.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Born in England to a wealthy Roman Catholic family, Leonora Carrington rebelled against her upbringing from an early age. After being expelled from at least two schools, she was sent to study in Florence as a young teenager. There she took up painting, and spent her days exploring the city’s collections. Later, at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy in London, Carrington discovered both Surrealism and Max Ernst, with whom she became romantically involved. In 1937, at the age of twenty, she ran off to Paris to live with Ernst and join the wider Surrealist group, spending her days making art. It wasn’t until Carrington moved to Mexico, however, that she reached artistic maturity; she had travelled there from France seeking refuge from the Second World War. She settled easily into Mexico’s European émigré group that had sprung up around the Spanish artist Remedios Varo. Freed from the rigidity of European Surrealism, and inspired by her friendship with Varo, Carrington began to probe ideas around myth and religion which she synthesised into a unique and highly personal idiom. Her influences were diverse, ranging from Celtic lore and Greek myths to childhood fairy tales, Egyptian belief systems, and the occult, elements of which are evident in Mars Red Predella, whose striking burnt sienna and ghostly white conjure images of antique amphorae, Pompeian wall paintings, and underworld oracles.
Mars Red Predella was previously owned by Edward James, known primarily for his patronage of the arts as well as his Surrealist garden, Las Pozas, in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico. Over the years, he amassed a vast collection, featuring, in addition to work by Carrington, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte. James first met Carrington in 1944 in Acapulco; they became acquainted through their mutual friend, the painter Esteban Francés, and soon became close themselves. James regularly visited Carrington, and even titled some of her works. In 1947, the year Mars Red Predella was painted, he introduced her to Pierre Matisse, the son of the artist and owner of the eponymous and influential New York gallery, where she held her first solo exhibition in February of the following year. Reflecting, decades later, about the artist in the catalogue to her 1976 retrospective in which Mars Red Predella was exhibited, James wrote, ‘Always has Leonora Carrington avoided echoing, not to speak of copying the style of any other painter. Her work is as wholly unplanned as it has always been spontaneous and unconscious, and she had her own world which needed to be expressed… The fact is that this painter’s inspiration is as timeless as it is ageless’ (E. James, ‘Introduction’, in Leonora, Carrington: a retrospective exhibition, exh. cat., Center for Inter-Am Relations, New York, 1976, p. 12-13).
Mars Red Predella was previously owned by Edward James, known primarily for his patronage of the arts as well as his Surrealist garden, Las Pozas, in the Sierra Gorda mountains of Mexico. Over the years, he amassed a vast collection, featuring, in addition to work by Carrington, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte. James first met Carrington in 1944 in Acapulco; they became acquainted through their mutual friend, the painter Esteban Francés, and soon became close themselves. James regularly visited Carrington, and even titled some of her works. In 1947, the year Mars Red Predella was painted, he introduced her to Pierre Matisse, the son of the artist and owner of the eponymous and influential New York gallery, where she held her first solo exhibition in February of the following year. Reflecting, decades later, about the artist in the catalogue to her 1976 retrospective in which Mars Red Predella was exhibited, James wrote, ‘Always has Leonora Carrington avoided echoing, not to speak of copying the style of any other painter. Her work is as wholly unplanned as it has always been spontaneous and unconscious, and she had her own world which needed to be expressed… The fact is that this painter’s inspiration is as timeless as it is ageless’ (E. James, ‘Introduction’, in Leonora, Carrington: a retrospective exhibition, exh. cat., Center for Inter-Am Relations, New York, 1976, p. 12-13).