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Lot Essay
Leonora Carrington once described herself as ‘born loving [animals]’, and after establishing herself in Mexico in 1942 she naturally embraced ‘the Indian belief that each one of us possesses an animal – nahual – soul as well as a human one’ (M. Warner, introduction to The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, New York, 1988, p. 1). Animals long inhabited her paintings, from early sketchbooks (e.g., Animals of a Different Planit [sic], circa 1927) to her mural for Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, El mundo mágico de los mayas (1964), which features myriad native species from jaguars and turtles to armadillos, monkeys, quetzals, and deer. Butterflies materialized in numerous works throughout these years, among them And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953), Ab Eo Quod (1956), and The Return of Boadicea (1969); a family of anthropomorphic butterflies sits down to dine in Lepidopteros (1969).
The metamorphosing subject of the present Lepidoptera announces itself at the top of the painting – ‘This is the Lepidoptera’ – and, in a rare example of political commentary, expresses solidarity with Mexico’s student movement. Its date of August 13 coincides with the students’ first march to the Zócalo and their appeal to President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz to engage in public dialogue about government repression and violence; the movement continued through the Tlatelolco massacre on October 2, when soldiers fired on student demonstrators. The Lepidoptera, a ‘free drawing’ that declares itself neither politician nor soldier, ‘has not mistreated or killed anyone,’ reads the left-hand side of Carrington’s painting. Noting some misspellings and corrections in the text, the poet Hugo García Manríquez has suggested that ‘the overwriting of the text captures and foregrounds, poignantly, the interplay of policing (collective) grammars and the (ultimately lethal) policing of insurrection in Mexico, during those days. The painting seems to say, Assassin is an Asesino, in any language’ (H. Manríquez quoted in K. Killian, ‘Fernandez and Carrington,’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2014/04/fernandez-and-carrington, accessed on 24 January 2023).
Across from Carrington’s words appears the second stanza of John Donne’s poem, ‘The Damp’, in which the speaker (a cadaver) addresses his lover, turning his autopsy – which reveals ‘her picture in [his] heart’ – into a macabre and erotic seduction. ‘Who could work all of this out,’ wonders poet Kevin Killian, ‘except to note that the lovers of ‘The Damp,’ who seem like ancient gods in [a] never-ending battle of wits the speaker longs to conclude in mutual mercy, have been transmuted into actual deaths of actual monsters and miracle creatures’ (ibid.). An image of strange hybridity and transformations, Lepidoptera commingles politics and poetry, violence and death, love and freedom. ‘Through orange sands stalks the two headed leopard (one head that of a bird) on the back of which crouches a black figure, dressed in cobwebs, its arms and hands extended akimbo in appeal,’ Killian continues. ‘On top, a figure that combines elements of fish, fowl, and lepidoptera – the order of the moth and butterfly, an eye on either wing, a flame emitting scandal from its scalp, and an explosion of white paint in lacy patterns of centripetal elegance, but hideous somehow’ (ibid.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College
The metamorphosing subject of the present Lepidoptera announces itself at the top of the painting – ‘This is the Lepidoptera’ – and, in a rare example of political commentary, expresses solidarity with Mexico’s student movement. Its date of August 13 coincides with the students’ first march to the Zócalo and their appeal to President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz to engage in public dialogue about government repression and violence; the movement continued through the Tlatelolco massacre on October 2, when soldiers fired on student demonstrators. The Lepidoptera, a ‘free drawing’ that declares itself neither politician nor soldier, ‘has not mistreated or killed anyone,’ reads the left-hand side of Carrington’s painting. Noting some misspellings and corrections in the text, the poet Hugo García Manríquez has suggested that ‘the overwriting of the text captures and foregrounds, poignantly, the interplay of policing (collective) grammars and the (ultimately lethal) policing of insurrection in Mexico, during those days. The painting seems to say, Assassin is an Asesino, in any language’ (H. Manríquez quoted in K. Killian, ‘Fernandez and Carrington,’ https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2014/04/fernandez-and-carrington, accessed on 24 January 2023).
Across from Carrington’s words appears the second stanza of John Donne’s poem, ‘The Damp’, in which the speaker (a cadaver) addresses his lover, turning his autopsy – which reveals ‘her picture in [his] heart’ – into a macabre and erotic seduction. ‘Who could work all of this out,’ wonders poet Kevin Killian, ‘except to note that the lovers of ‘The Damp,’ who seem like ancient gods in [a] never-ending battle of wits the speaker longs to conclude in mutual mercy, have been transmuted into actual deaths of actual monsters and miracle creatures’ (ibid.). An image of strange hybridity and transformations, Lepidoptera commingles politics and poetry, violence and death, love and freedom. ‘Through orange sands stalks the two headed leopard (one head that of a bird) on the back of which crouches a black figure, dressed in cobwebs, its arms and hands extended akimbo in appeal,’ Killian continues. ‘On top, a figure that combines elements of fish, fowl, and lepidoptera – the order of the moth and butterfly, an eye on either wing, a flame emitting scandal from its scalp, and an explosion of white paint in lacy patterns of centripetal elegance, but hideous somehow’ (ibid.).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College