Tarot of Leonora Carrington

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FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2022 Magical 'The Tarot of Leonora Carrington' is NEW from RM Featured spreads (picturing The Hanged Man, The Lovers and The Sun) are from RM's highly-anticipated, expanded edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, featuring new archival materials and research by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq, alongside an essay by Carrington's son Gabriel Weisz Carrington. "Leonora's tarot is endowed with a subliminal iconography, a window opening to a performance of the marvelous," Weisz Carrington writes. "What retains such a seductive allure is that whenever we get the opportunity to play with these cards, each one of us is invited to day dream; the cards also guiding players and observers through an adventure into an unknown domain of feeling and subliminal transformation." continue to blog Some diverged greatly, with different colours and icons used whilst others stayed mainly the same though with important changes to fit into the mythology of the cards that were being developed. I was forwarded the Guardian article about this by a friend and immediately went down a rabbit hole, trying to find out everything I could about Leonora Carrington who I had never heard of previously.

Another missed opportunity and one that might have a more direct bearing on Carrington is scarcely any discussion of the theories of Gurdjieff and, especially Ouspensky in relation to her tarot. For example, the authors reference her famous 1939 ‘Portrait of Max Ernst’ who is shown carrying a lamp which the authors assert represents Carrington as his ‘guiding light’. In a later self-portrait, she also carries a lamp representing Ouspensky, but this ’guiding light’ not explored at all despite it being known that Carrington (and Varo) were involved with Ouspensky’s post-Gurdjieffian’ Fourth Way’ in Mexico City, although, to be fair, Carrington appeared to wary of most organised groups of occultists.After all that digging around I just had to get the book as soon as it came out and brilliantly enough the release coincided closely enough with Christmas for it to be one of my presents! This new edition also reproduces previously unpublished photographs and images, as well as exciting new research into Carrington's influences, emphasizing the authors' claim that her work on the Major Arcana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. 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. Of the essays, the first is an illuminating introduction/memoir by her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington which offers direct insight into Carrington’s world as experienced by one who both lived and collaborated with her. On the basis of this, I look forward to a lengthier volume of his recollections due to be published later this year by Manchester University Press.

Hers was, as her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington puts it, “a permanent inquiring mind” shaped by a range of influences including Golden Dawn literature, Egyptian mythology, Surrealist rejection of logic, and indigenous witchcraft in Mexico, where she lived for most of her life. And, of course, she was a devout student of tarot. She not only read spreads but also incorporated icons such as The Magician, The Hanged Man, and The Chariot into her paradoxical visuals that refused intellectualization. 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.” A key figure in the surrealist movement, and a noted writer as well as a painter, Carrington was highly regarded by peers such as André Breton, although long overlooked by the art establishment. This initially explores her work and the influences from the occult learnings of various groups in the 19th and 20th century, including The Golden Dawn, mesoamerican myths and culture, Celtic gods and goddesses, feminism, Jungian theory, and explored this amalgam through examples of Leonora’s works. Another book by Carrington’s biographer, Joanna Moorhead, examining the places Carrington was most strongly associated with, is due out next spring, amid growing interest in the artist’s work and her ideas as a pioneering feminist figure with an interest in ecology.It is she, Carrington, who -- in spite of her reclusive life -- has, almost single-handedly, guaranteed that the supreme style of Western Art -- Surrealism -- will never die. 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. 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.

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. 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 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. 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.Aberth believes the opportunity to study Carrington’s tarot finally has made sense of elements in her wider art that have long perplexed those who have tended to place her fantastic figures in the context of surrealism alone. Spirituality was very fundamental to her. She was a seeker all her life and Leonora was always searching, always going out of her comfort zone, looking for where mystery of life might be revealed. She went through periods of intense interest in Buddhism, the Kabbalah, tarot. All these worlds around that felt closer when she took you with her, including the worlds of plants and insects. From the cover to the end this book is so opulent, glistening in gold, shining in silver, and all on excellent quality paper making it an object of desire within itself.