not only are Carrington’s cards a reflection of her intense philosophical engagement with the tarot (and other occult disciplines), but they also provide us with considerable insight into many aspects of her paintings’ (ibid., p. 63).
To wit, Aberth and Arcq note similarities between Hierophante, Pour Dauphine and the Hierophant card in Carrington’s deck. ‘The head of the hierophant does not hold a crown but takes on an odd oval shape that we see again in a 1958 painting by Carrington titled Hierophante, Pour Dauphine where it resembles an egg,’ they observe. ‘Like the card, there is a yellowish golden tone and the priest resembles a Babylonian relief carving with his luxurious beard and hair. Standing between two ethereal walls, one white and the other black, he performs a ceremony of some sort above a magic circle in a square involving a string in his hands and a snake at his feet’. They speculate further that, ‘given Carrington’s interest in Einstein’s theories (E=mc2 specifically), the diagram the hierophant is manipulating could be derived from the one used to model Special Relativity. [Mathematician Hermann] Minkowski’s Diagram x attempts to show how space and time are interwoven into a single continuum known as ‘spacetime,’ an idea whose magical significance would not have been wasted on the artist’ (ibid., p. 100 and 115).
The male counterpart to the female High Priestess, the Hierophant is the fifth card of the Major Arcana and is revered as a spiritual leader and divine medium. Hierophante, Pour Dauphine retains a vintage aura, its warm umber and sepia tones delicately overlaid with feathery and faded markings that frame its principal subject, his expression solemn and supplicating. The enigmatic nature of his offering is unknown—and perhaps unknowable, even to the most devout believers. ‘As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it,’ Carrington once whispered to Jodorowsky, after challenging him to read the Major Arcana. ‘The tarot is a chameleon’ (L. Carrington quoted in ibid., p. 65).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
‘Carrington often used her artistic practice hand-in-hand with her various magical practices and thus her paintings can be construed at times as actual magical workings,’ explain art historians Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq. ‘So, when images from the tarot are seen in her work over and over again…we must surmise there is a significant reason for those esoteric lessons to be brought to the fore. Furthermore, tarot images appear not only in her paintings, drawings and prints, but in her fiction, plays, theatrical scenery and costumes’ (S. Aberth and T. Arcq, ‘As in a Mirror with Multiple Facets: Leonora Carrington and the Tarot,’ in The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, Somerset, 2020, p. 65). Carrington engaged with the tarot within the close-knit circle that she cultivated in Mexico, spiritual kindred that included the Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, the poet Octavio Paz, and above all the Spanish painter Remedios Varo. By the mid-1950s, Carrington and Varo had immersed themselves in studies of the occult, reading the Russian mystics P.D. Ouspensky and George Gurdjieff and beginning to address the tarot in their painting: Carrington with her deck (only two cards are dated, both to 1955) and Varo in works such as Carta de Tarot (1957).
Long held privately, Carrington’s Major Arcana premiered to great fanfare in the recent retrospective, Carrington: Magical Tales, which opened at Mexico City’s Museo de Arte Moderno in 2018. ‘Carrington’s interpretation of the tarot has significant diversions in terms of color use, arrangement and symbology,’ Aberth and Arcq explain. ‘She felt free to transform the deck in accordance with her own ideas and needs, and with a thoughtfulness and confidence that reveal her long and deep involvement with this divinatory system. Not only are Carrington’s cards a reflection of her intense philosophical engagement with the tarot (and other occult disciplines), but they also provide us with considerable insight into many aspects of her paintings’ (ibid., p. 63).
To wit, Aberth and Arcq note similarities between Hierophante, Pour Dauphine and the Hierophant card in Carrington’s deck. ‘The head of the hierophant does not hold a crown but takes on an odd oval shape that we see again in a 1958 painting by Carrington titled Hierophante, Pour Dauphine where it resembles an egg,’ they observe. ‘Like the card, there is a yellowish golden tone and the priest resembles a Babylonian relief carving with his luxurious beard and hair. Standing between two ethereal walls, one white and the other black, he performs a ceremony of some sort above a magic circle in a square involving a string in his hands and a snake at his feet’. They speculate further that, ‘given Carrington’s interest in Einstein’s theories (E=mc2 specifically), the diagram the hierophant is manipulating could be derived from the one used to model Special Relativity. [Mathematician Hermann] Minkowski’s Diagram x attempts to show how space and time are interwoven into a single continuum known as ‘spacetime,’ an idea whose magical significance would not have been wasted on the artist’ (ibid., p. 100 and 115).
The male counterpart to the female High Priestess, the Hierophant is the fifth card of the Major Arcana and is revered as a spiritual leader and divine medium. Hierophante, Pour Dauphine retains a vintage aura, its warm umber and sepia tones delicately overlaid with feathery and faded markings that frame its principal subject, his expression solemn and supplicating. The enigmatic nature of his offering is unknown—and perhaps unknowable, even to the most devout believers. ‘As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it,’ Carrington once whispered to Jodorowsky, after challenging him to read the Major Arcana. ‘The tarot is a chameleon’ (L. Carrington quoted in ibid., p. 65).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park