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Tarot of Leonora Carrington

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An elite cadre of committed scholars and researchers, including surviving family members, has made sure that a number of excellent studies of her life and work have already been published -- and have identified her also as a significant proto- environmentalist, feminist, and animal rights activist. This week, a widely expanded edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington will be published that will place her tarot in the context of her wider career. This new edition also reproduces previously unpublished photographs and images, as well as exciting new research into Carrington's influences, emphasizing the authors' claim that her work on the Major Arcana represents an esoteric roadmap to Carrington's feminist vision and wish for a new global gender equality toward a better ecological future for our planet.

It is nearly impossible to put into ordinary language anything meaningful about why Carrington's art is as impactful, significant, and wonderful as it is. Somehow, she was able to access deep unconscious material and alloy it with the core visual messages of surrealism, the persecuted esoteric knowledge of European culture, and the fabulous folk mythologies of Mexico to produce a large body of imagery that can never cease to astound the beholders. Born in Lancashire in 1917 into a family of wealthy mill owners, Carrington rebelled at school, later attending art school. Meeting Ernst in the late 1930s, who left his wife for Carrington, the couple moved to France where Carrington became part of the surrealist circle around Breton. Ernst, a German citizen, was interned twice after the outbreak of the second world war, prompting Carrington to suffer a breakdown in Spain – where she had fled – and she was admitted to hospital. Her account of her escape from this situation is also remarkable. Her parents planned to send her to another institution, this time in South Africa, and she was accompanied to Lisbon so that she might take a ship. She told her chaperone she needed to go to the lavatory, nipped into a cafe, ran out of the other exit and into a cab which she had take her to the Mexican embassy, where she knew a diplomat, Renato Leduc. He did indeed come to her aid – by marrying her and taking her with him to Mexico (via New York, where she once served André Breton a meal of hare stuffed with oysters). She never saw her father again. No wonder, perhaps, that after this life of reversals, flights, expulsions and exiles, she craved routine in Mexico City. Aridjis remembers someone “sane and stable but giving the impression that she lived in a permanent state of anxiety – had no inner peace”. One day, the neighbours sent in workmen to prune the overhanging branches of the tree she had planted in her front yard decades before. She passionately, angrily, pleaded with them to let its wide-spreading boughs alone. The Tarot of Leonora Carringtonis the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist’s work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights ­—­­­ exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington’s wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources.Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England. In 1936, she saw Max Ernst’s work at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and met the artist the following year. They became a couple almost immediately. When the outbreak of World War II separated them, Carrington fled to Spain, then Lisbon, where she married Renato Leduc, a Mexican diplomat, and escaped to Mexico, where she became close with Remedios Varo and other expat Surrealists. She spent the first part of her childhood in a gloomy gothic pile in Lancashire riding (and to her later regret, foxhunting). She was passionately attached to animals, a love that persisted and is evident in the magical bestiary of her art, her paintings a menagerie of cats and dogs and birds but also griffins and salamanders and many nameless creatures that hover between human and animal. She was expelled serially from Catholic boarding schools; she seemed to have an inbuilt loathing of institutions and authority of all kinds. Her short story, The Debutante – in which the young narrator of the story, about to have a ball held for her, swaps places with a hyena, with gruesome consequences – gives a sense of her absolute hatred of the tropes of upper-class life (and also, perhaps, of the nastiness and even violence veiled beneath manners and polite rituals). Nonetheless, her writing does have a kind of crystalline detachment and light irony that connects her to her class and to a literary tradition that includes Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear.

For Carrington, tarot symbolism was “deep and interchangeable,” Aberth and Arcq write. It “permeated most of her work and just kept recombining in new ways to suit her esoteric thinking and development.” The cover of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, edited by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq (Fulgur Press, 2021) (image courtesy the publisher)The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview. When you see the cards, you realise they were central to her entire production, including the question of what is the nature of the esoteric. What makes the cards so unique is that they were her own tools for exploring her own personal consciousness.” It also talks about her relationship with other artists who used the subconscious and the occult as part of their practice and shows her influence on them, placing her firmly within the canon of surrealism and at the same time making you wonder how she was so firmly hidden for so long.

Once you start reading and finding all about the occult life of Leonora Carrington though you are transported to another time, a brilliant introduction, touching opening essay from her son, then onto the meat of the book, her work. Fulgur has a reputation for producing nice books and this is certainly the case here. Large format, finely printed, full size, full-colour reproductions of Carrington’s Tarot cards alongside two essays on the artist, each of these accompanied by other Carrington and related images such as images by Remedios Varo. I have a liking for Carrington’s work (one of the few British surrealists I do like) so in this respect I am a happy man.The images, both extraordinary and vivid, are part of a set of tarot cards, painted by the British-born Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington.

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